Most days I work from 1pm to 9pm here in Spain, which translates to 6am to 2pm Chicago time. That gives me all the time before lunch to enjoy the light of day and all the activities that encourages. I find myself more interested in working out, more eager to read books, and generally infused with more energy for both physical and mental activities.

Over the past few years my average sleep schedule has been roughly 10 PM – 6 AM. When you compare that with a midnight to 8 AM sleep schedule, which is similar to what I was on previously, there are really only four hours of my day that are different: 6 AM – 8 AM and 10 PM – midnight. I’m essentially trading a two hour block at night for a two hour block in the morning.

Occasional I slip back in to a later schedule, whether it’s because of work or social life or I’m just being lazy and sleeping later. When this happens I notice that I don’t like how I spend those hours in question and inevitably force myself back on to the early riser schedule.

Similar to @DHH, I tend to spend those additional two hours in the morning reading, working out, or getting ahead on work for the day. I also enjoy the peacefulness associated with knowing that everyone else is sleeping (and therefore won’t be interrupting me). Comparatively I seem to spend those two hours at night watching TV or playing Xbox. Not that I don’t enjoy those things, but ultimately I’m a much happier person when I’m doing more of the former and less of the latter.

From January of 2008 when I became an early riser through early 2010 I had my morning alarm set for 6 AM and almost every day that was when I got up. In my 1 month update and 7 month update I used phrases like “amazing” and “life-changing” to describe my new sleep schedule.

At some point last year though, I got off track. Too many things were keeping me up late, both with work and socially, and I started to think “why not just sleep until I wake up?” All of a sudden I was getting up anywhere from 7 AM – 9:30 AM on most days, depending on how the prior day went. I went back to always feeling tired and always playing “catch up” with my sleep.

After my trip down south in the fall, where I slept until almost noon on the day of my presentation (!), I decided it was time to get back on track. I remembered how much better I felt when I got up early and I wanted that back. Not only getting up early, but sleeping consistently. Being fully awake during the day, and fully asleep during the night. Something I’ve only accomplished with a dedicated consistency to sleep, much like the dedicated consistency required in exercise, dieting, or even starting a business.

To be more practical, I switched my time to 7 AM. This is much more realistic. On any given night I tend to want to start winding down around 10 PM. By the time I fall asleep it’s probably close to 11, giving me a full eight hours instead of seven. On nights where I’m out late, I simply take a nap the next day per my productive napping rules, or go to bed a little early the next night.

I’ve taken to setting my phone to vibrate right at 7, and I set my loud annoying alarm across the room to go off at full blast at 7:05. Nothing gets me out of bed faster than the fear of having to hear that thing go off! Generally once I’m physically out of bed, it’s only a few minutes until I’m moving at full speed…there’s not that lethargic feeling that I get if I’ve just underslept or overslept.

I’ve also taken to tracking my 7 AM wakeup progress on an index card I keep on my desk. It’s something I think I’ll keep doing – it helps keep me accountable. Throughout the holidays I’d miss a day or two over the weekend but I’d get right back on track during the week. Recently, I’ve been doing pretty good:

Predictably, I feel great again. I don’t ever feel tired. When I’m up I’m fully up, and when I’m sleeping I sleep great. The scary thing is that I never knew this was possible until I committed myself to sleeping well. Had I kept on with a corporate career path, the sleep deprivation that I was putting myself through, which probably started when I was in grade school, would have probably continued on, unbeknownst to me how much I was hurting myself.

Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project, stretches an obvious thesis to the breaking point in his plaint on how the American workplace—theoretically where technology has allowed us to reach for more, bigger, faster—has bred an atmosphere in which workers have become disengaged from their work. We fail to take care of ourselves, he points out, and end up undermining our health, happiness, and productivity.

Of course, because I’m obsessed with sleep and how little we care about doing it well, despite it’s importance, I really keyed in on the sleep chapter. It is probably the single best thing I’ve read on the perils of lack of sleep. Here are some of my favorite quotes arranged into a more readable excerpt:

The consequences [of lack of sleep] include extreme fatigue, compromised cognitive capacity, emotional instability, lower productivity, and greater susceptibility to illness. No single behavior, we’ve come to believe, more fundamentally influences our effectiveness in waking life than sleep.

Nonetheless, sleep is also one of the first behaviors many of us are willing to sacrifice, on the mistaken assumption that doing so will allow us to be more productive. “We all think we have to stay awake to get more done,” says Matthew Walker, the director of the sleep and neuroimaging lab at UC Berkeley. “I think that’s simply not true. In fact, if you have a good night’s sleep, what you’ll find is that you can get more done than if you simply stay awake.”

So how much sleep do we need? The National Sleep Foundation recommends between seven and nine hours. Precious few of us can function well on much less. As Thomas Roth of the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders and Research Center says, “The percentage of the population who need less than five hours of sleep per night, rounded to a whole number, is zero.”

Based on their own estimates, Americans average only 6.5 hours of sleep per night. Even that may be overstated. In a study led by Diane Lauderdale at the University of Chicago, 669 middle-aged adults reported that they slept an average of 7.5 hours a night. But they also wore wrist monitors that allowed the researchers to determine precisely when they actually fell asleep. The average turned out to be 6.1 hours.

People who are sleep-deprived often don’t recognize their own limitations. “It’s convenient to say, ‘I’ve learned to live without sleep,’” explains David Dinges, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “But you bring them into the laboratory and we don’t see this adaptation.” Charles Czeisler, another renowned sleep researcher and chronobiologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it more bluntly: “Like a drunk, a person who is sleep-deprived has no idea how functionally impaired he or she truly is. Most of us have forgotten what it really feels like to be awake.”

Two recent studies of athletes at Stanford University suggest a powerful correlation between sleep time and performance. In one study, members of the swim team maintained their usual sleep-waking pattern for two weeks and then increased to ten hours of sleep a day for six to seven weeks. Once they were sleeping longer hours, they began to report higher energy and improved mood. They also significantly improved their quickness off the starting block, as well as their turn times, sprint times, and kick-stroke rate.

In Dream On: Sleep in the 24/7 Society, Charles Leadbeater summed up the costs this way: “Lack of sleep makes us more inefficient at work and more dangerous behind the wheel of a car. It undermines the quality of our lives and makes us more vulnerable to illness. It is also responsible for making us less able to respond creatively to problems and opportunities, and less original, flexible and divergent in our thinking and thus less likely to generate new ideas.”

Several studies have shown that immune response drops significantly among people who sleep less than seven to eight hours a night. Eve Van Cauter, a University of Chicago sleep researcher, found that subjects who slept four hours a night for six consecutive nights demonstrated not only a lower immune response but also diminished ability to regulate blood sugar, a risk factor for diabetes, and unusually high levels of circulating cortisol, a risk factor for high blood pressure. Among Van Cauter’s most significant findings was that sleep deprivation dramatically lowers levels of leptin, the hormone that signals satiety, and helps us control how much we eat.

Subjects sleeping four hours a night for six nights produced 18 percent less leptin than those sleeping seven to eight hours. This finding, Van Cauter and others believe, goes a long way toward explaining the connection between obesity and sleep patterns. For example, a study of nearly 10,000 people found that subjects who slept five or fewer hours a night were 60 percent more likely to be obese than those who slept seven hours or more.

The Harvard Nurses’ Health Study, which followed nearly 80,000 nurses over twenty-five years, uncovered a strong link between chronic sleep deprivation and increased risk of a range of diseases, including breast cancer, colon cancer, and coronary heart disease. Nurses who averaged five hours of sleep a night, for example, were significantly more likely to develop heart disease than those who got six hours. They, in turn, were at greater risk than those who slept seven hours a night.

At the cognitive level, we don’t think well when we’re tired. David Dinges found that subjects who slept less than six hours a night over a two-week period demonstrated a decrease in performance that was equivalent to that experienced after forty-eight continuous hours of sleep deprivation. More striking still, Harvard’s Charles Czeisler found that averaging four hours a sleep for five consecutive nights has an impact on our memory, attention, and speed of thinking that is equivalent to being legally intoxicated.

Wow, if that last paragraph doesn’t get you to think seriously about your sleep schedule, I don’t know what will.

In the past several months a lot has changed about the way I do things, all for the better in my opinion.

I’m getting a lot less customer service emails since we changed the way we handle errors on Detailed Image and are in the process of getting rid of Amazon and Tastefully Driven.  In terms of customer service, I used to handle all DI technical emails, all of Amazon, all of Tastefully Driven, all of SportsLizard, and then the other misc emails that trickle in now and again (Music-Alerts, Z.ips.ME, iPrioritize).  Knocking the first two off of my list has decreased my emails by about 65% (educated guess).  Don’t get me wrong – I love handling customer service issues. I love hearing the feedback.  It makes me an infinitely better developer.  But in these cases, the emails I was getting were repetitive and adding little or no value to the business.  Those are the types of emails I dislike, and therefore am really happy to rid myself of.

For the past ~6 weeks I have only been doing two warehouse days per week. That will probably go back to three once volume picks up in the Spring, but two is where I’d like to be back to by the end of Summer.  Hopefully we’ll have our full-time warehouse manager in place by then. We should each be able to do Monday + one other day, with a part time employee and the manager giving us 3 people per day.  The extra day off makes all the difference.  At least one day off is always primarily an errand day.  I go to the bank, visit my parents, grocery shop, shave my head, etc etc.  So by going from one additional day off to two, I can get a lot more of my project work done.

Speaking of which, I’ve really taken to batch processing my tasks based upon where I’ll be for the day.  For example, on my two legit days at home, I’m trying to do nothing but develop LockerPulse.  Those days I can go long stretches without being interrupted, which is really what you need to “get in the zone” and program effectively.  I try to save everything else for my warehouse days or my errand day.  Those days I often only get 15 or 20 minutes at a time to do stuff.  Especially on warehouse days.  There are interruptions left and right.  So when I add something to my to-do list that will take less than 30 minutes, I make sure I add it to one of those days and keep my days off totally free.

I’ve really taken to listening to podcasts when I’m in the car. It started when I listened to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders and has kind of blossomed into a routine for me.  I really look forward to getting in the car now by myself.  I’ve got it to a point where the podcasts I listen to come out at roughly the same pace that I drive.   Originally I tried using my old iPod, but found it a pain to carry around, keep charged, and plug into my car, so instead I’ve just been burning a new MP3 CD every few weeks and just leaving that in my car.  When I start the car it picks up right where I left off.  In addition to the Stanford talks, I’m subscribed to the 37Signals Podcast, This Week in Google, TechStuff, Diggnation, and Business Week’s Behind This Week’s Cover Story.  If you have any suggestions for me I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Last but not least, I’ve changed my sleep schedule to get up an hour later.  Sleep has been one of my favorite topics on this blog, mostly because 1) it’s really really important for health and productivity, and 2) everyone I know (myself included) pretty much sucks at it.  Check out the sleep category if you want the full run down, but basically in Jan of 2008 I decided I was going to become an early riser and stop getting up late and sleeping erratically as I had for my entire life.  I worked my ass off and was disciplined as hell and after several months got my body on an awesome 10 PM – 6 AM schedule.  I didn’t realize how tired I always was previously until I did this.  One or two good nights sleep just don’t leave you feeling as rested, happy, and productive as months upon months of great sleep do.

Anyway, 10 – 6 worked great for a while.  It enabled me to get to the gym before coming to the warehouse.  Back then we also had clients, so it let me get a few hours of work done before they started harassing me with phone calls.  The past six months or so, I kept finding myself in more social situations that kept me out later.  The only way I could keep getting up at 6 was to nap a lot.  I love napping, it can be a great supplement if done right, but I didn’t want it to be an every day routine.  Napping is horribly inefficient when you factor in the time it takes to wind down and wind back up afterward.  I also found myself going to the gym on non-warehouse days after doing some work  (9 or 10 AM), so the need to be up at 6 wasn’t really there.  The last straw was when my girlfriend got a new job that will have her at the office most days until around 7 PM. I want to make sure we have some time at night to spend together. I finally decided to start getting up at 7 AM about three weeks ago.  This really wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, but I always thought I’d stick to my 6 AM forever and ever because of how much I liked it.  Since the change though, I’ve realized that it’s a much better lifestyle fit for me now.  I haven’t napped since.  I’ve never been tired at all during the day.  I just feel more relaxed and less stressed overall.

In my quest to become healthy, happy, and productive, I’ve become fascinated with sleep over the past few years.   I always exercise regularly and for the most part I eat very healthy, but a good nights sleep eluded me for a long time.  The problem started in high school where I routinely got less sleep than I needed, and then just sort of continued into college and the workforce.  Like most of us, being sleep deprived became the norm.

However, since I started working for myself a few years back I’ve been able to experiment with what makes me operate at my best.   On 1/1/2008 I became an early riser.  It wasn’t easy, but I’ve become much more productive hitting the ground running at 6 AM as opposed to starting lethargically at 8:30 or 9.

But there was a problem.  The trouble started in the spring when the Detroit Red Wings – my favorite hockey team – won the Stanley Cup.  For two straight months I was up until midnight watching games and it often took me an hour or two to wind down after a game.  I began napping during the day to make up for the lost sleep, but for the most part I was lethargic all of the time.

After the finals were over, I was happy to try to get back on my 10 PM – 6 AM sleep schedule.  While in theory it worked well, I felt like it wasn’t realistic to always have to sleep those same 8 hours.  Sometimes I need more sleep than just 8 hours.  Sometimes I’m out late and only get 6 hours of sleep.  I needed a way to nap productively.

So based on a recommendation from Lifehacker, I picked up Take a Nap! Change Your Life. By Dr. Sara Mednick, the leading nap researcher in the world.  I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to be more productive, whether you think you sleep good or not.  Napping tends to get a bad name and is associated with “lazy” people, but it’s really the opposite.  Among other things, here are the key things I learned from the book:

• Studies have shown that people are naturally biphasic sleepers, meaning that people prefer to sleep twice per 24 hour day.  In a laboratory setting, people tend to sleep 8 hours at night and then take a short nap during the afternoon.  This is consistent with siesta’s that were common in all cultures until about 100 years ago.
• The benefits from just a 20 minute nap are HUGE. Short naps give you a dose of Stage 2 sleep, which drastically improves alterness and motor skills, much more so than a cup of coffee does.
• Along those lines, all naps are beneficial, whether 5 minutes or 2 hours.  If you happen to wake up during Stage 3 or 4, you’re likely to feel a bit lethargic.  This doesn’t mean the sleep didn’t help.  A splash of water to the face or a small dose of caffeine should take care of it.
• Your body spends more time in different sleep stages depending on what time of day you nap, giving you different benefits.  (see Dr. Mednick’s nap wheel).
• Naps don’t hurt your night time sleep.  In fact, people who nap regularly have an easier time sleeping at night.

However, the most important thing that this book taught me was that it’s OK to nap.  And not only is it OK, it’s very beneficial for your health and productivity.  That got rid of the mental block I had that napping was somehow lazy or unproductive.  The book also gets into how to get rid of the “nap stigma” at work/school so you can work napping into your lifestyle (something rather easy for me).

Armed with this information, I’ve been able to tweak my sleep schedule so it works for me.   For the most part I’ve never been productive in mid-afternoon, so I’ve begun working a daily nap into my schedule between 2 PM and 5 PM, depending on how my schedule shakes up for the day.  If I got my 8 hours of sleep the night before, I take a 20 minute nap to refresh myself.  If I didn’t get enough sleep, I try to sleep a full sleep cycle (roughly an hour and a half).  It takes me about 10 minutes to fall asleep, so I factor that in when setting my alarm.

If you don’t have time to read the book, I definitely recommend watching Dr. Mednick’s presentation she gave to Google employees last year:

So, exactly one year later, I no longer feel like I’m going through life sleep deprived.  I feel like I’ve laid the groundwork for a lifetime of healthy sleep.  This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever accomplished, primarily because old bad habits are really really hard to break.  I’d imagine it’s much the same way that procrastinators have a hard time getting on top of their work, or that sedentary people have a hard time sticking to a new exercise routine.

It was a good lesson for me because things usually come pretty easy to me.  Sometimes things that come naturally to other people are hard for you.  That doesn’t mean you can’t make changes in your life that you want to make, provided you’re willing to put the work in, make a few sacrifices (like giving up going out on the weekends until 4 AM in my case) and don’t give up easily.

UPS comes every day around 11 AM.  FedEx delivers at 7:30 AM and picks up around 3 PM.  Freight companies generally come in the early afternoon.  On the rare occasion that a freight company is scheduled to come later, someone hangs around until the delivery arrives.  Overall, it works pretty well.  Of course, that’s working under the assumption that it isn’t Winter.

With the cold weather on the way there are two potential problems:  commuting and heat.  It’s hard to commute on a cold, snowy morning and get to work before 7:30…not to mention we’re located right next to a high school that starts school just after 7 (see picture).  Then there’s the cost of oil rising as much as 18% from last year, and it wasn’t exactly affordable last year.  Heating a warehouse isn’t cheap, and every hour we can avoid being there will save us some cash.

Oh, and working in a warehouse in the winter kind of sucks too.  Personally, I’d like to spend as little time there as possible during the cold weather.

About three weeks ago I posed the question:  if we could get FedEx to deliver later in the morning and pick up later in the afternoon, how much money could we save on gas?  What if we could push our schedule from 10 AM – 2 PM? We started a spreadsheet and tracked every delivery for a few weeks.  Every delivery – other than FedEx – came in the 9-3 window.

With our increase in volume, FedEx has assigned us a local rep and we actually have some pull now.  Greg was able to talk to a routing expert and negotiate our deliveries to be dropped off at the same time as pickup, which is now 2 PM.

So starting today we now officially work 9-3 on our warehouse days.  We’ll save ~2 hours/day on heating in the winter.  We’ve improved the warehouse so much since February (insulation, programmable thermostats, etc) that we don’t know exactly what a day of heating will cost us, but as soon as I have numbers I’ll let you know.  Consider this though:  2 hours per weekday will save us 200 hours of heating over the course of 20 weeks of winter from Nov – Mar (5 months * 4 weeks/month * 5 days/week * 2 hours/day).  That’s a lot of coin.

We’ve also adjusted our Monday’s so that 2 people can leave each week as soon as we have a meeting and pack orders, which usually is about noon.  Meaning each of us work Monday’s alternating between half and full days, and then two other days from 9 AM – 3 PM.  Not bad considering we still don’t have an employee and have to pack and ship all of our orders ourselves.  We’re becoming so damn efficient that we can double in size, and spend half the time, and get better results (shipping mistakes are down with a new packing check system we put in place).  I can’t wait until that day that we do have employees, but for now 15-18 hours a week in the warehouse aint too bad.

Oh, and I forgot the best part:  I can go back to going to the gym in the morning before work.  9 is perfect.  I can get up at 6, eat, check email, go to the gym, come home, shower, eat, and get to the warehouse right at 9.  I really enjoy working out first thing in the AM so this is a big “lifestyle” deal for me.  Since we went to the 7 AM schedule I haven’t really been able to find a workout schedule I like.  From a personal side of things, it was the thing I was most looking forward to being able to do once we had an employee.  Now I don’t even have to wait.  Good stuff

Right now it’s 8:30 AM.  I’ve already gone to they gym, eaten twice (before and after), showered, shaved my head (weekly Friday ritual), dressed, and landed on my couch in time to watch the USA Basketball game vs. Lithuania while answering my morning emails (31 – 15 after the first quarter, nice start).

The past two nights I stayed up until midnight, waking at 6 with a ton of energy, mixing in a 1.5 hr nap yesterday afternoon.  One of those nights I was out, the other I stayed up and worked on a project that I really want to get done.  Most nights I still go to bed around 10 PM, but at this point I’ve become so conditioned to getting up at 6 AM that I can basically stay out as late as I want a few nights a week and still wake up and make it through my day.  I generally make up for the sleep I miss by napping or going to bed a bit early the next day.

It took some conditioning, but at this point my sleep schedule is an immense productivity aid.  For the first 2-3 months I never deviated from my 10 PM – 6 AM schedule.  By that point I was so conditioned that I could implement a super practical version of the schedule like I outlined above, one that allows me to not sacrifice anything socially in the name of sleep.  All of the benefits of being an early riser that I listed off after 1 month are still very much true:  less stress, more productivity, less tired, better workouts, better eating habits, more free time, and overall happiness.  That’s one hell of a list just for waking up a few hours earlier.

However – the flip side of the issue is receiving shipments, which has been quite a pain since moving. Mail doesn’t get delivered to our industrial park, so for all USPS packages and mail we have to use a different address…our P.O. Box. FedEx, UPS, and other shipments arrive at all sorts of hours, as I suppose you’d expect.

We had generally all been going in from ~9 AM – ~4 PM. The gas savings from carpooling has been nice (although I am not really a carpooling fan in general, which is a whole other post), but it doesn’t provide for the best coverage, specifically in the early morning.

After missing two shipments Friday morning, George called me and we discussed the issue a bit. At first, I thought “let’s call all the shipping companies and tell them we don’t open until 9 AM”. Then I realized that it was unrealistic to expect FedEx, UPS, DHL and every other private shipping company to coordinate around our schedule. Shipments are going to come at all hours of the day, starting at 7 AM and ending at 5 or 6, whether we like it or not. FedEx in particular likes to come right around 8 AM I’ve noticed.

I thought about it some more, and since I am still in early riser mode, I offered to start going in at 7 AM. Instead of going to the gym at 6:30 and then being ready to go into work by 8:30, starting Monday I’m going to work from 7 AM – ~2 PM and then hit the gym mid-afternoon. After that I’ll probably grab some food and work for a few more hours before calling it a night.

While this isn’t really my ideal schedule, I’m curious to see how it works. I’ve always been a morning gym guy. I’m hoping it breaks up my day a little more and gives me a little more freedom because I won’t be doing much carpooling. 7-2 is also a nice little 7 hour shift, so even if that’s all the work I do for the day I’m still getting quite a bit done. Of course, it could go the other way and I could hate stopping work mid-day and have trouble waking up without my workout…we’ll see.

Did I have to adjust my schedule? Of course not. But I think that as a four-person company we’re best staggering our shifts a bit so that we have as much coverage as possible. Right now it might not be a big deal if we miss a shipment or two a week, but we’ve vastly expanded inventory and plan on continuing to do so. Missing a few a week could become a few a day in six months. I’d rather just nip the problem in the bud right now. A minor schedule adjustment for me now could save us a bunch of headaches over the next year or two.

So how has this past month been?  Amazing and life-changing are probably the two best adjectives to describe the feeling.  I have been:

• Going to bed by 10 PM most nights.  The latest I have fallen asleep is probably 10:45.  If a good sports game or show is on, I’ll record it to watch in the AM.
• Waking up every single day at 6 AM.  I use my iPod to wake me up, and I have a backup alarm set for 6:10 in case music doesn’t do the trick.  The latest I have risen from my bed has probably been 6:12 AM.
• I generally eat, check email, and watch Sports Center (or a recording of a game/show from the previous night) from 6-7, and then leave for the gym around 7.
• By 9 I am showered, dressed, have eaten my post-workout meal, and am back at work (having already cleared my inbox earlier in the morning).
• Stop working by 7 PM at the latest so I have a few hours to myself.  If I have dinner plans or other plans with friends, I can stop working at 4 PM and still have accomplished a ton.

Here have been the benefits:

• Far less stress.  Instead of waking up and thinking “crap, I need to get to the gym and rush my workout and get back and get to my emails” I’m now way ahead of the game.  Clearing my inbox from 6-7 lets me relax at the gym knowing I don’t have anything major waiting for me when I get back.  By 9 AM I’m at the point where I used to be at noon, and that is huge.
• Much higher productivity.  Obviously if I’m 3-4 hours ahead of my old daily pace I’m getting a lot more done.
• Less tired – I’m only really tired for the last 15 minutes before I fall asleep and the first 15 minutes when I wake up.  Never think about it otherwise, which is a huge change for me.
• Better workouts at the gym.  Now that I’m not rushed, I feel 100% satisfied with my efforts instead of the usual ‘I wish I could spend more time working out’.
• More consistent eating habits.  I have always been a wanna-be-nutritionist, but with a regular sleep schedule I’ve been able to really hone in and eat my 6 or 7 meals at the exact same times each day.  And by having more time, I can prepare what I really should eat instead of settling for faster-but-unhealthier alternatives.  Much like never feeling tired, I never really feel hungry except right before I am scheduled to eat.
• More time to hang out with friends.  I’ve seen my friends more in the last month than I did all last year…seriously.
• More time to play read, watch sports, and play video games.
• Just overall more happy and fulfilled.  I’ve always been a pretty happy guy, but if I could quantify my happiness increase it would be around a 25% increase…solely from waking up early!

Amazing as this has been, I probably couldn’t have done it even a year ago.  Your social situation dictates when you can and can’t sleep and wake up.  At 25, the whole “going out to the bar every night” thing has worn off and I don’t really have the desire to be out until 4 AM anymore.  When I do go out, I can stay out until 12 or 1 and still get a decent amount of sleep by 6.  And of course, I can always sleep in on a rare occasion.

The big question is:  can I stick to it and make it a true lifestyle change like I have with diet and exercise?  I vote yes.  Partially because I made it 30 days and I have no desire to ever sleep in again, and partially because it just fits perfectly in my entrepreneurial life.  Obviously I won’t know for a year or two if it sticks, but I’m going to be extra serious about sticking with it for the next few months and hopefully by mid-year it’s just automatic.  I’ll try to post updates every few months to force myself to stick to it or admit that I suck if I don’t.

Of course, this is the part where I become a hypocrite and go against everything I just said. Yesterday I saw a post on Lifehacker about the How to Wake Up Early site, which got me thinking about my sleep habits. Hard core blog readers will remember a time when I wrote a lot about my crappy sleeping habits (see Does it matter when I get my 8 hours of sleep, Making a bold move, Here we go again, and Sleep – my productivity killer). I stopped not because the problem was solved, but because I figured I’d piss people off if I made sleep the main topic of a young entrepreneur blog.

For my physical (and to some extent mental) health, there are three key components I’ve always focused on: eating healthy, working out, and getting plenty of sleep. The crazy thing is, I’ve got #1 and #2 down to the point where they are habits that I don’t need to worry about anymore. I’ve been lifting and working out continuously since high school, and for about the past five years I’ve eaten an extremely healthy and balanced diet. That stuff is easy for me. It’s probably not for some, but it is for me.

However, I can never get the sleep thing down. I don’t really have trouble sleeping, I just don’t have a set schedule so I tend to just do whatever I feel like whenever I want. Every time I get into a good groove for a week or two, I let it get out of hand and I convince myself I should just sleep when I’m tired and stop worrying about getting up early. However, a recurring theme in my head is always “I could be so much more efficient if I got on a better sleep schedule”. When your weekly number of hours of sleep looks something like 5-7-10-5-8-6-9 and you sleep and wake at all sorts of crazy hours it puts an added stress on you mentally and physically, and also impacts your diet and exercise.

I’ve come to the conclusion that on 95% of nights I’m not out past 10 PM, so I really don’t need to be up late. Thanks to digital cable, I can record any show or sporting event I’d normally watch and watch it the next morning. That was my largest hurdle. The next hurdle in my head was WHY? I’ve come to the conclusion that almost every successful person I know wakes up early. Don’t know why for sure, but I’m guessing because it’s a lot easier to waste time away at night than it is in the early morning.

Even more important, I feel like I’m starting my day in a productivity deficit and I’m always trying to catch up. I’d say I average waking up at 8 AM. Not bad…but after grabbing some food, going to the gym, eating again, and showering, I don’t get my start until around 10 or 10:30 on a lot of days. After sifting through emails, many days I look up and see lunch time without accomplishing any work. That stresses the shit out of me, and it’s time to change. I want to jump out ahead on my day and feel like I’m on top of things. By instituting a routine I’ll be healthier and I’ll worry less about sleep, which will make me happier and more efficient. All at the cost of….well, I suppose at the cost of my prior laziness and inability to commit.

So, starting this morning – armed with some good tips from the site – I got up at 6 (side note #2: did anyone else know you can use your iPod as an alarm? Me neither…what a great way to aid my new waking up process….). I’m going to try to stay on a ~10PM – 6AM schedule. I made a note to do a follow-up post on 2/1, although if this works I’m guessing I’ll comment on it more frequently because it’s kind of a big deal for me.