leftovers – the 2018 april newsletter (productivity and wakeup time)

Hi all,

Longtime readers may recall that back in the April newsletter I threatened promised to come back again and write at length about a few of the items. Well, I guess it’s finally happening, as over the next few days I’ll post some short expansions on my ideas from last April. Where appropriate, I’ll also note any recent updates.

Enjoy…

Reader, remember when I realized I was more productive on the days I woke up early? I really tried to strangle the golden goose lean on the lesson by waking up early in the morning to write. In the weeks leading up to the start date for my new job, I managed to roll my sleeping schedule forward in order to wake up around 6:00 AM on February 19. From there, I tried waking up fifteen minutes earlier each week.

The gradual shift seemed to work very well for me – I’ve always felt that the ‘rip the band-aid off’ approach didn't concern itself enough with the patient. The following progression illustrates how I was locked into a 5:00 AM wakeup by the time the May newsletter rolled around:

Week of 2/19: 6:00 AM wake up
Week of 2/26: 5:45 AM wake up
Week of 3/05: 5:30 AM wake up
Week of 3/12: 6:15 AM wake up*
Week of 3/19: 6:00 AM wake up
Week of 3/26: 5:45 AM wake up
Week of 4/02: 5:30 AM wake up
Week of 4/09: 5:15 AM wake up
Week of 4/16: 5:00 AM wake up

* - daylight savings time (1)

This pattern more or less held up for a month. However, I realized around mid-May that I was tired all the time. In response, I loosened up the schedule a little bit and experimented with setting the alarm for later in the morning to see when I would wake up naturally. I was pleased with the result – despite setting the alarm as late as seven AM on some mornings I usually managed to get up sometime before six AM. I figured that would work in the interim until my sleep cycle fully adjusted to these early wakeups.

Again, though, I started noticing a week or two later that I was getting fatigued. The same pattern I described in the prior paragraph repeated itself but this time with slightly later times – I’d set the alarm for seven-thirty or eight and find myself awake by seven. This was fine (since I felt better during the day) but it wasn’t ideal (since I was no longer writing as much as I’d wanted). I scrapped the idea of waking up at any set time and I resolved to figure out a better rhythm the next time I tried to squeeze more writing time out of the morning.

The approach I came up with around the start (or end?) of daylight savings time in November took a different angle to wakeup time than the plan I described in April. The new plan focused more on the process rather than trying to manipulate the outcome. To govern the process, I reviewed everything I knew about sleep to come up with these basic principles that I felt applied most to me:

i. I need more sleep than I acknowledged last time – up to seven and a half hours
ii. I sleep in cycles of roughly ninety minutes
iii. I tend to read for up to half an hour in bed before I start dozing off
iv. I have a hard time waking up after less than six hours of sleep

I then thought about my goals for waking up and the reality of what I do in the morning to come up with these additional principles:

v. Writing for about ninety minutes a day is the minimum for a good session
vi. I need around thirty minutes in the morning to get ready for the day

After I had all of this figured out, I just needed to identify the main operating constraint and subordinate everything else against it. For the most part, I needed to start my day at around 8 AM, so taking into account (v) and (vi) meant I would be up at 6:00 AM. The combination of (ii) and (iv) meant I had to be in bed no later than midnight and (i) suggested 10:30 PM was ideal. Bringing (iii) into the equation suggested that 10:00 PM was the ideal time to have everything wrapped up.

The most interesting part of having the process in place was how I started thinking about other factors with more clarity. These thought experiments led to changes in my lifestyle that I had not considered when I had just written out an arbitrary list of ever-earlier wakeup times. For example, if I targeted 10:00 PM as a bedtime, when would I need to start eating dinner? I realized after factoring in the time it took to prepare the food, cook the meal, and wash the dishes, I would need to start sometime before 9:00 PM. I’m not reliably home by then on most nights, so I replaced dinner with a cup of yogurt and started eating bigger lunches instead. It’s also factoring into sleep hygiene decisions like how I use my radiator – I need the temperature to drop in order to fall asleep so that means I can’t leave the heat on during the day unless I know I'll be home by 8:00 PM or so that night.

The other big change resulting from this process driven approach is how I’m keeping an eye on (iv), the note above about needing at least six hours of sleep. I can run just fine on six hours of sleep, once, but two days in a row is pushing it and three days is a borderline train wreck (2). The biggest problem is never the next day – it’s that when the weekend rolls around I end up sleeping in until mid-morning and thus forfeit my most valuable writing time. If I’m worried about having back-to-back six-hour nights, I’ve gone to the extent of taking an extra hour or two off of work the next morning to make sure I can get a full night of sleep on one of those two days.

Of course, reader, you may be wondering at this point – why all this explanation just to say I go to bed around ten-thirty and wake up around six? How unusual is that? I agree to an extent that I’ve wasted some time here - but oh, you should have seen the first draft!!! Anyway, the main point is that it really is different when you approach these questions with a process-driven approach than it is when you just look at the alarm clock and resolve to ‘just do it’ when the bell goes off. I think it’s important to think really deeply about these things (especially because the trend of life is for the early hours to become increasingly more important than late night hours) and being fully in charge of the first thing you do every morning – waking up – is going to pay off every single day for the rest of your life.

Footnotes / footboards? / bored?

1. Because daylight savings…

I slid ‘backward’ on March 12 because of daylight savings time. This created some confusion for certain people who thought I should wake up at 5:15 AM regardless of the clocks changing. It was never a question for me because the plan was for me to wake up fifteen minutes earlier each week, not for me to adhere to some arbitrary standard of the outside world.

2. Or maybe I just don’t handle six beers very well anymore…

They used to tell us in school that losing a couple hours of sleep was the neurological equivalent of having drank six beers. I never believed it.

These days, let's just say all my little stumbles and mumbles whenever I’m running on fumes has me in a different frame of mind.