Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

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themodelplumber

I'll give it a shot. I've been getting out of bed at 4-5 am for the past 5 months when I have no need to other than to accomplish more personal stuff.

1. If you need to get up early for work, leave a good handle on it the night before. Like leave detailed notes on how to accomplish the next step or steps. Detailed enough that your first half hour to hour will be brainless peace and harmony.

2. Leave an exciting reveal for the morning. Say you finished building a cool new feature. Don't try it out until you wake up. I like to leave a 3D image or animation rendering overnight.

3. If possible change your schedule so that the early morning can just be full of fun stuff.

4. Plan to lay in bed for about an hour before you fall asleep. Incentivize it with a bedtime-only iPad or a pile of good books for bedtime only.

5. Lay out your clothes for the morning, the night before.

6. Do not get out of bed cold unless you find that invigorating. I bought 5 long-sleeve cotton shirts and sleep in those and some comfy pants and short socks. If I get hot, I use fewer blankets. I also keep a coat ready to put on.

7. Make breakfast or a cup of tea/water beforehand.

8. Make a fun routine. I bought a nice radio for early morning use. It picks up stations far away and I listen to it while I work.

9. Plan to take a nap later whenever needed. Schedule in the downtime.

10. Lay out a plan for your entire tomorrow. I do a mind map on paper. With this done the evening before, there should be nothing left to avoid thinking about in the morning, making it easier to consider getting out of bed.

Edit: And yes, it will change your life and people will wonder how you do it. Also I consider this practice a great burnout-prevention tool if you can keep work out of it (or out of the rest of your day).

Overall it's a fun list, except for:

6. This is terrible for sex and sensual cuddling. You need skin contact. I'd say have a bathrobe ready close to the heat source so that you can sleep naked, but don't suffer from cold when you get out of bed by getting inside its heat.

4. It's terrible advice if you have trouble getting asleep. You should be in bed only to sleep, otherwise you associate bedtime with being awake. Following this advice worked wonder in reducing the time it takes me to fall asleep.

9. Naps don't work for everybody, and can reduce sleep quality for the temporary gain of efficiency, so I've mixed feelings about it.

You seem to have scheduled your life well, but I wonder how you manage things that break the routine. Friends, exceptional crunches quickly break the good patterns and I find it difficult to come back to cruise mode after a lost night.

6. Opposite is true in my case. In fact going to bed late was causing more bickering in the morning, and my relationship with my SO was suffering from that. Plus she was always saying, "I wish we could get up earlier." Since I started going to bed earlier, she's able to do that more often. My own life plans accelerated too; I'm more an ambitious and energetic. Since late last year, I lost 80 pounds to reach a healthy BMI. Getting more specific, I received feedback that "physical affection between us is more frequent now and I wonder why?" Etc.

4. I had read about this too. However, it isn't true for me, or at least I associate my bed with general pleasantry and I sleep great. The biggest sleep aid I found back when I had insomnia was writing 1,000 words before bed every night, but I don't have that problem now.

9. Not sure what to say; I read a lot about naps and as a result I think it's OK to have mixed feelings about naps. If you don't want to nap, there are lots of alternatives depending on your schedule. Some people slow their schedule and get more done. Others meditate. I hope you take whatever steps necessary to maintain optimal cruise mode.

I'd like to emphasize the first point. For about six months, I woke up at 4am Monday of every other week to catch a plane to another city to start work at 9am till 6pm. I would not only get everything ready to pack in the morning, but I'd leave notes throughout the apartment listing what I needed to do before leaving, things like "take this or that item", "turn the power off", etc. I'd put the notes on door handles, to the toilet, main entry door and the only way I could forget something was if I had a stroke and couldn't read.

So as parent said, it was "brainless peace and harmony" all the way to the airport.

Similar, I had to get up just before 5 each Monday to drive to London, to spend some of the week working there.

It was easy when everything was easy... When my clothes were laid out, when the car was full of diesel, when even my coffee was ready, just needed to boil the kettle. On those days it was really simple to just get up shower dress and leave and before I knew it the 3 hour drive was over and I was getting on a tube to work ready for some London time. But if anything tiny thing was left to be done in the morning, that I would tell myself wouldn't take 2 minutes, it always seemed to take 20.

Just curious, what sort of work situation led to that arrangement?

It was a contract and I didn't want to move so it was agreed that I work one week remotely and one week onsite every fortnight.

Hey awesome list! Do you feel like the additional work required on the front end is repaid by the productivity gains in the morning? Like one hour of added prep, two hours of morning work?

Thanks! First, I'm not as likely to do any planning or detailed planning when I wake up at say 7:30 and immediately need to get kids to school. It probably won't happen at all. So with that taken out of this equation, the rest takes me maybe 10 minutes to do. In the evening just laying in bed now puts me to sleep in about a half hour. And pre-sleep in-bed stuff is remarkably similar to my normal couch stuff anyway.

I can't give exact figures but even being conscious that early in the morning seems to be some sort of amazing life hack, like you are sitting there going "I did it. I did at least that much today." There is some holistic benefit outside of the spreadsheet, in other words.

But regarding planning in general, I know I have made some astounding productivity gains with planning. The first time a planning session saved me four hours of work off of a six hour estimate, I put away my hotshot coder/designer mentality, redoubled my planning efforts and started flow charting, mind mapping, etc much more frequently. I don't plan everything out with exactitude, but let's just say that while I used to laugh at those obsolete books on flow charting, now I pore through them to see if I've missed any tips. And I use them for all kinds of things, not just coding. A design agency asked for my template a while back and I made it available on the web for libreoffice users.

Happen to have a link to your template for those interested in the exercises left to the readers? :)

Google free libreoffice flowchart template and you can't miss it, blue background.

http://www.marccarson.com/resources/free-openoffice-template...

I'll echo and expand on point 6: sleep in warm clothes. Marcus Aurelius asked:

> is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

The mental barrier of throwing off the warm covers can inspire a lot of time wasted snoozing in the morning.

It may take some adjustment, but wearing warmer pyjamas with a lighter blanket is one of the few things that can make the very act of getting out of bed easier.

I agree, warmth in the morning hours is the number one incentive to get out of bed for me.

I do a slight variation of the same concept: I've set the a/c timer to raise temperature to an almost tropical heat 20 minutes before alarm time.

I sleep under heavy covers and a somewhat low temperature, which is also part of the program.

The idea here is to sleep tucked in and warm like in winter, then wake up to a excessively warm but welcoming environment. If I remain in bed, I'll start sweating profusely and I'm forced out of my covers. So getting out of bed to me is actually inviting while undressing and getting into the shower is less painful.

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