Hacking my day

Lon,lifehacksdiscipline

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Photo by Ju Guan on Unsplash

Photo by Ju Guan on Unsplash ↗

On Tuesday, 23rd August I made a decision to make some changes in my daily routine to jump-start improvements in my life. This decision was born primarily out of a nagging feeling of frustration about where I am in life versus where I think I could or should be.

Honestly, it's not like I have some crystal clear idea of where I could be, but I know deep down that I am not there and this has been eating at me for a while.

What are the decisions I made?

I made the following decisions:

Sleeping earlier

I had always prided myself on being a night owl. This is because I had great success in Secondary school as a result of doing a lot of reading at night - as crazy as reading all night before an exam. This worked out very well for me then because I was in a boarding school system and had very few distractions.

For the last 10+ years, I had continued to sleep late. Roughly between 1AM and 2AM on average. And occasionally, as late as 3AM. However, as you probably know as well, there are a lot of distractions in adult life and so my nights were not as productive as they were 10 years ago.

Hence, I made the decision to go to bed earlier. My wind-down period starts at 11PM with a worst-case bedtime of 12PM every day.

Waking up earlier

In tandem, sleeping late meant I typically woke up late as well. This was aided by the fact that I've been working from home since COVID started. So I could wake up as late as 9 AM and still start my work day properly.

However, if I sleep earlier, then I can wake up earlier and make the most of some of the most productive hours of the day. I got inspired about this by Benjamin Hardy in his blog post where he talks about the power of the hours between 5 and 7 AM.

I have made the decision to wake up between 6:30AM and 7AM. You will notice that this does strictly follow Benjamin's recommendation - Yes! I evaluated my life and saw that 7AM to 9AM can be my version of 5AM to 7AM, mainly because I work from home.

Earlier dinner time

Trying to sleep earlier, I discovered that if I had dinner at 10PM (like I used to do for a long time), the food will not be digested in time for me to sleep early.

Hence, I made a decision to have the food I will eat for dinner, made ready and eaten by 8PM (at worst by 8:30PM). This way, there's time for the food to digest and I can then spend the remaining ~3 hours before sleep on effective or relaxing activities while gradually winding down towards sleep.

Reading

Considering that I will be awake between 7AM and 9AM, how do I invest that time?

I made the decision to spend the first hour of that time reading a book. I wrote a tweet here about why I believe reading is super essential to living to the max of your potential.

In the future, I will make posts about books I've been reading and some learnings from them.

Attending Church

My spiritual life has not been the best for a couple of years, and that has been largely due to negligence more than anything else. At some times I was very consistent in attending church, at other times I was "too busy".

My faith is a very core part of my life, this is because most of the key milestones in my life can be directly attributed to God opening doors for me.

I made the decision to be more consistent with church attendance (this need not be physical, I will start being consistent with online services first, and then will consider taking the next step to physical services as well).

Can I keep up with these decisions/commitments?

The short answer is - I do not know.

The long answer:

I am at a pivotal point in time in my life where I need to see some things change that could determine the course of the rest of my life. I feel like I have no other choice than to make these changes and commit to them, else I would probably be stuck in the same spot that already has me having this nagging frustration.

So, I'm like, "take the shot, what's there to lose?"

Accountability?

To be very honest, I have not made any concrete plans regarding accountability or how to measure my adherence to these decisions. My best thought now is that I will write updates on my progress in new posts over time.

That being said, if you're my friend and you're reading this, the next time you see me, ask me about this and you might just be helping me stay accountable! 😉  

Photo by yue su on Unsplash

Photo by yue su on Unsplash ↗

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