I Woke Up at 5 a.m. for a Week to See if It Would Change My Life
By: Joseph Mavericks
Tags: Self Improvement, Work, Self, Morning Routines, Productivity

Learnings

My friend and I called on Saturday for a debriefing. We both loved the experiment. After our call, I came up with a list of all the learnings we had talked about.

The power of accountability is huge

When you have to report to someone about your progress, about following through on what you said, your commitment will increase in most cases.

The American Society of Training and Development did a study on accountability. They found out that being accountable to someone bumped up your likeliness to succeed to 65%. If you hold a specific accountability appointment with someone, your chances jump all the way up to 95%. That’s huge.

For me, the power of accountability really showed on Tuesday morning. When my alarm went off, I was going to stay in bed, to sleep an extra hour or two. But then, I thought of this picture of my watch I had to send to my friend, within the next 10 minutes. I didn’t want to let him down, and I didn’t want to disappoint myself by losing the challenge only two days in. So I got up, took a picture, and went on with my day.

A routine is primordial

“To go on with the day” can be a pretty vague notion at 5 a.m. That’s why a clear routine and agenda are necessary in the early hours. Without a clear plan of what to do, there’s literally no use in waking up early.

I remember over a year ago when I started waking up early to work on my blog. I would literally wake up at 6 a.m., have breakfast, sit at my desk, and stare at my computer screen without knowing what to do. I didn’t have a plan.

I already explained my routine earlier on. The idea is to find what works for you, and to be as precise as possible. My routine is somewhat split in 30-minute intervals. If you need 10-minutes intervals to be able to keep the momentum, then do that. Just know that if you don’t have a reason to wake up this early, you’ll go back to bed, or you won’t even get out of it.

The time you gain is insane

I was honestly shocked by how much time I had. I would stretch, go for a walk, work for almost two hours, and then I would start making breakfast, thinking to myself “I need to hurry, I’m going to be late for work.” Then I would check the time: 7:30 a.m. I still had over an hour before having to leave the house.

I was surprised by this gain of time because I didn’t think one hour was going to make that much of a difference. But it did.

There are two reasons for that:

From 5:00 to 8:30 a.m., that’s three and a half hours that I fully own. This time is mine. I can fit a lot more things in that timeframe than I can when I wake up around 6:15. Because of the accountability I had with my friend, there was no lingering in bed. For the past month, I’ve been gradually staying in bed a little longer. My alarm goes off at 6 but I’ll actually get out of bed around 6:15, 6:20. Then I will stretch and take a while to get ready, have breakfast… by the time I get to work, it’s actually 6:45–7 a.m.. So in reality, I only have one hour to work. With this challenge, I had to get out of bed at 5 sharp to have time to get dressed and send a picture to my friend before 5:10 a.m. Needless to say, pictures in bed were not allowed.

If you do everything in the morning, what do you do at night?

Gaining time is awesome. But I did notice that my afternoons were a lot less productive than they had been before. Before the challenge, I would work on my blog in the morning, go to the office, and then clock in another 1-2 hours on my blog once I was back home. This week, it was a lot harder to work after being back from the office.

Again, two reasons for that:

My energy died down very fast in the afternoon, from 3 to 4. When you have less energy, it becomes harder to get things done. I had already done so much in the morning, I actually didn’t have much less to do at the end of the day. The rest was for the day after. All of my most important tasks were done.

I ended up being in this weird zone where I was too tired to keep working, but I also didn’t want to watch Youtube from 6 p.m. until bedtime. I still had two of my main hobbies: reading and playing chess online. I tried to work a little under an hour. But a lot of that time was spent relaxing.

It’s interesting to note that even though I now had a lot more time, the total amount I spent working was around the same as before. That being said, the quality of the work done in the morning was much higher than my daily average performance outside of the challenge.

So what do you do when you’ve done all your work by 5 p.m.? You relax, work just a bit more, and exercise.

On morning exercise

I only ran one time in the morning, on Monday when I felt psyched about the first day of the experiment. I ran one mile in ten minutes. Because I was exhausted at the end of my days, I didn’t actively exercise for the rest of the week. I went for walks, but nor for runs.

I’m always tired when I get back from work anyway, but I usually find the motivation to do some sort of exercise. This time, it was different. I was drained. I was thinking to myself: “If had I exercised in the morning, I wouldn’t have to worry about it now that I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

That’s also a big part of the reason people wake up insanely early. To work out. The best time of the day to work out is the time where you feel your best, you’re the most likely to be consistent and compliant. If I wake up early, then mornings are also the best time for me to exercise.