How Gen Z are stealing back time from their corporate jobs

Ellie Muir, The Independent

I settle at my office desk at 9am and smugly look at my colleagues wiping sleep from their eyes. What they don’t know is that between the hours of 4.45am and 8.30am this morning, I went to the gym, meditated, meal-prepped my lunches, worked on my side hustle, wrote in my gratitude journal and read a chapter of a self-help book. I even listened to a productivity podcast on my commute. I’m fulfilled, energised and comfortably in the swing of my day.

My mornings are typically lazy, but not today, because I’m testing the viral “five-to-nine” routine, which sees corporate Gen Z-ers document themselves — either before work from 5am to 9am or after work from 5pm to 9pm — performing an action-packed step-by-step wellness programme made up of exercise, personal growth work, meal-prepping, skincare and side-hustling. These routines are regimented and seem strenuous, but they have a huge appeal: the five-to-nine video style has been replicated by thousands of creators online, with the hashtag #5to9routine having 35 million views on TikTok alone. Under this tag, you’ll find thousands of Gen Z workers showing how they reclaim their time – and their personalities — back from their corporate jobs.

Gen Z’s interest in maximising productivity in these four golden hours has taken inspiration from the rise of the “5am club” — a special group of uber-productive superbeings who celebrate the benefits of rising at dawn. Sure, people have always been early risers (famed Vogue editor Anna Wintour, obviously, is one of these people) but the very act of waking before the rest of the world is increasingly common, with celebs including Jennifer Aniston, Mark Zuckerberg and Michelle Obama all claiming to be members of the club. There’s also Gwyneth Paltrow, whose morning routine consists of a 30-minute tongue scrape, Ayurvedic oil pull, a 20-minute transcendental meditation and a dance workout. The meeting point between productivity and wellness has risen in popularity as a cultural phenomenon in recent years, thanks to bestselling self-help books including Robin Sharma’s The 5am Club, Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning, Adrienne Herbert’s Power Hour and James Clear’s Atomic Habits. You can see the same thing happening with the 5pm club, too, who use their evenings to maximise their wellness through the act of winding down mindfully yet efficiently.

Any mere mortal who may prefer to doomscroll in bed each morning or binge Love is Blind in the evenings may feel ashamed when faced with the five-to-nine trend. Ketki, a 24-year-old analyst for a tech policy firm, is one of them. These videos make her feel inferior to her corporate peers. “I watch these videos and feel inadequate,” she says. “Everyone seems to be running marathons or balancing some sort of creative pursuit alongside their jobs, and I watch these videos and feel a weird pressure like... am I going to be left behind?”

The five-to-nine lifestyle appeals to Ketki because she also desires to regain control of her life outside of work — it’s just an impossible balance to strike. She graduated from studying classics at a Russell Group university in 2022 and began her first graduate role a year and a half ago. But adjusting to the demands of a full-time job was more difficult than she imagined. “When I joined my job, I got this weird feeling of wanting to reclaim my personality,” she explains. “Corporate takes so much from you and you have to be switched on all the time. You have no time to go outside, get a full lunch break. I always work through lunch.” A huge part of adjusting to having a full-time job was mourning the open-ended free time that she had become accustomed to as a student. “At university, you get to see friends or do a sport — things you just don’t get out of a corporate job. Now I’m working, it almost feels like you have to sustain the lifestyle you had before but just squeezing it into those two gaps before or after work.”