Why Waking Up at 4AM WONT Make You More Productive

Anyone who has spent time in or around self improvement circles has heard it: Want to be more productive and successful? Wake up at some crazy time in the morning! It used to be 6, then it was 5, now it’s 4… Will it soon be 3?

Given the amount of successful people swearing by this schedule — from David Goggins to Steve Jobs, Jocko Willink to Jack Dorsey, Richard Branson to Dwayne Johnson — with some surveys suggesting 90% of executives wake up before 6AM, there must be something to this waking up early thing, right?

Well, there is. But it’s not as simple as the headlines would have you believe. In fact, failure to understand the important nuance of why it works for some will cause most everyone else to actually be significantly less productive.

You see, the reason these extremely successful people praise to the heavens waking up before the butt crack of dawn is because their biological energy levels begin rising long before the sun, but they spent most of their lives trying to “sleep in” until 7AM for the 8–5 work schedule. Once they finally discovered and began to utilize the wake time that corresponded best with this innate cycle, several hours of energy that were previously wasted tossing and turning in bed were now magically unlocked.