The Guilt of Not Being a Morning Person

I’m an “entrepreneur” who stays up late and sleeps in. Judge me.

“A short-haired cat sleeping on a bed” by Alexander Possingham on Unsplash

My name is Sarah and I’m not a morning person. Wow. It feels so good to get that off of my chest.

It’s 3:20am as I’m writing this. In just a few hours, before the sun even rises, “go-getters” everywhere will wake up. No snooze necessary. They’ll meditate, go for a run, do some yoga, send out 16 emails, read an entire book, and drink a decaf latte.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably sleep until 9:15, hit snooze 6 times, begrudgingly roll out of bed around 10, brush my teeth and proceed with my morning routine of cycling though Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for 20 minutes until I’m absolutely disgusted with myself. Then I’ll make some coffee, check emails, and cry at the amount of work I could have accomplished if I was a “good” entrepreneur. The kind who swear by mornings and stringent my productivity tactics. You know, the kind that the people at Entrepreneur magazine want to write articles about.

I’m not delusional. I know that I feel better about myself when I wake up early and get a jump start on the day. I know that productivity peaks during certain hours but more often than not my best ideas come to be at 10pm. I don’t like feeling guilty for my habits when I still get the same amount of work done as someone who wakes up early.

Isn’t the whole point of being an entrepreneur/working from home is the ability to set my own rules right?

A lot of times I have meetings in the evening with mentors and accountability partners and they get my creative juices flowing. I’ve learned that once I get the motivation, I have to ride it as long as it will go and a lot of times that means until the wee hours of the night. That also means that I usually wake up sometime around 9 or 10. I can hear Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Sheryl Sandberg simultaneously cringe and tell me I need to suck it up and change my routine. That I should set boundaries so I can go to sleep on time and join the morning risers. That waking up early is directly proportionate to the amount of money I’ll make.