When the 5 AM Club Meets Motherhood: Rethinking Time Management Through Women’s Reality

By Dr. Fariha Gull

Author, educationist, consultant and researcher

Every year on International Women's Day, conversations about women’s empowerment often focus on leadership, opportunity, and representation. These conversations are important. But there is a quieter structural issue we rarely discuss: the architecture of time itself.

Most of what we know as productivity wisdom, morning routines, deep work blocks, early rising rituals, rests on an assumption that time is fully controllable by the individual.

But that assumption is not universal.

In many cases, it reflects male experiences of time, not women’s.

The Myth of the Peaceful Morning

Modern productivity culture celebrates the idea that success begins early. Books, podcasts, and leadership seminars repeatedly emphasize the power of early mornings. One of the most popular examples is the philosophy popularized by Robin Sharma, which suggests that waking at 5 AM unlocks clarity, creativity, and high performance.

The image is compelling.

• A quiet house.

• A warm cup of coffee.

• A journal.

• A few uninterrupted hours of deep thinking before the world wakes up.

But this image contains an invisible assumption: that the morning is calm.

For millions of women, particularly mothers, morning is not calm, it is operational.

At 5 AM, many women are not meditating or planning strategic goals. They are:

• Preparing breakfast

• Packing school lunch boxes

• Organizing children’s routines

• Managing household logistics

Ensuring everyone else’s day begins smoothly

In other words, the peaceful mornings celebrated in productivity culture often exist because someone else is managing the chaos behind them.

Very often, that someone is a woman.

The Hidden Labor Behind Productivity

This phenomenon is not simply about household chores. It reflects something deeper that sociologists describe as invisible labor, the cognitive and emotional work required to keep families functioning.

Women are not only doing tasks; they are anticipating needs, coordinating schedules, and managing emotional environments.

This labor rarely appears in productivity manuals, leadership training programs, or time management frameworks. Yet it profoundly shapes how women experience time.

Where productivity advice assumes linear and controlled time, women frequently navigate relational time, time structured around the needs of others.

A Small Story That Revealed a Bigger Problem

Once, a colleague advised me that if I wanted to write more research papers, I simply needed to “manage my time better.”

The suggestion seemed logical. So I decided to try what many productivity experts recommend: waking up early for uninterrupted writing.

I set my alarm for 5 AM.

My assumption was simple. My child usually slept until around 8 AM. That meant three precious hours of silence, perfect for academic writing.

At 5:15 AM, my plan collapsed.

• My daughter woke up.

• Not quietly.

She was crying, walking through the house looking for me, needing me to sit beside her. Like most young children, her sense of safety depended on proximity.

In that moment, the idea of a peaceful 5 AM writing routine disappeared.

• Not because I lacked discipline.

• Not because I lacked ambition.

But because my time was not fully my own.

When Productivity Advice Ignores Context

This is where many productivity narratives unintentionally fail women.

Advice like “wake up earlier,” “protect your mornings,” or “create deep work time” assumes that individuals control their environment.

But many women operate inside complex ecosystems of care, children, elderly parents, households, and professional responsibilities.

Their time is negotiated, not owned.

When productivity frameworks ignore this reality, they can inadvertently produce a harmful message: that women are less disciplined or less organized.

In truth, many women are not managing less work.

They are managing more layers of work simultaneously.

Rethinking the Architecture of Time

If we want genuine gender equity in academia, leadership, and professional spaces, we need to rethink how productivity systems are designed.

Instead of asking:

• Why don’t women follow these routines?

We should ask:

• Who designed these routines?

• Whose life conditions were assumed when they were created?

• What invisible labor makes them possible?

True inclusion requires more than inviting women into existing systems. It requires redesigning systems to reflect diverse realities of life and care.

The Women Who Hold the Morning Together

Behind many successful routines, many productive days, and many calm households, there is often a woman who woke up earlier than everyone else, not to journal, but to make the day possible for others.

Her morning may not look peaceful.

It may look chaotic, demanding, and full of interruptions.

But within that chaos exists a remarkable form of leadership: the ability to create order, stability, and care for an entire ecosystem of people.

On International Women’s Day, perhaps the most meaningful recognition we can offer is not just celebration.

It is visibility.

Visibility for the unseen work that structures our days.

Visibility for the women whose mornings begin with chaos so that others can begin theirs with peace.

And perhaps most importantly, a commitment to design a world where productivity advice does not assume freedom from care—but learns to respect it.

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