What kind of bird are you?
If you do your best work early in the morning, you’re a “lark.” If you work best by waiting until the midnight hour, you’re an “owl.” It’s a taxonomy I learned in “Tapping into Your Team’s Circadian Rhythms,” a recent article by professor of management Stefan Volk in the Harvard Business Review.
It’s our body’s circadian rhythms that determine the time of day when we do our best work. In the wild, there are probably larks who sleep late, missing out on the tastiest worms and owls who are up bright and early, ready to hoot and holler at dawn. In the wild, the birds work it out. In the workplace, failing to understand the body’s circadian rhythms can complicate your job and crash your career, stat!
Sad to report, circadian rhythms are “hard-wired” and “not habits or preferences that you can train yourself to change.” As Volk writes, “They are biological dispositions that remain remarkably stable over time.”
Since we can’t change our hours of peak performance, it is up to our managers to make sure every team member gets their assignments when their body clocks are ticking like a Rolex. The larks get their assignments early in the morning, when their circadian rhythms are hammering out one brilliant idea after another, after which the whole mess is turned over to the owls, who spend the night thinking up excuses for what the larks screwed up.
Unfortunately, this level of enlightened time management is rare. In most offices, Volk asserts, businesses suffer from an obsession with “morningness, equating early-day energy with commitment, competence and leadership potential.” It’s easy for a lark, but tough on owls, who have to drag themselves into work and fill themselves with toxic levels of office coffee to even pretend to give a hoot. The owls do get their revenge when it’s necessary to “pull an all-nighter,” and it’s the larks who are dragging their feathers back and forth from the coffee machine, too tired to make a peep.
How to fix the problem? Here are three steps that could work:
No. 1: Managers need to analyze their own birdness.
“Circadian-informed leadership starts with self-awareness,” Volk writes. A conscientious manager will analyze their own high-level decision-making to determine when they are operating at maximum effectiveness and reserve their most important decisions for this time period.
Convincing managers to recognize their rhythms isn’t easy. Most consider themselves to be perfect, 24/7. The trick is to get your manager to realize they are more perfect at some times of the day than at others. Do this by organizing your co-workers to record the time of day your manager makes their biggest blunders. Provide this data to your manager and your manager’s manager. Include the name of everyone who contributed to the report, but leave your name off.
You’re either a lark or an owl. You’re not a dodo.
No. 2: Know your own bird.
Take the time to consider the time of day connected to your greatest triumphs. (Haven’t had any triumphs lately? Use the time you started reading this column. It’s definitely a triumph of optimism over common sense.)
In determining when you are at your best, don’t be afraid to narrow the time frame. Let your manager know that you will only accept assignments between 10:35 and 10:45 (a.m. if you’re a lark; p.m. if you’re an owl). Your specificity will be appreciated and will also be helpful when HR is deciding when to deliver your notice of termination.
No. 3: Let your inner bird fly.
Let’s be honest, both larks and owls are loser birds. Larks are nature’s clowns, chattering endlessly as they flutter around aimlessly. Owls are just boring. They bide their time, hiding in trees, occasionally swooping down to snatch up a rat for a midnight snack. Yum!
If you must be a bird, be an eagle. Don’t concern yourself with earthly matters, such as being productive. Instead, focus on looking good. Use your sharp-eyed eagle vision to pick out the weakest co-workers, whom you swoop in on and tear apart with your merciless talons.
I can see you now, soaring high above the office terrain, inspiring terror in your company’s larks, owls, parrots, penguins, ducks, crows, hummingbirds and blue-footed boobies (you’ll find them in marketing).
You don’t do much work, but you look magnificent, and isn’t that what success in business is all about?
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at info@creators.com.
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