No Time For Something Important? Try Waking Up Earlier.

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. No time for something important to you? Try getting up earlier by Gretchen Rubin.

Of all the changes in my daily routine wrought by my happiness project, one of the most fundamental is that I get up at 6 AM every day. And I get up at 6 AM every day even on weekends and vacation because I love it. I get an hour to myself at my computer before my family wakes up for the day. It's quiet, the light is dim, and the world feels very serene. I love this time so much that I would get up at 4:30 or 5 AM, but that would mean I'd have to go to bed at 8 PM, and I just can't live that way.

I'm funny daddy enough as it is. From what I hear, one of the most common happiness challenges is lack of time for something important. People want to exercise or work on a novel or meditate or read for pleasure, and they just can't fit it into their day. I absolutely know the feeling. But here's what I've noticed.

For many people, the end of the day is a pleasant interlude of free time. When work is done, the office isn't emailing, the kids are in bed, and the TV or the Internet is at hand. It's pleasant, so it's easy to stay up late to watch one more episode of The Wire or to read the most recent article about Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson's breakup or to do back to school shopping or to research the works of JM Barrie, And then it's hard to get out of bed in the morning. This end of day time is pleasant, but it doesn't give much happiness bang for the buck. It's filled with a fairly low value kind of activity.

With that same hour or 2, you could be exercising, writing a novel, keeping a journal, woodworking, etcetera. But by that time, I'm too tired, you think. And you are too tired. So here's a possible strategy. Go to bed earlier and wake up earlier and use that reclaimed morning time for the activity you wish you could add to your day.

Or if you wish you had more time to do things with other people, you could do tasks during the morning period that would free up time elsewhere in your day. An hour isn't long enough, you may protest. Well, give it a try. You can get a surprising amount done in an hour. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short term, say, 1 afternoon, and underestimate what we can get done over the long term, if we do a little bit at a time.

It's a secret of adulthood. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't let the fact that you can't write for 3 hours prevent you from writing for 1 hour. It's so nice to start your day knowing that you've accomplished something important to you. It's done.

It's crossed off the list. Early Rising can also work as an occasional rather than daily strategy. My college roommate gets up at 4:30 AM to go for a 16 mile run every Sunday. This is the only running she does all week. I wouldn't have thought this possible, but that's what she does.

I talked to a guy who loves going for very long bike rides, but now that he and his wife have 2 young children, his wife objects to his absence for a whole day on the weekend. So one day a weekend, he gets up at 5 AM, rides his bike, and is home by lunch, which she doesn't mind. True. It takes a while to adjust to a new sleep schedule. You might try getting up at the new time without trying to accomplish anything much for a week or so just to get accustomed to the new wake up time.

It helps to wake up at that time every day, even on the weekends and on vacation. This may sound a bit grim, but the fact is I love my morning hours so much that I want to wake up early. I don't want to miss it. You never realize how wonderful the morning is if you sleep through it. You have to be there to experience it.

However, it turns out that people really are larks and owls, and this strategy very well might not work for an owl. I'm a lark, so getting up early isn't much of a strain for me. And, obviously, if you have a little kid who wakes up at 5:30 AM, this strategy isn't going to work for a few years. Let me just start by saying I don't like to get up early. I think my ideal schedule would probably be go to bed around 2 and wake up around 10 or 11.

I normally get most of my best work done at night, but, unfortunately, that's not how society works. Having a full time job, you have to actually be at work before 11:30, which is a real bummer. It's the man getting you down. So what I what I took away from this article is not necessarily that it's important to get up early, and maybe that's my own biases speaking because I don't want to get up early. But But what I took away from this article is that it's important to at least think about or be cognizant of your daily routine.

The author noted that for her, the end of the evening was pretty unproductive time that she would just spend watching TV or surfing the Internet. And it was unproductive because she was super tired. So instead of trying to reclaim that hour at the end of the night, she basically just lopped it off and started waking up earlier. So she traded an hour of unproductive time for an hour in the morning of very productive time. You know, not all time has to be productive though.

That's that's definitely not what I'm saying, but there is a difference between leisure time and wasted time. Leisure time typically looks like hanging out and reading or talking with friends or your spouse or roommates or whoever, Maybe even watching an episode of that show that you don't ever wanna miss. Maybe that looks like watching Shark Tank on Saturday mornings. But wasted time is that point when Netflix asks you, are you still watching? If you get to that point, you're probably wasting time.

Or if you get to the point where you're thinking to yourself, what else could I look up on the Internet? Then you're probably wasting time. So please don't hear me say that your life has to be ruthless productivity because I think that's silly. But if even Netflix thinks, surely, they can't watch this many episodes in a row, then we've moved over from leisure time to just wasting time. And instead of wasting time at night, maybe you go to bed earlier and get up earlier.

I have a pretty flexible work arrangement, so I get up as early as is feasible for me. I go into the office early, and I leave the office early. And this has allowed me to capture some time back because I used to sleep in and then get to the office at, like, 9:30 or sometimes even 10, and then have to stay late on the back end because I got there super late. But even getting to work at 9:30 or 10, I wasn't doing anything with my mornings. I was just sleeping in till, like, 8:45, which was awesome.

But now I've shifted that whole thing back, and I get so much more time in the afternoon and early evening to work on projects or just hang out or to basically have my own time. And all that took was just to look at my schedule and think, man, I'm really wasting those mornings and deciding to make a change. And the author is totally right in that we way overestimate what we can get done in the short term and underestimate what we can get done in the long term if we just work a little bit at a time. And I don't know what it is in our brains that convinces us of that, But we think, if I don't have all afternoon to work on something, I might as well not even get started. Might as well just sit here and watch TV.

But I don't know of anything that's the result of one herculean effort versus some effort over a long period of time. That's why we love training montages in movies because a lot of stuff happens all at once. But, unfortunately, and as someone who's trying to lose a couple of pounds, I can tell you that it doesn't actually work like that. You have to put in sustained effort over a long period of time. So where can you claw back an hour?

Where are you wasting time that you can take back? Where can you trade low quality time for high quality time? Where can you kill off an hour of Netflix and give it to reading, or writing, working on your projects, spending time with your friends or family? Be thoughtful with your time. Don't just fritter it away.

The Music Makers is released every Monday at 9 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode. How did it get to be okay for people to be late for everything? It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late. Rubbish.

You are rude and inconsiderate. You can find show notes online at musicmakers.fm, or please send me an email and tell me what you think. Aaron@musicmakers.f m. I would love to hear from you.