When is “late for work” at your company? Depending on what industry you’re in and where you live, it could be anywhere from after 8 a.m. to approaching noon. If you live in New York, for example, you enjoy (or are frustrated by) the latest median arrival time of any city in the country, according to data from FiveThirtyEight.
(Photo Credit: Arman Thanvir/Flickr)
Granted, that median arrival time is not super late: it’s 8:24 a.m., to be exact, with a buffer of an hour on either side. That’s still about a half an hour later than the U.S. as a whole, Nate Silver notes in a post.
When the workday starts is important. If you’re not a morning person, all the alarm clocks and early bedtimes in the world won’t change your inner rhythms. But if you’re constantly in trouble with the boss for rolling in a few minutes late, the answer might not be to move.
“In general … the workday schedule is dictated more by the type of work than the location,” writes Silver. “The earliest-arriving quartile of the workforce in the New York metro has begun work by 7:28 a.m. — quite a bit sooner than the latest-arriving quartile in Hinesville, which starts work at 8:06. Some of us New Yorkers appreciate our extra half-hour of sleep. But if you’re an early bird or a night owl and want a work schedule that matches your metabolism, changing jobs is a better strategy than changing cities.”
New York, in other words, is home to a lot of “creative” professions, as are San Francisco and Boston, which also make Silver’s late-rising list. Other cities with later start times house nocturnal industries, like Atlantic City’s nightlife empires, and colleges and universities, like the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan.
So if you want to go in later, maybe it’s time to look for a career that works with your inner clock.
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