Meet the ‘chronoworkers’ who are ditching the 9 to 5 — and following their body clocks instead

Some people call it self-advocacy. Their bosses call it a scheduling headache. 

Either way, “chronoworking” — structuring your job around your personal circadian rhythm instead of the traditional 9-to-5 — has become the workplace buzzword of the return-to-office era, and it’s already dividing offices into two camps: the biologically enlightened, and the deeply annoyed.

The idea is simple. Not everyone’s brain and body hit peak performance at the same hour. Some people are wired to be sharp at 7 a.m. and useless by 3 p.m. Others don’t fully wake up until noon and do their best thinking at 9 p.m. 

Chronoworking — a term coined by British journalist Ellen C. Scott — argues that instead of forcing every employee into the same fixed shift, companies should let people work when their internal clock says they’ll actually be good at it.

It’s not a fringe idea anymore. Clinical psychologist and sleep expert Dr. Michael Breus, who developed a widely cited four-category chronotype system, found that 55% of people peak between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Fifteen percent are sharpest in the early morning, another 15% peak at night, and the remaining 10% have irregular, easily disrupted rhythms. 

A 2023 survey of 1,500 American workers by MyPerfectResume found 94% said they’re currently working outside their preferred hours, and 77% said it hurts their job performance.

Meet the chronoworkers

Eloise Skinner isn’t waiting for permission. 

The 32-year-old London-based writer, fitness coach and therapist doesn’t open her laptop until around 11 a.m., teaches gym classes in the afternoon or early evening, and saves her most demanding work for after 7:30 p.m. — when, as she puts it, “the world has gone quiet,” letting her concentrate far more effectively. 

A self-described night owl, Skinner has structured her work life around that rhythm across multiple jobs and time zones. 

“It may seem a bit extreme, but it reflects how intensely I concentrate around 8, 9, or 10 p.m.,” she told The Post. “That’s when I’m most efficient.”

Stephanie Mickelson is her mirror image. The freelance writer and mother of three has spent the last five years building her workday around the opposite end of the clock. 

“I naturally feel sharpest in the morning, like pre-5 a.m.,” Mickelson said. “My work schedule reflects this because I typically get up around 4:30 and work for a bit before the rest of the house wakes up.” 

Even on days with hours of free time ahead of her, she added, “I still do my most focused work in the morning.”

The routine wasn’t a plan so much as a survival strategy that stuck. When she started freelancing, her three kids were a newborn, a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, so mornings were the only uninterrupted stretch available. 

“It wasn’t always a guarantee, but I could usually get in an hour or two if I woke up around 4,” she said. “Sometimes when my workload was heavy, I’d push it back to 3:30.” 

Now that all three kids are in school, she still can’t shake the early start. 

“I don’t love it and am going to start getting up at 4:30 again,” she said of her current 5 a.m. wakeup. “There’s just so much time to sit and write and drink coffee.”

Before freelancing, Mickelson taught middle school English — and even then, she was front-loading her focus time rather than staying late. 

“The only time I had to work was in the morning and after bedtime,” she said. “As a teacher, I always got to school early to do grading and lesson planning rather than stay after school or stay up late to finish things up.” 

But she’s clear-eyed about what’s actually transferable to a standard job: “With a traditional 9-to-5, it would be tough to use this schedule to do actual ‘on the clock’ work. The complete flexibility to work when I work best is definitely only possible because of freelancing.”

Skinner and Mickelson are also exactly the kind of case a skeptic would flag: both are self-employed, with no single boss or team calendar to negotiate around. That’s the built-in asterisk on nearly every chronoworking success story — the people most able to do it have the least oversight, which is why the real fights over chronoworking are happening inside traditional offices, not outside them.

Corporate wellness consultant Tawn Williams, founder of House of Anaya, said she’s watched the concept spread mostly among freelancers and solo entrepreneurs, where “reduced necessity for synchronized team meetings” effectively creates a “create your own schedule” paradigm. 

Larger organizations, she said, have quietly absorbed pieces of this through remote and hybrid work, “although these adaptations are often vaguely defined and less structured under broader flexibility policies.”

Some employers are building chronoworking into official policy rather than letting it happen informally. 

Julia Lyons-Ryle, an HR performance specialist with Insperity in Austin, Texas, recommends flex schedules with protected overlap hours — letting staff work 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. instead of 9 to 5, but requiring everyone online from noon to 2 p.m. so teams can still convene. The biggest risk, she added, isn’t the schedule itself — it’s the communication gap it creates. 

“Team members and managers need to be aware of one another’s working hours so they can meet when they need,” she said.

The science is real — but it’s not a blank check

Chronotype isn’t just vibes; it’s a documented, largely biological trait. But Christopher Barnes, an organizational-behavior researcher at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, said the fix doesn’t require blowing up the whole calendar. 

“For most people, it’s a matter of shifting even one or two hours from some sort of anchor,” he said. “If you give workers the flexibility to push that forward or backward by an hour or two, that’s already a potentially large benefit to their lives.”

Barnes’s research has found real downsides to ignoring chronotype entirely. His studies show “larks” behave less ethically late at night, while “owls” behave less ethically early in the morning. He’s also found bias against employees who start later, even with explicit permission. 

“You get a better employee if you have an alignment between their work schedule and their circadian rhythm,” he said.

Dr. Celine Vetter, a circadian rhythm and sleep researcher who has linked work-schedule misalignment to elevated Type 2 diabetes risk in a major nursing study, estimates that roughly 80% of people work on a schedule that clashes with their internal clock. That’s a case for modest flexibility, not for employees declaring themselves exempt from meetings.

Regular business hours

This is where the skepticism kicks in. Amy Morin, psychotherapist and author of “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do,” is one of the more clear-eyed voices on why this doesn’t scale neatly. 

“For some companies, flexible scheduling isn’t an option due to deadlines, business hours and other factors,” Morin said.

 She also notes that chronotype doesn’t operate in a vacuum: a natural night owl might still have kids who wake up at 6 a.m., forcing an early schedule regardless of biology — a tension Mickelson’s own teaching-era routine makes just as plain, since even a devoted morning person had to squeeze focus time around a bell schedule rather than her body clock.

Her bottom line is the sentence every manager rolling their eyes at a “chronotype” request has been waiting for: “Most companies still need to hold meetings — and there isn’t going to be a time that’s best for everyone,” she noted.

So is it legit — or just an excuse?

Probably both, depending on who’s asking. 

The research is genuine: chronotype is biological, misalignment has real costs, and modest flexibility has documented benefits for output and ethics alike. But nobody in the actual research is arguing that biology entitles anyone to skip meetings or unilaterally redesign a team’s calendar around one person’s sleep preferences.

For freelancers and solo operators like Skinner and Mickelson, chronoworking is close to a free lunch: no one else’s calendar depends on theirs. 

For anyone whose job depends on being in the same room — or the same Zoom call — as other people, it’s a negotiation, not a mandate, and the honest version looks like Barnes’s one- or two-hour shift or Lyons-Ryle’s protected-overlap-hours model, not an 11 a.m. start with zero flexibility. 

Even Mickelson, who lived both sides of that line as a teacher and now as a freelancer, says as much herself: the schedule she has now simply “is definitely only possible because of freelancing.” 

The people using “chronotype” as leverage in return-to-office fights aren’t wrong that the science exists — they’re just betting their boss won’t read past the buzzword to the fine print, where even the researchers say: some flexibility, not a blank check.