Night owl habits and morning struggles
Good morning friends, it is a little after 9 a.m. Taking a short little break, went to go make some coffee this morning and just sitting down for five minutes in between working through some work emails and thought I would talk into my phone while I enjoy some delicious warm coffee this morning. When I was a kid, I was a night owl. I did not do good waking up in the mornings. My mom would come in and wake me up and then wake me up again, wake me up again, you know? And then I remember, you know, when I was a teenager hitting the snooze button so many times that I have to start bargaining for things that I wouldn't do. You know, I had to be at school at eight and I would wake up at seven and then I would hit snooze and say, well, I got an extra. How come snooze is always nine minutes? I never understood that. I guess it's to throw you off a little bit. But you know, I would hit the snooze and I would say, well, I was just gonna wake up and stretch. I don't need to stretch. And then I would hit snooze again. I mean, after two or three times I would say, well, I don't really need breakfast. I could skip breakfast. And you know, then it was I could skip a shower. I don't need to brush my hair. It just, you know, until like it took me 15 minutes to get to school and I would hit snooze until it was like, you know, 17 or 18 minutes and I go, okay, I have three minutes to get ready and get out the door. So I was not a morning person, but I was sure was a night person.
Bedtime when I was a kid was 10 p.m. Lights out. And I would turn my light out and wait just long enough for my parents to think I'd gone to sleep. And then I would go turn my light back on or go to the computer desk, which I didn't need a light for. I had a little lamp by the side of my bed, but I was definitely the kid that was under the covers with the flashlight so I could read books late at night. I was always a night owl. And the thing is, I was not a night owl to the extent where I slept in the next day. I just always seemed to function with less sleep. So it's not like, you know, they say you get eight hours of sleep, right? Go to bed at 10 p.m. then you could wake up at 6 a.m. or go to bed at 11, wake up at 7 a.m. But I would go to bed at midnight or one in the morning and get up at five or six. Like I was just not a person that slept for eight hours. I'm still not today. Today I kind of, I don't officially do polyphasic sleep, but at night I sleep five hours maybe and then during the day I'll take an hour nap and that's pretty regular for me.
Anyway, the older I get, what I've noticed is I'm becoming more of a morning person now. I do still stay up late at night. So how could I be a night person and a morning person? Well, I am. I like staying up late at night because it's quiet. You know, when you're after you've been a dad for 20 years and my kids don't live here anymore, but after a while you realize, well, the time when it's quiet around the house you can get stuff done starts at 10 o'clock. You know, so from 10 to 12 at night, 10 to midnight, that's what I would write blog posts or do whatever I was, you know, wanting to do on the computer and stuff. But, um, the older I get, I'm finding that that time is kind of shifting to the morning. And again, I'm still, I still stay up late at night, you know, but it's not uncommon for me to wake up at 5:30 and by 5:35 be in here on the computer, start writing, you know, start plotting out the day, start doing stuff, you know.
And although I like both staying up late at night and I like getting up early in the morning, but what I find is that early in the morning I'm way more productive. In the morning I come in and I can bang out a chapter of a book or I can write a blog post or record a podcast or anything in the morning. I've got that fresh, you know, early in the morning starting the day energy and I'm able to get stuff done where at night, even if I stay up late, it's usually watching TV or watching a movie, surfing the web. It's more passive kind of stuff. I'm not really getting stuff done late at night. So that's my only thought for today is figure out when your times when you're most productive. It could be late at night, it could be early in the morning, it could be mid-afternoon. People find all sorts of times where they're the most productive, you know, and then shift your projects to that time.
So I've been working on a couple of books and I've been working on them late at night, but what I've been trying to do is shift them to the morning. I'm trying to shift that work early in the morning where I could come in here and write for an hour, hour and a half before everything else in the day starts. It's a challenge to do that when the internet is one button away and it sure is easy to click on Google News or whatever headline news that you read and get sidetracked and then you've wasted that productive time. Try to resist doing that, I suppose, and just use that time to be productive. I was pretty productive this morning. Now I'm back to work doing stuff all day and I have projects building up in my head. A little list of things I want to do when the end of the work day comes. At the end of the day I'll clock out my day job and I'll clock in on my night job. But until then, it's back to work for me. Hopefully, you can find what part of your day you're most productive and use that time to your advantage to get something done.