HBR IdeaCast · Harvard Business Review

The Case for Designing Work Around Circadian Rhythms

April 7, 2026·26 min·2 clips

Alison Beard and Adi Ignatius reveal their contrasting work patterns, questioning if leaders should design work around internal clocks.

The premise is practical, not cosmetic. Alison Beard and Adi Ignatius start by comparing when they do their best work, and both land outside the early morning ideal. That makes the biology feel less abstract. Circadian rhythm is the internal clock that affects when people feel awake, energized, and engaged at work. The guest pushes back on the neat idea that evening types can simply train themselves to start earlier. Their bodies may not settle down early enough for that. Melatonin timing gets in the way. When those workers force an early schedule, they often lose sleep instead of changing their rhythm. And lost sleep is not a small tax. The guest connects it to weaker performance, worse health, and shifts in mood and emotion. Alison pulls the point back to ordinary life: the pressure to wake earlier, bounce back from jet lag, and treat early rising like character. Then the conversation turns to workplaces. Flexible work can help, especially now that teams cross time zones and people can work from almost anywhere. But flexibility can be fake if the schedule underneath is still rigid. COVID changed some expectations, since many organizations saw flexible arrangements cause less damage than they feared. The proposed fix is structured flexibility: core hours, such as 10 to 3, for meetings, creativity, and coordination, with the rest of the workday completed earlier or later depending on the person.

As heard by us

A useful HBR case for treating body clocks as part of workplace design.

Work design starts with the body's clock in this HBR IdeaCast episode, which treats circadian rhythm less as a personal preference than as something managers should account for.

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Why you'd press play

When your best thinking shows up at the wrong hour, this one lands.

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