Who Told You That You Needed To Get Up At 5AM?

If you're a small business owner or entrepreneur who's ever felt guilty for not having a morning routine, this one is for you.

When I was starting out, I worked with a few clients who swore by early rising. Up at 5AM every day, no exceptions. One had built an entire brand around the idea. Another, a genuinely successful, award winning entrepreneur, would always be up before the rest of the world. The message was clear. Successful business owners get up early. That's just how it works.

And I tried it. Properly tried it. For about a year.

So. Who told you that you needed to get up at 5AM to be productive? Why did they tell you that? And does waking up early actually work?

Who Told You That? The Origins Of The 5AM Club

Almost certainly, directly or indirectly, Robin Sharma. Full disclosure, I haven't read the book myself, so this is what a general internet search uncovered.

‍ Sharma is a Canadian former litigation lawyer who walked away from law at 25 and built an empire out of personal development books. The 5AM Club is a business fable, a fictional story about an entrepreneur and an artist who meet a billionaire who teaches them his morning routine. It's a legitimate format. Business fables have been around for decades. But it's worth being clear about what it actually is. A story. With lessons embedded in it. Not a study. Not peer reviewed research. Not evidence that getting up at 5AM will make your business more successful.

And it worked spectacularly. Over 25 million copies of his books sold worldwide. Speaking fees of up to six figures per event. Courses marketed at a 99% discount off a value of over £17,000. ‍

That's quite a lot to gain from convincing the world that a 5AM alarm is the difference between mediocrity and greatness.

I Tried The 5AM Routine. Here's What Actually Happened.

Not because a book told me to. Because we'd just gotten a kitten who wanted feeding stupidly early and was relentless with her licking of my eyelids until I woke up to feed her. I didn't really have much choice.

And for a while, it genuinely seemed to work. More alert. More energised. Fewer afternoon slumps. Better productivity, or so I thought.

Except at the same time, I'd also cut down significantly on my caffeine intake. And what I thought was the 5AM routine working its magic was actually just me fixing a caffeine addiction I didn't know I had. Two things had changed at once, and I attributed the result to the one I'd been told would make the difference.

That happens a lot more than people admit. You change a couple of things in your routine, one of them works, and you credit the one with the best marketing behind it.

It lasted about a year. Then life happened. Christmas, summer holidays, sleep patterns naturally drifting. And as I run a service led business, my clients aren't at their desks until 9AM. So getting up at 5AM to be productive meant four hours of... not much, really. There's only so much you can do before the people you work with are actually awake and available.

I'd try to get ahead with work. Check emails. Sometimes just end up watching telly. It was lovely having a window where nobody needed anything from me. But productive? Not really. Not in the way I'd been told it would be.

If you're a visionary entrepreneur working on your own ideas with a team to implement underneath you, the time of day might genuinely not matter. You're not waiting on anyone. But if your work as a self employed business owner depends on other people responding and collaborating, an extra four hours alone in the dark isn't a superpower. It's just being tired earlier than everyone else.

When I stopped, nobody cared. Nobody questioned it. Nobody was disappointed. Because nobody's that interested in your sleeping patterns apart from yourself.

Which tells you something important about why morning routine culture takes hold in the first place. The 5AM Club only has power if there's a community built around it. The shared identity. The "I'm a 5AM person" badge. Take away the audience and it's just an alarm going off in the dark for no particular reason.

Does Waking Up Early Actually Improve Productivity? What The Research Says

The NHS recommends 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night for adults. If you need 8 hours and you're getting up at 5AM, you need to be asleep by 9PM. For a huge number of small business owners and entrepreneurs, with families, with evening commitments, with bodies that simply don't wind down that early, that's not realistic.

Here's something the morning routine industry doesn't talk about enough. Roughly a quarter of people are naturally wired as morning people. Your chronotype, whether you're naturally inclined to be sharper in the morning or the evening, is largely genetic. Forcing an evening type into a 5AM schedule doesn't make them more productive. It tends to just result in less sleep, more fatigue, and a worse mood.

Researchers at Imperial College London looked at data from over 26,000 people using the UK Biobank and found that people who described themselves as evening types actually performed better on cognitive tests than morning types. Morning types consistently showed the lowest cognitive scores. One group scored over 13% higher if they were an evening type. A separate study of MBA students found night owls scored significantly higher on their GMAT entrance exams than early risers, regardless of sex.

So what happens if a self employed business owner trades 5AM for 7AM and works later into the evening instead? For a genuine night owl, the research suggests that's not a compromise. It's working with your biology rather than against it. Night owls tend to show an advantage in divergent thinking, the kind of open ended creative problem solving that drives a lot of entrepreneurial work. There's even a small study on professional violinists, I play violin myself, that found their playing was most stable between midday and 4PM, with more instability first thing in the morning.

But it cuts both ways, and this is important. Morning larks perform better athletically and cognitively in the morning compared to evening types. So if you're a genuine early bird and you force yourself to do your best thinking at 9PM, you're working against your own biology in exactly the same way a night owl does at 5AM. There's no universally superior time of day for productivity. There's just your time of day, and everyone else's.

How To Find Your Optimal Working Hours

There's a proper tool for it. The Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire, developed in 1976 and still widely used in sleep research today. 19 questions, about four minutes, and it will place you somewhere on the spectrum from definitely morning to definitely evening.

But honestly, you probably don't need a questionnaire to tell you something your body already knows. Think about a day with no alarm, no obligations, nothing you have to do. What time do you naturally wake up? When do you start flagging? That's usually answer enough.

You can take the questionnaire here: https://psytests.org/trait/meqen.html

What's Actually Going On With Entrepreneurs Who Thrive On Early Mornings?

Having tried the 5AM routine myself, my honest read is that it's rarely about the time on the clock. It's about having a window where nothing is required of you. No emails, no client messages, no one needing a decision. That's genuinely valuable for any business owner.

But that quiet doesn't have to live at 5AM. For some people it might be 10PM. For some it might be a Sunday morning. The specific hour isn't the magic ingredient. The absence of demands is.

And the actual research on sleep and business productivity points at quantity, not timing. More sleep, properly measured across a working population, correlates with higher earnings and a greater likelihood of being in work in the first place. Not earlier sleep. More sleep. So if getting up at 5AM means cutting into the hours you actually need to be asleep, the evidence suggests you might be working against the very thing you're trying to achieve.

So who told you that you needed to get up at 5AM to run a successful business? A very successful man who built a real empire on a work of fiction.

Why did they tell you that? Because a morning routine is sellable in a way that "find whatever quiet pocket of time works for your actual life" simply isn't. One fits neatly into a book, a course, a six figure keynote. The other doesn't fit into anything you can charge for.

Does it actually work? For roughly a quarter of the population who are naturally wired as morning people, maybe. For everyone else, the evidence suggests you might just be trading sleep you need for a routine you were told to want.

If you've been forcing yourself out of bed at an hour that makes you miserable because someone told you that's what successful entrepreneurs do... it might be worth asking whether it's actually working, or whether you've just never questioned it.

If you're more of a written content person, you're in the right place. But if you want to listen, the podcast is always a few steps ahead of the blog. Catch that here