The 5AM Life Hack
What I learned.
I mentioned last time we talked that I was experimenting with a new life hack to see if I can squeeze some more juice out of my life.
Simply put, I decide to get up early every morning. I know many of you already do this. I do too, in a way, but I don’t do it consistently and I don’t have it as a habit. I know from experience that you can’t try too much at the same time so I simply decided to get up at 5AM every day and see what happens.
On a normal day I’m usually up Between 6:00 and 7:00. My routine is to get some oatmeal and coffee started then go take a shower and get dressed. When I’m cleaned up I sit down at my desk, eat my oatmeal, drink some coffee and check my email and other incoming electronic challenges. This usually lasts for an hour or so and then I’ll pack up and drive into my office.
Some days I’ll work from home – especially if I’ve got early calls. If I’ve stayed up late or had some crazy travel I’ll sleep in until 7:00 or even 8:00. Most days I really don’t need to be anywhere until 9:00. My schedule is not rigorously set or tied to an office. I’m basically available 24 X 7 by email or cell phone if there’s something that needs attention.
I have the additional challenge of work travel. This means I’m getting up at 4AM some days to make a flight and not getting into the airport some nights until after midnight. These abnormalities pretty much blow up any regular sleep schedule during the week.
I also have to deal with time zone changes and jet lag. I might be on the West Coast one day where my 5AM is really their 2AM. Or I might be in Europe where their 5AM is my midnight. It all gets very jumbled and I end up sleeping where and when I can. I do a lot of sleeping, or at least napping on planes. Sometimes I just go without sleep. I can usually manage on adrenaline for 2 or 4 days before I have to crash and catch up.
I felt like I wasn’t getting the most out of my day and I wasn’t getting things that were important to me done – like the self-development projects that I believe are necessary to lead a happy and fulfilling life. I decided to create a habit of getting up at 5AM every day and working on some personal and self development tasks. I wanted to create a consistent and predictable habit and see what it did to my life.
I’m only a couple weeks in but it has been a worthwhile learning exercise. What I found was that if I let myself ‘sleep in’ I spend the day reacting to things and never get any forward looking or strategically important projects done. These are the things that will get you ahead and will get you closer to your personal goals.
I also knew from previous experiments that I couldn’t just get up earlier and sleep less. It is pointless to stay up until midnight and then try to get up and be creative a 5 in the morning. Some people can do it; I have never been able to. I knew if I was going to consistently get out of bed, I’d have to get to bed consistently at a reasonable time in the evening.
This is where the 5AM habit becomes one of those keystone habits that we talked about. As soon as I committed to a 5AM rise and shine a bunch of other habits started to fall into place. I started planning, and wanting, to get into bed by 9:00. Is 8 hours the right number? I don’t know, but it seemed like a reasonable guess and a way to not give myself an excuse to sleep in during the ‘burn-in’ phase of the habit.
It turns out that the time after 9:00 PM was time that I usually just spent watching TV and eating, or drinking beer. It was a chunk of time that was too small for me to do anything useful with at the end of my day. I was tired and brain-dead so I defaulted to sitting on the couch. It was wasted time that I really don’t miss.
As a keystone habit change, look at what happened. Since I was no longer sitting on the couch and watching TV for a couple hours I also wasn’t eating a sandwich or drinking a beer. Instead I’d find myself close to 9:00 in the evening and just decide to read for awhile in bed before I fell asleep. That’s some significant trading of behaviors with just one habit change.
Tally it up: Getting up at 5AM causes, 1) bed earlier, 2) no boredom eating, 3) less useless TV, 4) no boredom beer and 20-30 minutes of value added reading. That’s pretty good, yeah? Keystone habit.
But I struggled. I had one night where I didn’t get back from traveling until after midnight. I had wanted to see if I could get up at 5AM anyhow – sort of test it out – but I didn’t. I slept past the alarm. Then when the weekend came I decided to not set the alarm and just wake up when my body decided to. The keystone habit kicked in again. Even though I didn’t have the alarm set I woke up early on the weekend anyhow because my system was in the habit of rising early.
In that way the first couple weeks were a minor success. On those mornings when I did get up I would write and create some wonderful and worthwhile content. It was very useful. I didn’t use the time for running or work outs because I already have that scheduled into my day.
Somewhere during this early phase I was browsing my Amazon emails looking for new kindle books and they offered up a book called “The Miracle Morning”.
I swear Amazon has implemented the mind reading algorithm. I had not written down anywhere what the habit hack was that I was working on, but nonetheless the great mind-reading app in the cloud put a book about getting up early in front of me. “The Miracle Morning, the not-so obvious secret to transform your life before 8:00AM” – by Hal Elrod and I think it was like $3 for the Kindle edition.
This worked out great because I already had a pilot program going that had brought many nuanced questions to the surface. This book had my informed consent going in.
Hal, who, by the way has agreed to come on the podcast, is a character. I read the book in one plane ride. In the book Hal puts forth a methodology he calls Savers – or Silence, Affirmation, Visualization, Exercise, Reading and Scribing. In his program you get up early and do all these things in sequence before you start your day. He has worksheets and examples you can download.
Hal has a couple cute tricks to keep you from climbing back into bed when the alarm goes off. The first is to make sure the alarm is across the room so you actually have to get out of bed. The second is to brush your teeth right away so you feel like you’re up. Another is to drink a big glass of water first thing so your body starts hydrating. But, being the professional habit-hackers that we are we recognizes these as triggers that drive a desired routine and create a new loop for us in the morning.
By far the most useful thing I learned from Hal’s book was to set your expectations correctly the night before. I’ll be setting my alarm clock and see that ‘5AM’ flashing and a silent groan and shudder will run through my body as I think ‘Oh God, 5AM…’ Instead, Hal says, you need to do a form of positive reinforcement, like an affirmation, systematically before you go to bed. You mentally reset to look forward to it and get excited about getting up and getting to those great things that you will get done in the morning.
Again, we recognize this as a habit hack. Trigger->routine-> habit. Hack it to make it work for you.
I’ve started to implement Hal’s methodology. I’m already reading and writing and working on personal development projects but he adds some things that I am trying. He outlines all this in a 30-day quick start guide.
The first thing in Hal’s methodology, Silence, is basically meditation. I don’t have much experience with this quieting of the mind but I have added it to my routine to see what happens. I have previously downloaded some guided meditation from Dianna Winston at UCLA and I’ve been trying to use a breathing focused one that’s about 5 minutes long. What truly amazes me is how fast these 5 minutes go by. Quieting your mind is like time travel.
The second thing is Affirmation. This can be as structured as having a stack of index cards that you read out loud with feeling every morning. It can also be a simple as remembering all the things that you are grateful for and lucky to have. What a great way to start your day.
The third thing is Visualization. This is simply looking at your day, your week, your job and visualizing how you want it to go. This is helpful for me if I have client engagements or other interactions where I want to preset my attitude and approach. It’s like a practice run for the things that you will confront during your day so you can get them right.
The third thing in Hal’s mnemonic is exercise. I think I’ve got that one covered but I’m throwing in 20 pushups and 20 crunches to get the blood moving.
The next point is Reading. He specifically means inspirational or self improvement reading. I do this already but have tweaked my routine to take notes and create a short post form the pages I turn in the morning.
Finally he finishes with Scribing which is writing. I’m already doing this as well but, would like to get more focused on some projects.
After this he leaves blank space for other personal improvement activities you might want to squeeze in at the end of your SAVERS.
This seems like a lot of stuff and what I’ve found is that you can rebalance the mix of time you spend on each to match you daily needs.
I know what you’re thinking. “There’s no way I can squeeze all of that into a morning no matter how early I get up!” It goes faster than you think. One day this week I did all of this in addition to my morning ablutions, my email, my breakfast, letting the dog in and out a couple times, packing for a trip, packing for the gym, making a lunch and cleaning the dishes in the sink. When I looked up it was only 7:30.
I think this one’s a keeper! I like getting stuff done.