If you are are as stressed and overwhelmed as I was a couple years ago, you probably feel like you don’t have time to learn about financial independence, the study of happiness, or anything else. Consistently spending 55 hours per week in the office will not only make you bitter about the time you are missing with your children, but it will also make it seem like you don’t have time available to figure out how to change things.
If this is the case, the first thing you need to do is create some space.
I will detail exactly how I manage to carve out time every day for myself, and what I do with that time.
My process is largely inspired by the book Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. If you haven’t read this I highly recommend that you do. It is short, fun, easy to read, and inspiring. In the book, Hal identifies 6 habits that are common among highly successful people (S.A.V.E.R.S):
- Silence, i.e. meditation
- Affirmations
- Visualizations
- Exercise
- Reading
- Scribing, i.e. writing
I will get to each of the 6 items above in Part 2 but first we need to figure out how you’ll have time to do them: We need to get you out of bed!
Wake Up!
Photo by Sanah Suvarna on Unsplash
This is the hardest, but most important, part. Accomplish this and all the other parts are easy and enjoyable. Accomplish this and your life will take a turn for the better. If you hit that snooze button though . . . you’ll end up back where you were: stressed and unhappy with no time to figure a way out.
“But I’m not a morning person!”
Said everyone I’ve ever met, including me.
Here is the secret: You aren’t born a morning person, just like you aren’t born a 3-hour marathoner. You become a morning person through daily practice.
“How early should I wake up?” It depends. How early does the rest of your day start, and how much time do you want to have? I’d recommend starting by getting up 1 hour before you have to wake up. Just this one hour will have a huge positive impact on your day.
Previously, you were probably starting your day by getting up because you had to. You needed to brush your teeth, shower, and shovel some food in your mouth before rushing out the door to avoid being late for work. In other words, from the moment you woke up you were not in control of your time.
If you get up before you have to, then by definition you do not have to get up. You are now getting up and starting your day because you choose to. That little bit of control can make a huge difference!
Below are some tips, and an app, that will help you successfully get out of bed:
Make a Plan
Before you go to bed, plan out what you want to do with your time in the morning. Will you be doing all your SAVERS, some portion of them, or something else? Maybe you want to write a blog post, read a book, or go run for an hour . . . There are no rules. After all, the whole point of getting up early is that this is your time to work on accomplishing your goals. Once you start getting ready to head to work, your boss controls your time. If you have a family, when you come home from work it’s very likely they will control your time (someone has to make dinner, change diapers, get kids to any activities they have scheduled, put kids to bed, etc.). The morning may be the only chunk of time that you get to control all day, so pick something worth while.
Schedule it!
Once you identify what you want to do in the morning, write it down. This will force you to get more specific about what it is you plan to do when you wake up. You could write this on a piece of paper, in a journal, or (my favorite) in your Google Calendar.
If something is important and has to happen at a certain time at work (like an appointment or meeting), you write it in your calendar. Why would this be any different?
What I do is create 3 recurring appointments in my calendar:
- “Wake Up”: I give myself 30 minutes to wake up, brush teeth, start the coffee, feed the dogs, etc. The last 10-15 minutes of my “wake up” time is used to either meditate or get a quick workout in to get the blood pumping prior to “Me” time.
- “Morning ME Time”: I try to schedule at least 90 minutes, although this sometimes gets compressed to 60 minutes if I have to be to work early. Before I go to bed at night, I open the next day’s “ME” appointment and change the title to state whatever it is I want to do. You can see in the image above that tomorrow morning (Monday) I plan to write a blog article.
- “Get Ready for Work”: I don’t like to rush, so I block out an hour before I need to leave to cook breakfast, shower, and get dressed.
A large chunk of “ME” time used to go to my SAVERS (which I’ll address in the next post), but after 2.5 years of consistently doing SAVERS I am paring them back temporarily to work on this blog. That’s the beautiful thing about “ME” time . . . It’s mine and I can do with it what I please. HAHA!
Go to Bed Early!
This is incredibly important. You still need your sleep, so if you are going to grab a couple extra hours in the morning, you need to subtract that time from somewhere else. What you are doing is trading unproductive time in the evening when you are likely to just want to sit on the couch and “veg out”, for super-productive time in the morning when your brain is fresh and there are no distractions.
“But I can’t fall asleep if I go to bed early!”
If you can’t fall asleep, it may be because you aren’t tired enough. In that case, just skip this step for the first day or two. After a a night of less-than-enough sleep, coupled with a 5am wake up, you will be exhausted by 9pm and falling asleep will no longer be a challenge.
Once you get in the rhythm of sleeping early and waking early, your mornings may become your favorite part of the day. You will want to go to bed so that you can get up and enjoy it!
Another thing that helps me get to bed is setting a recurring “time to go to bed” alarm that goes off at night. I got this idea from this post at the 5am Joel blog. If I am engrossed in a book, or in a titillating conversation with my wife about the contents of the latest poopy diaper one of us changed, the alarm will remind me of the time and jog my memory that, “oh yeah, I want to get to bed!”
Have a Routine
Try to have a routine that you do every time you wake up. This will turn getting up into a habit that you will do without having to go through the internal struggle of “should I really get up, or should I just hit snooze?”
My routine consists of dealing with my alarm (which I’ll get to in a bit), brushing my teeth, and chugging an entire glass of water which I prepare the night before. Then I come out to the kitchen, start the coffee, and feed the dogs (they whine and cry and wake everyone else up if I don’t feed them right away). Lastly, if my “ME” time is not going to consist of something physical like running or biking, I’ll go out to the garage gym and get a quick 10 minute workout in.
Screw the Snooze Button!
Make no mistake about it, the snooze button is your enemy!
Waking up is tough enough when you only do it once . . . why would you want to do it over and over???
Dr. Awake and Mr. Sleeping
There are two people inside of you. Dr. Awake and Mr. Sleeping . The problem is that Mr. Sleeping will tend to disagree with Dr. Awake that getting up early is a good idea. Like Mr. Hyde, Mr. Sleeping will make decisions that Dr. Awake will later regret. For a few seconds after your alarm goes off, Mr. Sleeping is still in control and will direct you to either hit the snooze or go back to bed. The trick is to find a way to delay getting back into bed for long enough that Dr. Awake can take over control and you can move into your morning routine.
One idea is to locate your alarm far from your bed so that you can’t just slam the snooze button and roll back over. For many people this works, but if you are like me, even this trick won’t work 100% of the time. What has finally solved this for me is getting a “better” alarm…
The Worst (BEST) Alarm App Ever
I am about to recommend an app that I hate. Well, I don’t hate it, but
Mr. Sleeping hates it! The app is called Alarmy. It is an alarm that is difficult to turn off. Mr. Sleeping can scream as much as he wants, “turn it off, Turn it Off, TURN IT OFF!”, but until Dr. Awake takes over and figures out the puzzle, it will keep ringing.
You can set several different kinds of alarms with the Alarmy app. You can pre-load pictures of certain areas of your house, and then you will have to go find and take that exact same picture to shut the alarm off. You can have it force you to shake the phone for a certain amount of time. My favorite though is having the app give you math problems that you have to solve to shut off the alarm. There is no way that Mr. Sleeping can solve these, so he/she has to relent control over to the more rational Dr. Awake to get the evil alarm to stop. After that, you couldn’t go back to sleep even if you wanted to!
Another option that I haven’t personally used, but that I’ve heard good things about from multiple people, is the Philips Wake-Up Light Alarm Clock. It gradually starts getting bright when it’s almost time to wake up so that your body thinks the sun is rising and you “naturally” wake up. The main reason I haven’t tried this is that my wife and our infant son are sleeping in the same room as me, and I’m worried it would wake them up too. If that doesn’t apply to you, you may want to give this a whirl.
Enjoy It!
However you figure out to get yourself up, and whatever you decide to do in the morning, just do it! Enjoy the quiet. Enjoy the time to yourself. Enjoy never having to make the “I’d really love to do X, but I just don’t have the time” excuse ever again!
Homework: Tonight make a plan and get to bed early. Tomorrow, wake up and seize the day! Then come back and comment here on how it went!