Your Guide To Waking Up Early

Woke up early today and it was a great feeling to just jump out of bed without an alarm clock, especially on a Saturday.

But then I wasted the first hour being awake trying to figure out what to write about. Damn you stupid social media.

To not make it a total loss, one of the things I saved in my browser tabs this week was a guide to taking up early by Zdravko Cvijetic. It’s a great piece worth reading the whole thing, but here are the items that most resonated with me.

-Jerry Seinfeld’s technique for staying in a writing routine. This isn’t so much about waking up early as it is about writing, but it’s still good info on habit formation:

Famous comedian Jerry Seinfeld, said that he has a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page, and it’s on a prominent wall. And a red marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days, you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is not to break the chain. Don’t break the chain!” His net worth is an estimated 820 million dollars; that can tell you a lot.

-How you you keep in the habit of waking early all the time:

Note: you might experience energy drops in the first couple of weeks. But that’s normal until your body adjusts to the new schedule.

Pro tip: if you experience a sudden drop of energy, take a 20–30 minute nap during the day.

It will happen that sometimes you don’t wake up when you planned, and it usually happens that we are disappointed and it destroys the rest of the day.Don’t worry, be happy for the extra sleep and focus on the next important thing, tomorrow just improve.

How many times can I skip waking up early?:

When you are trying to develop this as a habit, be careful with how many times you skip, because if you go 2–3 days in a row, it will be difficult to go back to waking up early. But at the moment you go 30 days with consistent behavior, you will see the full benefits of it, and then even if you miss 2–3 days, it will be easy to go back, because you’ve gained the leverage over yourself and you know how important this is to you.

Ironically, I was also sucked into Zdravko’s tips on avoiding procrastination, so linking that below too. Thanks for the help this morning, Zdravko.
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Source:
–Your Guide To Waking Up Early

–7 Strategies to help eliminate procrastination