Sometimes before I got to bed I start thinking of things that I haven’t done or read then I want to start reading and this wakes me up. Then I continue working until 2-3 or even 5am. … of course this isn’t a productive work.

There were times where I used go to bed at 9pm and read for 1-1.5 hours then my mind was so tired and I couldn’t wait to go sleep.

Now, I need 7-8 hours sleep but if I go to bed early I wake up in the night all the time, I sleep terribly if I go to bed before 1am or so. Always have. I exercise a lot in the day (but not before bed) and I eat a while before going to bed. Going to be late and getting up late is natural for me and in fact my weight stays lower if I do that, and I have far more energy. I never did used to have much energy in the mornings, always at night.

So, I think people are just different. Now I am doing some 9-5 job I am so tired in the day I almost fall alseep half the time because I am going to bed at 12:00 midnight and getting up at 8am, both times are way too early for me so I have no energy. When I went to bed at 3am and got up at 11am I could jump out of bed and literally have loads of energy. So much for this then.

When I was in university, I had a grueling schedule. I was achieving a major in mechanical engineering at a tough school, adding lots of courses in design and business, holding lead positions in three clubs, working a part-time job, and maintaining a serious relationship and a very full social life. I was busy!
In fact, I think I worked harder during that time than I had ever worked before or since. Still, I had a wonderful work ethic. I rarely pulled all-nighters to get work done.
What I remember best about the positive decisions I made back then are these two lessons:
1) First, I realized that tasks would fill the time allotted to them. If I had to write an essay that should take approximately 3 hours to write, I would not begin at 8 hrs to deadline. If I started at the 8 hr mark, the essay would take all 8 hrs. Instead, I would begin at the 3hr mark, just the amount of time I deemed necessary, and that would be all the time I had. If the essay wasn’t done in 3 hours, it wasn’t getting done. Quickly, I trained myself to value the time I gave myself and do the best I could with what I had. I wouldn’t stress anymore at the end of the time allotted because I would literally have no more time or energy to dedicate to that task. (Usually I had to turn in the assignment or perform other tasks I’d already scheduled)
2) Second, and this one is really related to this article, I realized that I had to burn the candle in the morning, not at night. With such a busy schedule, just managing my time well was not always enough. Many days I had too much work to do and not enough time to do it in. At that point, I had to skimp on sleep to meet all my obligations. I realized that when I would get tired late at night, my productivity suffered severely. In a tired state, it would take me 3 hours to get a 1 hour task done. What did I do? Well, I still didn’t have the luxury of getting a nice 8-hour sleep every night, but instead of working into the night, I would set my alarm. The minute I felt my energy waning and the tiredness swimming in, I would stop my work, estimate how much time I needed to finish in the morning, and set my alarm early by that much. Sometimes I was falling asleep with unfinished work at 1am with an alarm set for 5am to finish it. Remarkably, this worked! Don’t get me wrong, I was still sleep-deprived and I had to catch up on that later, but my ability to work well at 5am, even on only 4 hours of sleep, was much better than my ability to continue working at 1am. If you have to lose sleep for work, much better to do so in the morning than late at night. Part of this also goes back to my first point – in the morning, you have a finite amount of time before the deadline, whereas the night before you essentially have all night stretched out ahead of you for working in a tired daze.

It’s always best to have a reasonable schedule, but I agree that working in the mornings with just a little sleep is far more productive than at night with none.