I am happy to say that after a day of designing, tweaking, and BBQing sausages, this blog no longer uses the default WordPress installation theme. This means that my Say No to Website Templates article is sadly no longer so ironic. Feel free to comment about what you like/dislike and of course any bugs that may have creeped in!

Thanks to a crazy influx of visitors from several social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, traffic has surged this month. This is nice because it means that readers are finding the material useful, and it shows strong potential for this blog to be sustainable in the long-run (defined as directly and indirectly generating sufficient income to offset the opportunity cost of the 14 hours a week it takes to upkeep).

I’ve decided that this will be the last update for some time on this morning experiment. As described below, the experiment has succeed greatly so far and I will continue with the early rise routine. I am on day five now, getting a lot done, and feeling great.

The biggest challenge right now is simply sticking to waking up at 5am every day. On Sunday I faltered and woke up at 6 instead of 5 despite two alarms insisting I need to be up. The consequences of this were immediately clear. I was disappointed that I had overslept and felt hurried the entire morning. After my usual morning routine and breakfast it was already 7:30 and this felt very late to begin work. I felt less motivated to get things done, lacking that “super productivity” high that I had been getting from waking up early. Oddly enough my mood wasn’t sour. In fact my partner in crime for this experiment commented on how amazingly cheerful I was, and how my great mood helped her wake up and get into the day (she has been having less success with being excited about waking up early).

On a familiar note to 7:30 feeling late to begin work, I woke up in bed on my own this morning wondering if I had maybe overslept the alarms I had set. I was in that “feeling rested but wanting to sleep more mood”, the kind that I get when I oversleep. I got up to check the time and found out that it was only 4! These events show that my body is rapidly adjusting to the timeshift I have imposed on it, making me feel confident that I can continue waking up this early.

It’s all in the Attitude

Over the past four days I’ve noticed a very strong link between my mood, mindset, and productivity. I had succeeded at waking up at 3 in the morning the first night due to a very strong desire to do so. Contrast this with the typical “I hate mornings” attitude where the desire is to keep sleeping as long as possible. I’ve had varying degrees of success and attitude in waking up the past four days, but simply wanting to wake up earlier has allowed me to have a great morning just as soon as the sleep wore off.

Similarly my housemate and I have both noticed that there is a real way to affect how you’ll wake up in the morning by your attitude and intentions the night before. The 3am wake-up is the most obvious example, but this has also applied to the results achieved on other days. From now on I’ll be sure to spend a few minutes before bed imagining how good it will feel to get up and start the day early.

Next Steps

My goal is to fully adapt to the 5am routine and then experiment with tweaking it. I want to find the optimal waking time for myself, and the optimal hours of sleep. I am also interested to see how this routine will ultimately affect weekends and exam studying. I will address the results of these tweaks in my 30 day update.

So You Want to Wake up Early

Waking up this early has been a very positive experience and I can’t wait to see how much better I function in the long run with this routine. If you want to try something similar, my experiences show the following may help:

• Start now, not tomorrow. As with anything from taking up a new hobby to quitting smoking, the universally effective technique is to not put it off. Set your alarm for 5 in the morning right now. You’re off to a great start!
• Make sure you have something to do in the morning. Getting up in the morning feels great and makes it possible to accomplish what you want before everyday life bogs you down. Your best energy should be funneled into your most rewarding and creative tasks, not into going grocery shopping, sitting in a lecture, or getting the kids ready for school.
• Enter the experiment with the most positive attitude and your results will match. Self full-filling prophecies are powerful stuff, so put them to positive use.

Steve Pavlina has some more ideas on rising early in his How to Become an Early Riser article. In particular he addresses that the appropriate time to go to bed is when your body is tired and quotes his own times to be typically 10-11pm for a 5am waking. This is one thing I really wish to try and may be a solution for not allowing a later night to ruin the sleep schedule and energy of the subsequent day.

Note: Steve is now a polyphasic sleeper, but I don’t see myself going that far anytime soon!

I wrote most of this post yesterday (March 18), but didn’t have a chance to complete/submit it until today. Here lie the results for day 2. Be sure to read The Extreme Morning Experiment Part 1 for the details on what the heck is going on here.

Day 2 Results

I had trouble going to bed and falling asleep early on the first night despite having been up since 3 in the morning and having worked a very full day. Not wanting to make myself less productive with a lack of sleep I set the alarm for 4am and went to bed around 9pm (actually falling asleep past 10).

4:00am - Waking up

I woke up to the most hellishly annoying ringtone I ever heard, and promptly vowed to never use that one again. I experienced a very heavy tiredness and didn’t feel that I could succeed at staying awake. In a turning point in this experiment I set the alarm for 5am and went back to bed.

5:00am - Waking up again

I woke up again feeling very tired still, but determined to wake up properly this time. The first night had been easy with me actually leaping out of bed to wake up at 3am. This time waking up could only be described as miserable. A shower helped ease things somewhat and I was able to work myself into consciousness.

A housemate agreed to try this experiment with me after the first day’s results, on the condition that she doesn’t have to wake up before 5 in the morning. With my late wake-up and her waking up when she was supposed to we were able to have breakfast at the same time. This definitely helped the morning mood as neither of us felt too well.

6:30am - Work begins

I began working on Tilted Pixel items and after the first hour I was able to again fully lose myself in my work. The grogginess of the morning faded and I was feeling really great as I worked on web development. I attribute the problem of actually waking up today to a rebound effect from the first night. I had been running full speed on very limited sleep and my body was now attempting to catch up on it the second night. When I forced myself to wake up early again the results were of course unpleasant.

1:30pm - Jogging

I went jogging with a joggy buddy at this point as a break from work. Jogging is something I do semi-regularly lately due to the cold weather and “slipping” from my routine. It’s one of the areas I’ll definitely be working to ramp back up.

My performance today was very strange. We went for a “run around the block”, a route that typically takes about 15 minutes to get through. Theoritically it shouldn’t have been a challenge but today it was difficult nearing the end. I found myself not so much physically exhausted as having trouble continuing to tell my body to move… almost a boredom effect. It’s difficult to draw much conclusions from a single run, especially since I have been neglecting jogging lately and the fierce cold wind made it hard to breathe. It’s something I’ll keep a pulse on though.

2:00pm - Back to work

Worked a couple hours more. I had a consistently high level of energy up until around 4pm. At this point I threw in the towel on “real work” for the day and decided that’s it until evening when I would do the tasks that involved low mental work such as answering e-mail, cleaning-up, image touch-ups, and so on. I’m surprised and pleased that I was able to pull off a productive 10 hour work day, with only about two hours lost to lunch, jogging, and coffee making. This kind of rest:work ratio is probably above-par for many offices, and combined with a 10 hour work day I’m pretty happy.

As a side note: this brings to the surface the issue of working from home and how much time to devote to work, something that I intend to tackle in a future article.

9:00pm - Bedtime

Hit the sack and fell asleep much more quickly than last night.

Modifying the Parameters - 5am Wake-up 

For the moment I’ve decided that the Extreme Morning concept needs to be toned down, so I set my alarm for 5am and intend to keep it that way for the rest of the week. There’s definitely some advantage to waking up at 3am to get real work done when the university day starts early, but it is also tough to fall asleep at the 7 or 8pm required for being well-rested. Once the 5am routine is established I will have the freedom to tune my schedule and see how much flexibility I can obtain.

This is a little less glorious than waking up at 3am, but ultimately the purpose of the experiment is to find a way to increase productivity and improve my overall lifestyle.