Lifestumbler

Dump Little Man has a thought-provoking guest post by Ali Hale from The Office Diet Blog. We all have to make a lot of decisions every single day, and it’s not always obvious which way to go. If you look around everybody seems to have some good advice about things you should do, and things you better don’t. To make things worse, everybody has a different view of the world. In the end, you have to decide for yourself.

No matter which way you go, there will be some people who agree with you and there will probably be some people who think you’re absolutely crazy. All that matters, is that you know you have made the right choice and Ali Hale suggests an excellent way to decide which way to go. Just ask yourself: “Will it matter in five years?“. That’s a brilliant way of putting things in perspective.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to become an early riser:

• Find a good reason to get out of bed early.
• Find the right time to get out of bed.
• Get out of bed.
• Get into bed.
• Make rising early a regular habit.

If you want to make more of your day, you should give this a try…

Getting out of bed on time for a couple of days isn’t that hard. The challenge is to make this a regular habit for the rest of your life, not just for a week or two. So how can you achieve this?

The answer to this is simple: Just do it. Every single day. Even on weekends.

Even on weekends? Isn’t it hard enough to get out of bed during the week? I need some days where I can sleep in! Wrong. The whole point of becoming an early riser is to change your sleeping patterns to match your needs. Your body doesn’t care whether it’s sunday or monday. If you get out of bed at the same time every day, you have a pattern your body gets used to. Your body knows you’ll get up at 05:00 am, so it will make you feel tired early enough to get you enough sleep. If you have a different time to get up every day your body has no chance to know how much time it will get to rest tonight. You might feel awake until midnight, but suddenly the alarm goes off at 05:00 am. You might get out of bed, but you’ll feel tired the whole day long.

Of course you can have exceptions to this rule. If you went to a party and came home very late, there’s no use in getting up at five in the morning. You need to sleep in after a long night. But if you went to bed early, there’s no need to do so. To get yourself used to waking up early on weekends, it would be a good thing if you have some weeks in a row without a party. Once you got used to it, you shouldn’t have a problem with breaking your sleeping pattern every now and then.

As a bonus, you’ll get more free time for yourself. Weekends are to precious for sleep anyways!

lifehack.org has a great article  about 10 ways to find time to follow your dreams. I especially like the third one:

3. Wake up earlier.

Getting up at 6 instead of 6:30 (or whenever) can give you a good half-hour of quiet time before your day gets going – perfect for writing or working on other personal projects. The idea here is not to sleep less, though – you’ll pay a cost in lost productivity as your lost sleep adds up, and be back where you started. Instead, cut the last half-hour of TV or whatever else you do at night and shift that time to the morning, when everyone’s still asleep, there’s nothing tempting on TV, and you can start the day with a half-hour well-spent behind you.

That’s exactly the reason why I started to rise early and started to write about how to become an early riser. Have a look at the lifehack.org article, there’s some really good advice in there…

Getting out of bed is without a doubt the most important step to become an early riser. But that’s just one half of the equation. Your body needs some time to rest, and so it’s equally important to get into bed.

Most people think that the key to waking up early is to go to sleep early. In fact, it’s even easier than that: Go to bed when you get tired. Don’t go to bed just because the movie on the television just ended. Don’t go to bed just because it’s 11:30. If you know it will take longer than 5 minutes until you fall asleep if you went to bed now, you shouldn’t go to bed. Instead, find some light activities you can do until you get tired enough. Watching a horror movie is no light activity, choose something which calms you down. If you don’t know what to do, try one of the following suggestions:

• Read a book. Even if it’s just a few pages every day, if you make this a regular habit, you’ll get through a couple of extra books per year. Not only will you have a better sleep, you’ll even learn something new.
• Cleanup your home. This is not the time to start your vacuum cleaner, but you can do little things like clearing all flat surfaces or disposing old magazines.
• Read your favorite blogs.
• Listen to your favorite podcasts.
• Water your plants.
• Plan the next day.

Go to bed when you are really tired and you’ll sleep right away. This raises the quality of your sleep, and this will help you the next morning. Remember: You’ll have to get out of bed at your time again…

You already know why you want to get up early and at what time. Now it’s time to get to the interesting part: How to actually get out of your bed.

Chances are, you have at least one good friend in your bedroom. A friend you can rely on. A friend who gives you instant satisfaction: The Snooze button on your alarm clock. Now this may sound obvious, but I have to tell you anyway: Dont use the snooze button. Never. What’s the use of it anyway? You set your alarm way too soon just that you can get those extra minutes of sleep? Don’t you think that’s kind of stupid?

Getting out of bed when the alarm goes off instead of pushing the snooze button will be hard. After years of extending your sleep for a couple of minutes, it has become a habit that’s hard to get rid off. You don’t hit it because you need that extra minutes of sleep. You are hitting the snooze button because you’ve become used to it. It has become part of your morning routine. And the good news is: You can change your routine, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do so…

• Place the alarm on the other side of the room. This way, you have to get up to hit the snooze button. Getting out of bed is the hardest task in the morning, and you don’t want to repeat it over and over again. You won’t hit the snooze button to go through the same hassle again 10 minutes later.
• If this doesn’t work, get an alarm clock without a snooze button. But don’t turn it off completely before you are out of bed!
• If you got rid of the snooze button and the alarm goes on for minutes because you don’t show any reaction, it’s time to change your alarm to something more annoying. If you don’t wake up to the sound of your favorite radion station playing quietly in the background, it’s time to crank up the volume. If this doesn’t work, you could try to change to something you can’t stand. Remember: Listening to the alarm isn’t something to enjoy, it’s supposed to get you out of bed.

After a week, you should be able to place your alarm within reach again and manage to overcome the temptation to hit the snooze button. You might need a minute or two to actually get up, and that’s okay. The problem are those 10 minutes that become 20 which become 30,…

Having a consistent wakeup time is a crucial factor of becoming an early riser. That’s why you need to stop hitting the snooze button. Now.

Now that you have found a good reason to get out of bed earlier, it’s time to think about when you want to start your day. You don’t want to wake up early just to have more time to kill before you can head to the office. You want to enjoy this time.

Look at the list of things you want to do in the morning, and estimate the time you will need to do them. Then add some extra time so you don’t need to hurry in the morning but have a relaxed start for your day.

Now that you know how much time you need, you can set a time when you need to get up to get everything done before you have to go to work. That’s the time you’ll get out of bed from now on. There is no need to wake up a little earlier every day to get accustomed to your new schedule. This is just a way to confuse your body. It’s better to jump into the cold water and start to get out of bed at your time right away. This will be hard for the first couple of days, but the benefits you get are worth the effort. Besides, it will get easier every single day.

The next step will be the hardest one: Actually getting out of bed…

Getting out of bed in time is one of the things most of us try, but it is also probably one of the things most of us fail to do without problems. I’ve already written about why I think it’s a good thing to become an early riser. Today, I want to talk about the first step to become one.

The most important thing to make your quest to become an early riser a success is to have a good reason. Getting out of your cosy bed is hard, so you need to find some motivation. It’s important that your reasons for getting out of bed so early are good reasons for you. You don’t want to get out of bed to please other people. You want to stay in bed for just a few minutes longer. Or an hour.

This might sound harsh, but we don’t like to do things for other people. For everything we do, there needs to be some benefit for us. I guess that’s true for all situations. Even if you’re donating something, you might just do this because you want the world to become a better place. Remember when your mom told you to make your bed? You did it because you had to, but your mom had to tell you again and again. You didn’t like it. As you grew older, you might have discovered that it’s nice to find your bed in a nice condition after a long and hard day. You don’t like to make your bed, but the prospect of the good feelings you’ll have in the evening give you motivation to do it anyway. You’ve found the benefit you get out of it.

The same applies to your sleeping schedule. If you try to rise early because you want to for a very good reason, you will succeed. So before buying a louder alarm clock, you need to think about why you should get out of bed in the first place. Here are some ideas:

• Have time for breakfast. A good and relaxed breakfast is the best start for a day.
• Have time to do your most important tasks before you get to work.
• Have time for some workout in the morning.
• Have time to plan your day. Instead of doing whatever comes up, make a list of things you really want to do.
• Be the first one in the office and use the quiet time before the others arrive to get things done. You’ll have your work completed faster - and get home sooner.
• …

What are your reasons for getting out of bed earlier?

Many people end most of their days with the feeling that they haven’t achieved all too much today. No matter how hard they try, they always seem to miss their goals. Life is full of surprises, and their plan for the day is nothing more than that - a plan. They had an idea about the things to do when they come home. But suddenly their boss shows up and asks for some extra work to do and their time and energy for their tasks slowly melts away.

I was one of them. I used to sleep as long as possible so that I just didn’t miss the last bus which took me to the office just in time. Everybody else was already there and I was confronted with a lot of questions and new tasks from the first minute on, even though I hadn’t finished yesterday’s work yet. I struggled the whole day to catch up with my tasks. At the end of the day I was exhausted and when I came home, I turned on the TV and didn’t even have enough energy left to read today’s newspaper. Needless to say I didn’t have the time to read it in the morning.

As the list of things I wanted to do and even the list of things I should have done got longer every single day, I decided that I had to change something. I read a lot of blogs in the hope to find a solution for my problem. In the end, I found that the only solution is one I initially dismissed, because it seemed like complete nonsense to me: Become an early riser.

I have to admit that I struggled with this for a long time. Leaving my cosy bed much too soon wasn’t easy. But now that I’ve become used to it, I can only recommend it. I have enough time to read the newspaper while having a great breakfast. I also find the time to do some cleanup, so that I don’t have to do it when I come home. Everything that absolutely needs to be done, gets done in the morning. When I have a hard day at the office I can look forward to coming home. In the old days I only thought of all the work I need to do when I get there. If I need to work longer, I can stay relaxed because I know that I’ve already taken care of all the important things.

But the best part is: Although I’m getting so much done in the morning, I still manage to be the first around the office. It’s quiet when nobody else is there, and the first hour of my workday has become the most productive one. Nowadays I’m the one asking the questions when my colleagues arrive..

If this problems sounds familiar to you, I suggest you give this idea a try. I’d be interested to hear your story…