What Is The Most Productive Time Of The Day For Startups ?

Ravi Kikan
Ravi is a Mentor at MentorEdge ( A CIIE- IIM-A initiative), A Knowledge driven enterprise. He is a Growthhacker for Startups, Online Community Builder, Startup Connector and B2B Marketing Expert.

Anytime is good time…Actually all the time 🙂

For someone working in a 9 a.m to 5 p.m. company structure this may be a very clean and straightforward question.

Most likely the answer would be..

Between 9 to 11 a.m. or say 3 to 5 p.m.

The rest of the productive session could be a working lunch or plainly extended lunch hours 🙂

For Startups however it could be a completely different game.

My experience in working with startups has been a completely different one.

If you ask a tech startup e.g. a founder who is also a coder what is the best productive time for him or her… You might get a very straightforward reply and most likely it will be:

Midnight stretching till early morning and later is all disturbance time 🙂

So, I asked this question in the Startup Specialist Group on LinkedIn to address this in specific context to Startups around the globe: What is your most productive time of the day ? Why that time ?

There are some great responses coming from some amazing people. There was one point in particular that one of the experts mentioned.

Przemyslaw Berlinski mentions in the same discussion:

It depends on what you mean by productivity. For me early mornings and late nights are the best for being creative (yeap it’s 2am CET). During normal office hours there are too many distractions.

I would agree to this point.

Productivity could be a relative term for a startup. For some it could mean either or all of the following:

1. Creativity
2. Innovation
3. Thinking
4. Planning
5. Process Execution
6. Designing
7. Coding or Let Us Say ” Creation “
8. or for that matter Execution of Plan or Process

All of the above or specifics may have different productivity benchmarks for different people.

Productivity could be a relative term and not necessarily be gauged against a time frame for results. e.g. A creative designer in a startup may feel nirvana in the early mornings even if the founders have a productive session in the morning time frame for designing their business calenders. You cant have a benchmark there and it has to be silently be understood.

Jason Palmer gives this amazing insight for productive timings for a startup

when I stay in bed or lay around on the sofa thinking what should I do, what should I not do, what can I delegate, thinking is key

So as I said it is mostly a relative term. For me early hours of the day are the most productive ones and I feel the rest is just a followup of that early morning plan. But hey..as I said it is a relative term 🙂 Yours could be entirely be different.

So what is your most productive time session during the day or night ?