30 Days to Early Rising
[edit: The status of this 30-day trial is: Stopped due to health concerns. I started getting too many headaches towards the end of the 2nd week, so ended it in the middle of the 3rd week. I had good results, but did not foresee the headaches. If not for this problem, I would probably continue to wake early.]
I’m planning on starting a 30 day trial to get up early in the morning and get more accomplished during the day.
Yes, I know, it isn’t nearly as inspired of a topic as managing expectations and starting the fight against the ego… It is, however, a practical exercise in both the objective world around me, as well as a great test of how far I’ve progressed emotionally.
Before
To start, I would like to explain my normal morning ritual. I wake up at 5:30 am, take a shower, get dressed, and check my email while my breakfast is cooking in the microwave. If I notice any new RSS items, I’ll read those as well. I’m usually out the door at 6:30 to enjoy my hour long commute to work.
There is a lot of wasted time in there. Of course, getting clean and dressed is important… but reading emails and catching up on RSS feeds really isn’t that essential, and I can typically wait until later in the day to tackle them. After all, it doesn’t take much imagination to work through email or read someone else’s post, which makes it a perfect evening activity. If something is truly time-sensitive, like an offer that I just can’t refuse, well, I’ll just have to pass it up. (I would normally pass up time sensitive offers anyways, simply because time limited deals are short-lived for a reason.)
During
Instead of having just enough time to get everything accomplished, I would like some time to make progress on certain goals. In the evenings, I’m quite unimaginative… This is especially true considering that my job consists of imagining data and typing out how that data should interact. By the time I’ve gotten home, I’ve used up my imagination quota for the day, and the evening is filled with talking with my wife, debating on online forums, watching an hour of television, and tinkering unimaginatively on the computer.
So, to do this, I would like to wake up at 4:00 am. My first act when waking up would still be to take a shower, since that is the fastest way for me to become alert, followed by dressing for the day. After that, I would fix myself breakfast and coffee (taking time to choose a healthy breakfast, rather than whatever I could microwave as I’ve been doing), then sit at my computer and start programming.
After
By the end of the first month, I have one specific goal. I want to make distinct progress in writing TimeAgent… hopefully getting to the same point I was just before I erased the last version and begin beta testing soon after.
A secondary goal is to develop the site that will host TimeAgent… though that is a distant second, and will not become important until after I am nearing the end of the beta testing and am ready to distribute it.
(For those who don’t know, TimeAgent is the name selected for a piece of personal information management software that I’m writing. Originally named Placebo as an inside joke, it developed into a to-do list management bar, and in November, was ready for testing… until I switched computers, and in the process deleted all of the files. I’m currently back in the planning phases, and despite some false-starts, I haven’t moved out of the planning stage yet. Current goals are to include a robust to-do list manager, an RSS feed reader, email, and perhaps throw in extra modules for other online services, such as managing blogs. The first version will only include the to-do list manager, of course, as I believe in the mantra ‘release early, release often.’ The intended audience would be people who derive at least a portion of their income from working online.)
I recognize that if I wake up early each day and don’t work on a project, I’ll just end up questioning why I even bothered with waking up early in the first place. I can fail to work on a project any evening that I choose to, after all… I certainly don’t have to push myself to wake up early to be lazy.
Link Love:
Steve Pavlina of the eponymous StevePavlina.com, for first introducing me to the concept of 30 day trials. I haven’t visited his site in a long, long time, but I imagine that he is still going strong and still giving useful advice.
4:00 a.m. and dusk when the sun is going down are supposed to be the 2 ideal times of the day for meditation. I learned this when I was in India the first time. I haven’t mastered meditating at either of those times. When I am in India is the only time that I have ever been able to get up consistantly between 4:00-6:00 a.m. After this last trip, I actually woke up at 6:00 a.m. for 6 weeks after I got home. Have a glorious day.
I never imagined that there were ideal times set by the clock for meditating…
I’ll definitely have to try it out. Too bad I’m usually on the road when the sun goes down, or I’d try that as well.