Morning person

This is an interesting article.

It basically details the thoughts of someone who experimented for a month by waking up at 5:00am. Even though he went to bed early as well, he found that he was able to accomplish a lot more by having more time in the mornings. He offers several reasons why this is the case (such as less interruptions) but one thing really stood out for me.

He mentions that he rarely gets stuff done in the evenings because he is tired from working during the day. Thinking back to my own lifestyle, this is absolutely true for me as well. Regardless of what time I leave the office or how busy I actually was, there is a psychological element in my brain which makes me just want to vegetate after leaving the office. Ultimately, this makes it hard to focus and motivate myself to do productive stuff (like going to the gym or upskilling myself).

Of course, the real question is whether I can do the same and move to an early wake up time as well. Unfortunately, the answer in my case is no (but possibly not for the reasons you expect).

The biggest issue with "early to bed, early to rise" for me isn't the kids, or the missus or my social life or anything like that. All of that stuff can be controlled to an extent. The problem is that it will kill my X360 time.

At the moment, my X360 time starts after 10pm which is when Gordon generally goes to sleep in the evenings. At this point, I finally get the living room and can turn on the TV and X360 and get some gaming time in before going to bed. If I goto bed at 10pm, then I would obviously lose this time. So why not play in the mornings instead?

The issue is that Gordon tends to wake up around 5:00 or 6:00am (time seems to vary a bit). What this means is that even if I go to bed at 10pm and wake up at 5am, I'm not going to get any time on the X360 as Gordon will also be up and about. Currently, I just don't see any way around this as giving up my X360 time completely or relegating it to one evening a week is not an option.

Still, its an interesting idea and judging from the comments in the above blog post, it looks like a lot of other people have also tried, and had success, with this approach.