Welcome to the second of the 30 day challenges. By doing 30 day challenges, I explore a topic that I feel will make my life more deliberate and productive. This month I will be looking at rising earlier.
Why I Chose This
My schedule is such that I feel busy all the time. I don’t feel like have uninterrupted time. I get up, go to work, and then when I get home I am bombarded with household tasks, exercising, and various evening commitments, not least of which is time with my family. I felt like I never had time to work on projects that were important to me. Non-fiction reading, fiction writing, blogging and crafting are wedged into the odd fifteen minutes I can find.
I feel that working on an early-rising routine will help me carve out the time I need to make progress on activities I want to have in my life.
The Foreseen
I want to make it very clear that I am a night owl. I am not an early riser by nature, and also not one of those who can easily adapt to either staying up late or rising early. I struggle to get out of bed when it is still dark. In the evenings, if I catch my second wind, which is about 10-10:30, I am up for most of the night.
So in the face of this, why am I choosing to get up early? The plain fact remains that I am not in charge of my schedule. I am committed to being at my workplace at 8:30 every morning; if I allowed myself to use my natural cycles, this wouldn’t happen. So given that I already have to be up, it makes more sense to do things at that time than to allow myself to slip into a cycle of being up until 3 every morning and then still trying to be in the office at 8:30.
I need my sleep. There is no way around it. So in order to get enough sleep, that means I will need to go to bed earlier. This has two effects: the first is that I will be asleep before I catch the second wind. I need to do this anyway in order to function at work. The second is that my before-bed activities were not necessarily productive and could be sacrificed in the name of doing things that really matter.
I have a habit of crawling into bed and reading fiction. Not only does this fill my brain full of junk food, but it can also pop me over the second wind line, and cause a night of insomnia. I need to head this off, and going to bed (lights out) before this is possible is a good alternative.
I’ve Done This Before
As I talked about in “A 5 Step Guide to Create A Morning Routine That Sticks”, The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)“* got me to implement a morning routine.
But soon after that, I spent a year teaching high school, and having to leave for work at 6:30 am was not conducive to me doing a morning routine. So it fell by the wayside. Now that I’m back in the corporate world, it is easier to work a morning routine into my schedule. But Hal’s SAVERS wasn’t working for me. I felt more like I was doing a checklist, rather than doing something of benefit.
In order to make this work, it has to be from my own needs and experience.
My Plan for the 30 Days
So what is important to me? I want to do non-fiction reading and take notes. I want to spend 30 minutes writing, either blog or fiction. I want to read from two daily meditation readers. I want to spend five minutes doing yoga stretches. I want to read the comics. I want to journal. I want to have time to set up dinner and straighten the kitchen so I don’t come home to a mess. I want to set the robot vacuum up so that is done daily. I want to set my daily plan, if I didn’t do it the night before, so that I never go into a day without some idea of what is coming at me.
It took a while to settle on this list. It doesn’t fit into Hal Elrod’s SAVERS. I don’t do affirmations – in fact, they can be detrimental to those, like me, who have significant trauma in their past. I don’t visualize how the day will go – it will unfold in a different way than anything I can imagine, so why waste my time?
I also have to set times on these items, or I will fall into the habit of “giving it a lick and a promise” as my grandfather used to say.
So here is my proposed schedule:
- Get up a 5:30; get a cup of coffee and go to my writing studio
- Spend 15 minutes reading non-fiction and taking notes. First will be my daily readers, then the current non-fiction book. My goal is to have three “cards” (see How To Take Smart Notes* by Sonke Ahrens) per day
- Write 30 minutes of blog or fiction
- Go downstairs, have breakfast, read the comics (and make sure my daughter is up for school or activities)
- Go back upstairs and journal for 10 minutes
- Review/make my daily plan
- Yoga stretches for 5 minutes
- Get ready for work or the day’s activities
- Set up Alice the Roomba to run
- Go back downstairs, set up dinner or clean kitchen
Want To Join Me?
I challenge you to join me this month as I do this. Figure out what you want to make time for in your day, and set up a routine. I encourage you to set times on this, and then calculate your rising time from that.
