YOU CAN PLAN A PRODUCTIVE DAY ON ONE SHEET OF PAPER.

Even though this post went up on March 1st, you probably didn’t even know it was there until March 2nd.

That’s not because you’re not top of your RSS feed, emptying my posts out of your email inbox or simply skipped reading my writing yesterday. It’s because I didn’t post this until the late hours of the evening. And it wasn’t scheduled either; it was because I finished it in the late hours of the evening.

That’s because I’m a night owl. And a good night owl at that.

I’m not going to dig too deeply into why I’m just as productive as an early riser – I took care of that over at Lifehack not too long ago.

The reason I’m revisiting it here is because I came across an interesting article from Scientific American regarding caffeine and night owls via Jesse Newhart on Twitter. The piece discussed the effects of caffeine on both morning people and night owls.

In the study, “morning people” who consumed caffeine during the day appeared more likely than late risers to awaken in the middle of their nighttime sleep.

Apparently this is just the first study that will attempt to link caffeine intake with what’s being called a “chronotype”. The Scientific American post defines a chronotype as “the categorizing of people by the time of day they are most alert and active”.¹

I’ve never really had a problem hitting the hay and getting solid (and uninterrupted) sleep after having a coffee or soda or two later in the day.

And now science has got my back when I do.

Photo credit: Jennie Rainsford (CC BY-SA 2.0)

¹Mind you, the study was conducted using 50 college students – the type of folks who tend to stay up into the wee hours. According to the piece, the next step is for researchers to look at people who aren’t in the throes of studying for school.