I don’t do much in the way of ‘life advice’, but here’s one: get up early!
As in, 05:00 early.
Now, if you’d told 27-year-old Johnny to get up at 05:00 he’d have kicked you in the shins. And rightly so! But now he’s 47 and a grown-up adult with a bunch of stuff to do.
Getting up early is transformative. Lucy got me in to it — it’s been a life-hack of hers for years. Because the thing is, by 09:00, you’ve got most of it done. And the rest of the world is just getting started and you’re feeling really good about yourself.
Then by 12:00 you’ve got all of it and more done, and you’ve still got a whole day ahead of you.
How to do it
It starts the night before.
I was a nightowl for many years and I always wondered how people could get up early. Turns out the trick is simple: you go to bed at 20:00. Consistently. You need to adjust your body clock.
Then, in the morning, take it easy. It’s really early, remember?
Brew a pot of tea and just read your stories for a good half an hour. Or put that tea in a Yeti mug and go for a walk round the block. Morning walks are amazing.
Don’t try to start work at 05:00. Don’t do yoga. Nobody’s watching.
That’s it. Aim to start work around 06:00.[1] And these morning hours are precious: don’t waste them. If you can knock out 3 hours of quality work before most other people have started, you are going to win.
Just don’t try to get your kids to do it. Let them sleep.
This assumes you’re working from home. At my last job the office opened at
07:00and I was often the first in, waving my arms around to turn the lights on. When everyone else strolls in two hours later it’s quite surreal. ↩︎
so when I woke up at 2:30 this morning with a thousand things racing through my head it wasn’t really a bad thing then?