Daniel Pink breaks down chronotypes: 15% are morning people, 20% are night owls, and two-thirds fall in between. Night owls suffer in jobs with early starts like teaching, since their peak performance comes later in the day.
All times of the day are not created equal. There are material differences in performance based on time of day, and some of that is key to what someone's chronotype is. What we know in the distribution is about 15% of us are very strong morning people, just sort of naturally get up early and go to sleep early. 20% of people are very strong night owls. They naturally go to sleep very late and wake up very late. But 2/3 of us are kind of in the middle, but we tend to lean a little bit more toward the larky side. The chronotypes that's really disadvantaged in the workplace are night owls. If you want to be a schoolteacher, you don't want to be a night owl. Right. Because you're getting to the office at like 7 o'clock in the morning. Morning dealing with screaming kids. So if your natural propensity is to go to sleep at 2:30 in the morning and wake up at 10:30 in the morning, yeah, having you be at a job at 7 AM is suboptimal.
