I'm Forcing Myself to Be a Morning Person

Mornings have never been “my thing”. Hitting the snooze button on my alarm three or four times is a common occurrence for me and I'm desperately trying to change this.

I've always been jealous of morning people and how much they achieve even before coming into work. I think it’s about time I become one of these people, not to only achieve more, but to be able to relax in the morning instead of rushing out the door. If I can have an extra 30 minutes to relax and make my breakfast in the morning, great. If I can create a habit where I’m creating things every morning and using this time productively, this is my dream.

After looking at why I struggle to get up in the morning I’ve found a few reasons.

My Sleeping Pattern

The most obvious one. I go to bed at about 9 o’clock(when I’m not working) and then try to wind down by watching TV shows or if I’ve found a good book, reading. I’ve found that watching anything online doesn’t relax me, quite the opposite actually. So my first step in taking back my mornings will be leaving my laptop outside of the bedroom.

I work during the night

My other bad habit is that I work at night. I see nights as a time where I can be undisturbed and productive. But in reality that’s not the case. I’m tired, unproductive and as soon as I go online, there’s distractions everywhere. I must admit that my best working times have been at night, working until 2am. But they have always been one-offs and I can’t keep that pace up while working a day job as well.

My plan to take back the mornings

My main problem with getting out of bed is that I love sleep and snoozing far too much. To wake up early I need to do something that I love even more than sleep. Creating things, anything.

Create, don’t consume.

My plan is to wake up every morning and follow this rule. No reading the news, emails, social media or even reading books.
My problem in the past when setting out to create anything, whether it be creating a website, blog post, or even dinner, I dive into consuming straight away. Research on the topic to find the most effective way of creating the thing, who else is doing a similar creation, who would want to help me? And most importantly, would anyone care?

These are all great things to be doing, but in the idea phase of creating these can hinder me from starting anything at all.

The Plan

• Wake up so you have an extra hour in the morning
• You can create anything
• You can't consume. No emails, no social media, no research
• No creating for what you would call “work”(you've created an extra hour of your day, make it unique and fun)
• Have fun, if it’s not fun you're not going to want to wake up an hour earlier to do this

If you see me blogging more, the plan has worked.