You’re three sips into your grande double shot as you pull into a desolate, jet black parking lot. By the time you hear footsteps walk through your office hallway, you’re an hour deep into next week’s big project.
You are Monday’s early-morning warrior—an anomaly in today’s ever-changing accounting landscape. Right?
Nah, sorry. Being an early bird doesn’t make you a beautiful unique snowflake anymore, no matter what your mom tells you.
According to a recent survey from Accountemps, you’re on par with a good portion of American professionals, who are more apt to crush work at both the start of the week and in the early hours of the morning.
Hard to believe? Yeah, we thought so too.
And the even crazier thing is that the gap in productive times is not even close: with roughly 75% of the 2,800 workers polled saying their kick-ass-and-take-names drive peaked by late morning and waned by afternoon.
The survey also dove into one’s preference for work space productivity and what caused the biggest distractions. Not surprising, older adults (55 and up) preferred a private office, while those younger were more keen on working in an open setting.
Most surprising was that the historically antsy millennials (sorry, we didn’t fucking make it up), who have led the telecommuting and digital nomad surge in recent years, preferred (slightly) making the drive to an office to associate with co-workers.
So maybe the old saying was right: the early bird does get the worm. Or most of the worm? Or eats it faster? Of course we could just be evolving from that shitty all-nighter mentality where we got absolutely nothing done and paid for it the next day.
We’ll let you be the judge.
Here’s a few takeaways from the Accountemps survey:
- 44% of professionals are most productive in the early morning, compared to 2% who say they work better late at night.
- Mondays (29%) and Tuesdays (27%) are the best days for productivity.
- 32% said “chatty Cathys” are their biggest distraction at work, followed by 22% who said office noise (which is kind of the same thing).
- Miami has the most productive Mondays (hmm), while San Francisco workers were nearly as distracted by their phones (25%) as their colleagues (go figure).
So basically everything we know about productivity is wrong, but according to the internet, everything we know about everything is wrong, so … whatever. Somebody throw me a sugar-free Red Bull, it’s 4 a.m. and I gotta get to the office.