Today is the 17th day of my waking up at 5 am experiment.
It’s incredible I’ve made it so far. Especially waking up at 5am on saturdays and sundays was strange at first, but it’s very rewarding, and not that difficult.
The nice thing is that you really get a lot of time when you wake up early.
After the firsts days when the hype is high and you just work on the list of things that were accumulated in your todo list, you then start to appreciate your new lifestyle, at the point that you begin to wonder what you can do with all that time.
This week I came to the realization that we really have too much time, the problem is that we use it in the wrong way. If you wake up and fill your entire day until 6-7-8pm with work, you’ll get nothing done. Seriously, how can you pretend to focus at 9pm after 8 hours of work, maybe 1 hour of commute and thousands of interruptions? You can’t unless you are a night owl (2 persons every 10 on average), but even then you need to work at a job where you can start late, otherwise if you go to sleep at 3am and wake up at 7am you may have other problems.
Now let’s look at a different scenario. You wake up at at 5am, and you work on your personal projects (writing, studying, singing, you name it) until you have to go to work. Assuming that you start at 9 am and you have 1 hour of commute, you can get almost 3 hours of real work, without any kind of interruptions. Who cares if you have to go to bed at 9 or 10? Is watching tv really important?
Of course everything’s fine if you don’t need the time, but in the case you were looking for more hours in the day, well, you know what to do.
I have a lot to say about this experiment, and I’ll write the next update at the end of the 30 days. I’m pretty sure tough that I’ll not switch back to my old lifestyle.