Okay, so it’s not a plan to take over the world, per se. It’s just a plan to be healthy, wealthy, and wise (and that’ll help me take over the world, right?). I’m going to become an early riser.
I stumbled across a couple of Steve Pavlina’s posts about sleep and becoming an early riser last year on Jordan’s del.icio.us links. I initially thought Pavlina was mildly crazy, but some of his ideas about sleep made a lot of sense to me. His posts on How to Become and Early Riser and How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off have especially good advice in them. I used to think some people were morning people and others weren’t, but Pavlina claims that anyone can become a morning person if they’re willing to discipline themselves, and he offers some practical (albeit slightly unorthodox) ways of doing just that.
I’m not sure why I didn’t put these ideas into practice back when I read this stuff the first time, but Tom’s del.icio.us links recently drew my attention back to Pavlina’s site and this time around I’ve decided to go for it.
I’ve never been a morning person. Quite the contrary, I’ve always been something of a night owl, staying up until 1:00 am or later and then crashing. Since I got married, though, my wife drags me to bed around 10:00 pm every night claiming that it’s the only way for her to warm up her feet. We’ve only been married a year and a half, so I still think that’s cute and I usually oblige. Even though I go to bed early now, I still typically roll out of bed around 8:00 am and make it to work around 9:00, but I’m pretty worthless until about noon, when I finally start to wake up. It’s crossed my mind once or twice in the past year that I’ve been sleeping 10 hours a night, and that’s probably why I’m so tired all the time, but I’ve never bothered to do anything about it.
Lately, though, I’ve been riding my bike to work two or three days a week. It gets my adrenaline and endorphins flowing and really makes me feel awake and alive. I guess that’s one reason why I didn’t simply pass over Pavlina’s pointers this time around. My bike riding has made me want to feel healthy and alive in other areas of my life. My wife keeps asking me what I did with her husband because I want to start taking vitamins and eating salad and fruit and stuff, but for the first time in a long time I really feel good about myself and I have real energy in the morning.
For two days in a row, I’ve gotten up more than an hour earlier than necessary. Yesterday I got up at 6:15 am and today I got up at 5:30 am. I think I’m going to make 5:30 my fixed wake up time, but if this works out I may move back to as early as 5:00. Getting up at 5:30 gives me a solid hour and a half between getting ready in the morning and having to leave for work.
One commitment I’m making is to spend this extra time on myself. That may seem selfish, but I spend a lot of my time working on other peoples’ projects. I need to learn how to say no to projects I know I won’t have time for, and I’ve been doing better, but so many of my own projects like my blogs have been pushed aside since I started working full time and doing school. So here I am blogging, and I hope to do this much more often starting today.
Speaking of blogging, I’m thinking of combining my two blogs back into one and turning it into more of a tumblelog like Jordan’s excellent Swirlee. I know it’s kindof a fad right now, but I don’t intend to copy exactly what anyone else is doing. I think it will be a nice way (at least a better way than the one I use now) to bring together my del.icio.us links, my Flickr photos, and the other things I post around the net.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on my adventures in waking up, so stay tuned.