My First Week of The 5 AM Club

A diary of my trials, lifestyle changes, and key achievements

A view of sunrise from my terrace, another reason for me to get up from bed

The soreness of growth is much less expensive than the devastating costs of regret.

-Robin Sharma

On 02/04/20 in the morning as I finished reading chapter 14 from a book called “The 5 AM Club” by Robin Sharma where Riley Stone shares this amazing Day de-construction schedule.

The schedule that was in the book

Thus, immediately the skepticism in me struck and in a few seconds my head was filled with questions like:

Is this doable for a person like me, a youngster?

Will this make me compromise with my social life?

Are there people my age who are following this? And if there are then, I want to have a long discussion with them immediately.

So, I quickly messaged on WhatsApp “Has anybody read The 5 AM Club book and if yes then, are you up for a serious discussion” in the group of this book club that I am a part of. Along with messaging a few more people in my contact list that I thought might have read it. So, after talking to most of them I was properly convinced by evening that okay, maybe it is not worth giving a shot and is maybe too impractical for youngsters like me to follow. Then in the night finally, the book club guy who by the way is called Pradyumn (not pradyu-mann) pinged me and asked me if we can get on a call because it is seriously going to be a long discussion. We talked for around 30 minutes and the crux of what we discussed and its conclusion was:

• The guy is my age and had been following it for over 3 years.
• His side of the talk came with a disclaimer that yes, you will have to sacrifice a lot and yes, your social life might be compromised but the end product is going to be so much worth it.
• Start slow and easy

Our conversation was like a ted-talk to me (honestly!) that I made up my mind immediately to give it a go and start by waking up at 6 AM for a week and gradually shift to 5 AM.

I decided that I will be calling him every day for the next 90 days to account for that I have woken up.

I was so pumped up that I woke up at 3:30 AM instead of 6 AM. So, I slept again (because it is equally important) and woke up at the correct time, and did the drill.

I stuck to the time-table that Mr. Stone shared. And here is how my schedule looked and the problems I faced with certain things:

20/20/20 rule [6 AM to 7 AM]: I was supposed to exercise for the first 20 minutes but I had no proper workout planned. I am a skinny girl and basically, you don’t find good stuff on the internet about the workouts for gaining weight. Instead, 90% of those are for how to stop gaining weight. And so, I ended up doing a few warm-up exercises, squats, lunges, and suryanamaskars. But yesterday I had downloaded this app called Adidas Training which I will be starting to use from tomorrow onwards. The best part about it is that they have the option of customizing the workouts for individuals of different shapes and sizes.

I then did Sudarshan kriya (a mediation technique) that I learned in Art of Living and made my to-do list for the day in the Journal. I then, read a book called “Factfulness” for the next 20 minutes.

[7 AM to 9 AM]: Utilized this time for preparing my breakfast, bathing, watering plants. I start my day by eating 5 almonds, 5 Black Raisins, 2–3 strands of Saffron, and black chana soaked (which is healthy and can be easily incorporated into our diet).

90/90/1 [9 AM to 10:30 AM]: This tactic requires you to schedule yourself to invest the first ninety minutes of the day for ninety days on one activity that when completed at world-class, will cause you to own your field.

But I realized I had no such passion for any activity in my field. Being a computer Science engineering student I took a course on Machine Learning in 3rd year of my college and later in my 4th year realized that I didn’t want to get into that field. So, I thought of learning something as basic as HTML & CSS in that duration and give that a go for once. So, on the first day of following the schedule, I just went on surfing over the internet searching for some nice courses and started the one by Geeks for Geeks. It was good but I was not able to enjoy it.

So, I went on to watch a video on youtube, and then an advertisement popped-up in which a girl was talking about some Web Development course for beginners which was available for a very reasonable price of Rs.455. So, I didn’t even start that youtube video and immediately rushed on to that course, saw the syllabus, enrolled in it, and boom I was already done with some introductory videos on that day itself. I can say that I have easily developed consistency with that because my teacher is awesome.

Also, I created this pure HTML website which has no good styling and content yet but I am proud of it.

60/10 [10:40 AM to 12:50 PM]: This period requires you to stay in focus for an hour straight, free from any distractions and work on your craft, and take a 10-minute break after completing it.

I continued my Web Development lessons in that duration.

And I repeated one more similar cycle.

The 60-minute student technique [1 PM to 2 PM]: This needs us to just work for developing our craft better and learn anything that helps us develop better as a person.

I learned Spanish on the Duolingo app in this period and watched some videos and interviews of great leaders, and read blogs to work better.

[2 PM to 5 PM]: I had my lunch and as we are under self-quarantines, for now, I played ludo with my family. Recently, I have added teaching my Grandmother to read and write in English in this schedule.

[6 PM to 7 PM]: I went for a walk on my terrace and listened to a podcast of Mark Zuckerberg and Yuval Noah Harari’s conversation on Spotify. I use this time for pruning my plants as well.

[7 PM to 8:30 PM]: Helped mother in cooking dinner, ate food, played another round of ludo.

[8:30 PM to 10:30 PM]: I used this time for reading a book (which is currently Norwegian wood), listening to music, and briefing about my day in a journal.

After this, I went straight to bed and took my beauty sleep of 7.5 hours ;)

I did this for 7 consecutive days.

Yesterday was my cheat day and so, I wrote a blog to still utilize it.

The point of sharing the whole time-table is to realize how much time we have and if we granularize our whole day like this we can utilize every minute of the day into something way more productive than sitting on our phones scrolling social media feeds.

I earlier used to sit on my phone and wait for the messages that were never going to come.

The dopamine bursts that I earlier used to have based on the number of people who reacted to my Whatsapp stories or Facebook posts were rendered through the body workout that I did and through the satisfaction of going to bed with a checked-off to-do list of the day and cross-marked on my calendar.

This is how my calendar looks now

I didn’t feel the need of being emotionally dependent on emotionally unavailable people then, because I had so many goals to work for in the day.

Also, I have started gaining weight through healthy means so, Yay!!!

And this is the impact of just one week. I don’t have to wonder what the coming weeks will bring. I will be posting here about every week on Saturdays for 13 weeks at least.

Goals for the next week:

• Optimize the time more properly
• Control my temper and patience
• Complete Factfulness book
• Work on my eating habits

Do let me know what your goals are or, if you have anything to say (good or bad) to me regarding this post here. I will be delighted to hear that.