My Plan to Become an Early Riser

Back in the ‘good ol’ days’ i.e. high school I was on the swim team and had to get up every morning at 5:00 a.m. to make it to practice on time. When the swim season was over I would still get up around 5:30 – 6 a.m. I remember it being a good time to prepare for the day. The house was quiet and it gave me time to think and plan.

Of late I have been waking up around 7:30 a.m. and been in a mad rush to prepare not only myself, but also my kids for the day. It feels like I jump out of bed straight into my office chair where I stare at the screen wondering what I’m going to do.

So it is now time to fix this problem and become an early riser again. One of my favorite blogs to read is called Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. I don’t subscribe to everything he writes but have found a number of really good information about organizing life. He wrote a couple of blog posts on waking up early back in 2007 that I believe will help in this endeavor. Taking points from these posts I plan to do the following and report on how it helps or how it has run me into the ground.

Out of the 9 items Zen Habits mentions I think the following will work well for me:

1. Go to bed earlier. Right now I function 100% by going to bed around 1 – 2 a.m. and get up at 7 – 7:30 a.m. My goal is to have at least 2 hours to myself in the morning which  will put me going to bed at midnight. This should be doable.
2. Don’t make drastic changes. I find this to be true with everything you do so I’ll try to adjust by 30 mins a week for a month.
3. Put your alarm clock far from your bed. Since my alarm is my iPhone I can set it to  not ask for snooze. Hopefully this will force me to deal with the infernal beeping in the morning.
4. Get out of the bedroom as soon as you shut off the alarm. This has to be done quickly to avoid the wrath of Kathryn
5. Allow yourself to sleep in once in awhile. This use to be impossible for me but as I said it has become a bad habit that I need to kick.
6. Enjoy the break of dawn. I love the break of dawn. Now that I’m getting my lawn in I hope to spend some personal time on the back patio with my iPad planning the day.

I’ll let you know how this goes.