My busiest hour is 5 am

Sahil Bloom wrote about an energy audit. For a week you note how your energy feels at different hours. Then you find the window where you think best and move your most important work into it.

He found his best writing hours were the ones he spent at the gym, so he swapped them. That was four years ago. He still writes from 4:30 to 7:30 am.

I wanted to try it. I didn’t want to wait a week, so I used data I already had.

The quiz

Sahil borrows three questions from Ultraproductive:

If you had no alarm, when would you wake up?
When do you do your sharpest thinking?
When does your energy crash?

My answers were the afternoon, late at night, and right after I wake up.

That makes me an Owl. The book says Owls peak in the late afternoon or evening. My evening starts around 5 pm.

My WHOOP

I split my time between Dubai and Islamabad and work US hours from both. All the times in this post are Pakistan time (PKT). Over the last 30 days, my WHOOP says my median bedtime was 8:32 am, and my median wake-up was 4:59 pm.

I would have told you I sleep at 10 or 11 am. The WHOOP disagrees. I’m going with the WHOOP.

My GitHub

My bots commit through my account, so this is less “when I work” and more “when my whole setup works”. In the last 30 days, that account made 6,719 commits.

The busiest hour is 5 am. The quietest is 3 pm, when I’m asleep.

Only 9.7% of the commits happen in my first three hours awake. About 40% land 9 to 15 hours after I wake up. For me, that’s roughly 2 am to 8 am, the end of the US workday.

12.3% happen while I’m asleep. That’s the bots.

The part Sahil didn’t have

I have ADHD. I take Ritalin, three doses, about four hours apart, starting when I wake up.

So the first few hours are slow. I need hours to get going. The flow shows up late, after the last dose and after the calls are done.

The Ritalin makes me focused. It doesn’t make me focused on the right thing.

Where the good hours go

When the flow finally shows up, I write specs and review what the agents shipped. I do PMP work that should have happened earlier. And I start a new project instead of finishing one.

I already wrote about my bots being very good at the wrong stuff. I’m not much better.

The bad nights

All four of my red recovery days in the last 30 came after a night of under four hours in bed. The worst was Oct 13. 1.7 hours of sleep, recovery 15.

I don’t remember what I was doing that night. That’s the problem.

The research is calmer than the quiz. In the 2019 Nature Communications study Sahil cites, the genes linked to being a morning person move sleep timing by about 25 minutes. A 2025 review found the “work at your peak time” effect in only 29 of 64 studies of young adults.

So being an Owl probably matters less than sleeping 1.7 hours.

What I’m changing

PMP work moves earlier, so it stops eating the flow. The late window is for the work that matters.

That’s the plan. Realistically, I’ll find a great window at 2 am and start a new project in it.

I’ll check back in a week.

~ aq