When And Where Do Americans "Rise And Grind"?

For years, the phrase "rise and grind" has inspired Twitter users to get on their feet and face the day. When is America rising, we wondered, and where is it grinding the most?

To find out, we used a Twitter scraper to record tweets that contained the words "rise and grind" (or "#riseandgrind") from Saturday, June 21, through Friday, June 27. In total we pulled raw data for 29,612 tweets. The first chart below, in blue, shows when these "rise and grind" tweets occurred (EDT), binned into 15-minute increments. Over 13,000 were retweets; one kid was particularly popular. These retweets were removed from the second chart, in red.

As the first chart shows, Wednesday had by far the most "rise and grind" tweets, peaking between 9 and 9:15 a.m. at 22.5 tweets per minute. Monday came in second, thanks to a flurry of late-night rising and grinding that was largely attributable to retweets.

Once retweets were removed—as the second chart shows—the "rise and grind" cycle became a lot less volatile, with tweets reaching the same general peak on Monday through Thursday mornings. The single highest peak was on Thursday, between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m, with 9.3 tweets going out each minute. The chart below compares, for non-retweets, how "rise and grind" peaked over the course of each day by hour; all times are EDT:

The weekday trend is pretty consistent. Early risers and grinders start rising and grinding at 5 a.m., and tweets increase sharply from there until reaching their 8-9 a.m. peak. The tweets then drop off at about the same rate, although there seem to be some late-morning risers who keep volumes high through 10 a.m.

So that covers when people are rising and grinding, but how about where? Unfortunately geocoded tweets are becoming harder and harder to find. Of the 29,612 tweets in the sample, just 1,073 had lat/long in their metadata (0.4 percent), of which 989 were tweeted from within the United States.

The chart below shows the locations of the tweets (not pictured: two Hawaii tweets). With the small sample size in mind, we calculated the "rise and grind" (RnG) tweets per million inhabitants for the 15 largest U.S. metros, based on data from the 2010 U.S. census:

Hard-hatted Detroit came in first with 29 "rise and grinds" for 4.3 million inhabitants, while Miami and Atlanta were second and third. West Coasters, notably, did not do a lot of rising and grinding. Los Angeles, the Riverside-San Bernardino metro, Seattle, and the Bay Area came in 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th, respectively. Chicago, at 11th, neither rose nor ground.

So there you have it. Have a great morning. #riseandgrind.