Should work be scheduled around your body clock?

It’s 5.30am and PR con­sul­tant Paul MacKen­zie-Cum­mins is already at his desk, tak­ing advan­tage of his clear head and qui­et sur­round­ings to get ahead for the day. This very ear­ly bird will take a long break between 2pm and 4pm, when he’ll often go for a run, do per­son­al admin and even take a quick sies­ta. He aims to fin­ish work­ing at 6pm.

He encour­ages his staff at Clear­ly, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions agency he found­ed in 2014, to take a sim­i­lar­ly flex­i­ble approach. Team mem­bers are on all kinds of sched­ules, with some even work­ing a split shift of 10am to 3pm and 7pm to 10pm.

“The days of the tra­di­tion­al nine to five have been con­signed to the his­to­ry books – and right­ly so, because each per­son is dif­fer­ent,” MacKen­zie-Cum­mins says. “I want to pro­vide an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple can sched­ule their work at the times that enable them to get the best out of them­selves.”

Evenings are the most pro­duc­tive times for Sarah Canelle, the own­er of online fash­ion brand canelle bespoke. She prefers to spend her morn­ings exer­cis­ing and run­ning errands, before set­tling into work after lunch and wrap­ping things up between 9pm and 11pm after a din­ner break. 

Two-thirds of full-time employ­ees polled by Glass­door in Octo­ber agreed that the abil­i­ty to allo­cate what­ev­er time they choose to work and per­son­al activ­i­ties is the mod­ern def­i­n­i­tion of work/life bal­ance. Research pub­lished by elec­tron­ics firm Poly in the same month revealed that 69% of employ­ees believe that the nine to five has been replaced by “any­time work­ing”.

Com­pa­nies that take a more flex­i­ble approach to work­ing hours enable their staff to fol­low their cir­ca­di­an rhythms – that is, an individual’s innate ten­den­cy to be more alert at par­tic­u­lar times of the day and sleepi­er at oth­ers. Genet­ics large­ly dic­tate whether you’re an extreme night owl, an extreme morn­ing lark or, like most peo­ple, some­where on the scale between the two. Cir­ca­di­an rhythms can even be split into more spe­cif­ic chrono­types, or activ­i­ty pro­files, that out­line when peo­ple with ear­li­er or lat­er wake­ful­ness ten­den­cies should get up, eat, exer­cise and do lighter or more demand­ing work. 

Sched­ul­ing your work accord­ing to your par­tic­u­lar chrono­type means you’ll oper­ate at opti­mal capac­i­ty most of the time, rather than strug­gle with­in a default nine-to-five sched­ule that may be at odds with your dai­ly fluc­tu­a­tions in wake­ful­ness. So says Geral­dine Joaquim, own­er of well­ness con­sul­tan­cy Mind Your Busi­ness.

“We all have our own opti­mal times for being focused, active and cre­ative,” says Joachim, who is also a hyp­nother­a­pist spe­cial­is­ing in sleep prob­lems. “Hold­ing reg­u­lar 8.30am meet­ings with night owls and expect­ing them to be full of ideas at that time won’t result in any­thing use­ful, for instance. Or, if your busi­ness is geared towards work­ing late to accom­mo­date the needs of an over­seas office in a dif­fer­ent time zone, say, expect­ing great things from your ear­ly birds may result in dis­ap­point­ment.”

Accom­mo­dat­ing the pref­er­ences of both owls and larks with flex­i­ble work sched­ules should help them to per­form to their full poten­tial, notes Joaquim, who adds: “With so much talk about whether com­pa­nies will be return­ing to the office full time, this is the best oppor­tu­ni­ty we’ve ever had to eval­u­ate what works best for peo­ple.”

Our pre­vail­ing soci­etal frame­work is more suit­ed to ear­ly birds, yet some stud­ies indi­cate that night owls are more resilient and able to stay focused for longer. Despite this, they can be stereo­typed as lazy, while oth­er research sug­gests that they are at a high­er risk of health prob­lems, par­tic­u­lar­ly demen­tia, which has been asso­ci­at­ed with the insom­nia that owls can be prone to.

“As well as under­stand­ing your chrono­type, it’s impor­tant to know your opti­mum sleep time. It’s between sev­en and nine hours a night for the aver­age per­son, but it can be as short as four hours or as long as 11. Know­ing these needs is cru­cial to your abil­i­ty to face the day feel­ing prop­er­ly rest­ed, with enough ener­gy to last,” Joaquim says. 

She is a night owl, but has found her nat­ur­al pref­er­ence for sleep­ing and work­ing lat­er imprac­ti­cal since hav­ing chil­dren. Sarah Canelle can relate to this. She recent­ly switched to a work­ing day of 10.30am to 6.30pm, hav­ing accept­ed that her extreme-owl pref­er­ences were jar­ring too much with her fam­i­ly life. 

Allow­ing peo­ple to work a range of sched­ules may prove a tricky man­age­ment task, which is per­haps where firms such as Drop­box may be on to some­thing with their recent adop­tion of a ‘core hours’ mod­el. The com­pa­ny asks its staff to be avail­able from 10am to noon and from 4pm to 6pm. They can sched­ule the rest of their work­ing day as they see fit.

But such an approach doesn’t go far enough, argues Anna McK­ay, anoth­er night owl and CEO of Zeez Sleep, a provider of tech­nol­o­gy designed to help peo­ple sleep bet­ter.

Enabling staff to work at their pre­ferred times is a quick pro­duc­tiv­i­ty fix, she explains, adding that firms which tru­ly care about their employ­ees’ long-term well­be­ing should take a more holis­tic view, which includes pro­mot­ing good sleep. This entails ensur­ing that peo­ple get the right kind of light and eat the most appro­pri­ate food for the time of day, spend enough time out­doors, take exer­cise in the morn­ing and engage in more rest­ful activ­i­ties in the evening.

McK­ay has tak­en this approach her­self and reports feels bet­ter rest­ed and more ener­getic than ever. She attrib­ut­es this to liv­ing in align­ment with her own unique ener­gy pat­terns, which, if more employ­ers were to embrace indi­vid­ual chrono­type-led sched­ules, could go some way towards solv­ing the grow­ing prob­lem of burnout.