If there’s one thing I always hear about becoming successful is the importance of getting up early in the morning.

And I know this to be true, because when I get up early, I can get much more done and I have much more energy during the day. Until now, I used to get up between 6 am and 7 am, depending on the days.

Based on my experience until today, I’m more productive in the first hours of the day, but my energy level begins to drop after lunch. This is true regardless of what time I get up, and even if I take a nap after lunch, it’s very hard for me to be as productive as in the morning.

When I was managing an online store a few years ago, I used to go to sleep late, usually at 2 am, and then I’d never get up before 10 am. At that time I would never thought of getting up before 9 am. That worked because I used to work only 2-3 hours per day, at home, without having to respond to anyone.

But I still wouldn’t join that lifestyle again (there’s a reason if I quit) and I don’t mind if everyone else at my age are doing their best to sleep as late as possible. I learned that if something is done by the vast majority of people, it’s probably wrong.

So, starting from tomorrow, I’m going to enter a 30 days challenge where I’m going to get up at 5 am every morning. Not because I have to, but because I want to see what will happen.

Here are the rules:

  1. I have to wake up at 5 am every day except thursday. I leave out thursday morning because I usually go to the gym on wednesday night, and I don’t want to stop that.
  2. I can take a nap if I want to during the afternoon, however my goal is to wake up refreshed, not with sleep deprivation. Thus, the afternoon nap would be an incentive to increase productivity, not to compensate sleep.

At the end of these 30 days I’ll decide wherever to continue with this new schedule or not. I’m also eager to find out if all this hype around becoming an early riser is really worth.

I know the first week will be challenging but I hope my body will adjust quickly.

At what time will I go to sleep? in order to get up at 5 am, I guess it’ll be something between 9 pm and 10 pm. But again, I don’t know yet and I’m curious to find it out too.

I’ll blog about this experience, how I’ll feel during the days, if it will be difficult to get up at that time and anything else that may come out.