Today, I’m giving “Becoming A Morning Person” another chance to be a habit in my life. I recently read an article on 99U that encourgaged readers to wake up early in an effort to be more productive and happy. I decided to join this movement. I spoke so much about this that my wife decided to do day 1 with me too. You can follow more of the movement with the hastag, #labrat
Here was my schedule for night/day 1:
- 9:30pm - Start getting ready for bed
- 9:45pm - Roughly list items to do at 6am
- 10:00pm - Go to sleep
- 6:00am - Attempt to wake up. Reset alarm to 6:30am.
- 6:30am - Convince my wife to get up with me since she requested that encouragement.
- 6:45am - With coffee in hand, I read my text messages and found my brother wanted me to listen to his recent podcast episode. So, I derailed once again from my to do list and listened to the podcast.
- 7:00am - Convince my wife to let me go upstairs where I could be alone to journal for 1/2 hour.
- 7:15am - Journaling results in getting motivated to do work. So I stop journaling early to start coding. My email is open so I’m getting inundated with auto-generated subscription emails. Responded to a few emails and then promptly closed it.
- 7:30am - Coding results in me debugging my Octopress blog install for the next 1.5 hours before I really need to start doing some real, “pay-the-bills”, work.
Takeaways
I set out to do tons of work in the morning but didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted. It was a good start to the “morning person” routine, I believe.
Things I want to do better tomorrow:
- Wake up at 6am. No snoozing.
- Don’t read email, text messages, Twitter, or Instagram before 9am.
- Set out to accomplish only 1 thing in the morning instead of attempting to do many things.
- Keep journaling in my morning routine.
- Make sure my wife has tasks to accomplish so I’m free to work :)