I’m gonna start waking up at 4:00 in the morning as part of my 30-day challenge during January. I could go into detail explaining my whole thought process behind the decision, but that didn’t work, I tried. Instead I’ll just sum up the thought process behind this experiment.
In my previous routine I would wake up at the exact moment that would give me precisely enough time to do everything I needed to do in order to leave for work and arrive prior to my morning meeting. Most days this meant targeting an arrival time between 9:00 and 9:30, but would really throw me off for the couple of times a month when I have 8:30 meetings. After putting in my time at the office I would head out, again in the heart of rush hour, and arrive home after spending from 2 to three hours on the round trip, tired and worn out. At this point I had to walk, feed and play with Starks, while figuring out what to feed myself for dinner. This would generally lead to a recovery period on the couch, in front of the tv with no productivity in sight for the rest of the day. Ten minutes on the couch is a slippery slope after rushing to get ready for work, followed by the stress of commuting in traffic just to get to the office and then repeating in the afternoon. All remaining free time seems to become a black hole.
So in order to add a more time to my day and hopefully alleviate some of the stress my plan for January was to start waking up earlier, much earlier.
I have an alarm clock app (Sleep Cycle) on my phone which allows me to set a wake up time, but unlike most alarm clocks this app also allows me to set a time interval prior to that time that it would be acceptable to wake me up. I set mine for 4:30, and my interval is 30 minutes. This means that if the alarm hasn’t gone off by 4:30 it will wake me up, but starting at 4:00 it will sense my movement and determine if I’m in a lighter sleep phase and wake me up then, not allowing me to fall into a deeper sleep before 4:30 and allowing me to wake up feeling slightly more refreshed and ready to start the day.
Once I wake up I’m not rushing to get ready as fast as possible so I can get out the door and get to work anymore either. I try to leave for the office around 6:45 which is well before rush hour and usually results in a commute that takes from 25 to 35 minutes, much shorter than some of the over an hour commutes when I left later. I dedicate the time starting at 6:00 to walking Starks and getting ready for work, with the addition of making and eating breakfast/tea/coffee. It’s a much slower, more enjoyable process. That results in a lower stress level before 9 a.m.
Arriving at work between 7 and 7:30 gives me quite a bit of quiet time before anyone else arrives where I can focus on my own work along with helping out the offshore resources who are already well into their day. Aside from a couple less stressful hours at the office I also aim to leave by 3:30 or a hard stop at 4:00. Getting out of the office that early usually means (except in the case of snow) that I don’t have more than 10 minutes of traffic in the afternoon.
The potential for burn out from an especially stressful day at the office still exists, but getting home from the office around 4:30 and in general having a less stressful overall commute while also adding some quiet working hours help to mitigate that and avoid the black hole for the most part. Knowing that I’m going to feel better in the evenings has started to cause me to have a mental list of things that I want/need to get done. Things like going to the gym, doing laundry or getting some of the storage space in the house properly organized. Starks enjoys the extra play time. I actually have time to think about cooking a decent meal and enjoy eating it. I’m not entirely opposed to vegging in front of the tv, especially when it comes to sports, so I still end up doing that too, it just doesn’t take up my whole night. Since most sports/tv shows don’t really start before 7 p.m. I’m less likely to just sit down on the couch when I get home, and if I do I end up doing something more productive like reading.
I try to start thinking about getting to sleep around 10:00 every night. Ideally I just need to brush my teeth and get in bed. I shoot for lights off and asleep by 10:30 but hopefully a bit sooner. After an 18 hour day I’m usually pretty tired at this point and fall asleep relatively quickly after my head hits the pillow which goes a long way in helping me wake up early tomorrow.
By far the most beneficial part of this challenge is the time I gain after I wake up until I start getting ready for work. It’s 90 minutes to two hours of the day where there is just about nothing else going on. No distractions. All that is on tv is infomercials. The day hasn’t yet been ruined by a shifty driver who couldn’t stay on the road and instead caused traffic for the rest of us, or a stressful day of finding some ridiculous pattern in the code base at work. Even Starks quickly gives me a look of “you don’t really expect me to get up now do you?” It’s just a block of time where I can guilt-free, stress-free do whatever the hell I want. As part of the challenge I’m making a goal to do something productive at least 3, hopefully 4 days, during the week. Productive can mean anything from reading, blogging or writing, working on a personal project to going to the gym, running outside or taking Starks for a long walk or to the park. On the days where I choose not to be especially productive I may do things such as play some xbox (Black Ops 2), clean some things off my DVR or catch up on my Google Reader blog feeds. I generally try not to do any work, but I always end up checking and responding to some offshore email, it just makes sense to knock a couple of those out as early as possible. If this challenge ends up living on as a lifestyle change, and at this point I believe it will, in some incarnation or another, I can use this time to help taking on future challenges such as daily reading, exercise (P90X?) or just learning something new.
About one-third of the way through January I can say that I already view this as a success. I don’t know if I can attribute all of the lower stress I’ve had so far this year to this challenge but I can definitely see how this is partially responsible. At this point I think this will get adopted into my life going forward. I may not always wake up at 4, I may find a better balance with a little bit more sleep or I may just shift the cycle slightly later in the day. I’m always looking for ways to improve upon things, whether that is shifting the parameters of the challenge or just finding something useful that I can use my extra time for, I’m open to it. I think I’m on my way to a successful first challenge of 2013 and I couldn’t be happier about it.
And for anybody who followed along closely, yes, this was more of a summary than the original version.
for more profundity or pithy humor follow me on twitter – @bicb
Comments