[jakevoytko]

Being the early riser has an extra penalty when your coworkers have later schedules, since it's acceptable to ask people to stay late, but not to arrive early. You will attend meetings when you'd normally be commuting. Plus, if an emergency occurs at the end of the day, everyone else's 9 or 10 hour day becomes your 12 or 13 hour day. If this happens often, you should try to find a workplace that doesn't make a habit of discovering critical problems at 4pm. It turns out they exist!

You can also alleviate the problem by doing something between waking up and working. I run in the mornings before I head to work, and it provides an extra daily boost. I admit that I prefer running in the afternoons (when it's not 4 degrees out) but life is full of constraints!

[tzury]

I am at the office at around 5AM ever morning for the last 8 months. By the time meetings starting (~9:30AM), I have already hacked for nearly 4.5 hours with no single interrupt.

When I am out at 3:30PM, I pick up my son from his kindergarten and have around 4 hours together until he's going to bed.

It is true I "miss" some "important" meetings, yet, in the corporate I am working for as a consultant, there are ~12K employees (~11K are meeting requesters) and I am glad I miss those useless meetings.

[rokhayakebe]

there are ~12K employees (~11K are meeting requesters)

That about made my day. It is true that in large organizations there are people whose only task seem to be to ask others to meet and talk about previous meetings and arrange the next meeting to talk about the current one.

[run4yourlives]

They're called Project Managers. :-)

[reinhardt]

So you start at 5am and work for 10+ hours/day ? Ouch

[jtbigwoo]

A good manager can help this by instituting fair meeting hours. The most common track I've seen is to say that meetings can occur between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm. That way the early risers aren't held hostage by somebody not showing up until noon and then wanting to schedule meetings until 6:00. (Or the late risers aren't tormented by somebody who wants meetings at 7:30 every morning.)

[eru]

I am a late riser, but I would actually look forward to early meetings---that would give me something to get up early for.

(I see your point, though.)

[wccrawford]

That's true... Until you make it clear that they are stealing your time.

I had some issues with that for a while, until I started making it clear that people were inconveniencing me. At that point, they started apologizing but still doing it. Later, I made it clear that overtime for the company was stealing personal time for me. I work overtime in emergencies only. (Okay, sometimes I do it because I want to get something done. That's my choice.) Since then, they have almost never asked me to do something after my scheduled time.

It also helps that my early arrival helps the company... They know that there's someone there to watch the system in case of any problems early in the morning.

[Spyou]

When I was working in the office, I was arriving earlier. And started to work straight when anyone was there. Fortunately enough the times when we needed to stay longer than usual were quite rare, so I never had to answer this question myself.