Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips and Personal Productivity Tools

How is the great, wake up early challenge going? If you asked me, I’d say ‘making progress’, but actually looking at the numbers is another story:

(The numbers on the graph are expressed as fractions of an hour, e.g. 5:30 is 5.5 — I only do this because numbers.app doesn’t want to graph time properly. If anyone knows a fix for this, I’d be grateful.)

My wake up times are wildly inconsistent. The difference between the earliest and latest time is six hours — almost a full working day. No wonder I’m so brain-dead in the morning. How to fix this situation and start consistently rising early? The main problem that I can identify is temptation.

The room where I work and sleep is the same. The desk where I will theoretically be busily at five in the morning is next to the warm bed that, at this ungodly hour, still contains a warm and sleepy wife. My inner reptilian brain doesn’t like leaving the warmth and often gets me back in bed before my mamalian brain realizes what’s happened.

To try and solve this, I’m separating my morning work area from the bedroom. Before going to sleep, I’ll move my laptop to the desk in the main room downstairs. This way, in order to get to work and do my twitter updates I need to go downstairs. Hopefully this will be far enough away from the temptation of a warm bed.

In this process, the twitter feed has been surprisingly useful. After my first post about getting up early, I was amazed that eight strangers immediately decided to follow my morning updates. I wasn’t really sure what to make of twitter, but it’s been a great help. Many mornings as I drifted back into unconsciousness, a part of my brain would yell, THE TWITTER FEED and I’d be able to get up. I’m sure without it, my median wake up time would be much higher. So a big ‘thank you’ to those who are following me. If you’d like to join them, I’m wellington_grey on twitter.

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Header photograph by ellie