Two important and often overlooked aspects of creating a lasting morning routine | Hacker News Reader

Two important and often overlooked aspects of creating a lasting morning routine

joel.is

26 pointsjongold15 comments

Perspective from someone who has a day job and does his own project when not at work:

My routine works best when I wake up at normal work hours ~8am and go to work after coffee via subway. At the office I take a 15 minute nap on a bean bag chair in the evening, drink a cup of coffee, then go to the gym. When I get home I'm awake and feel productive most of the time so I can attend to my website. So if I choose to be productive anywhere between 10am and 2am, it's usually not difficult.

If I was working full-time on a startup without a day job, I would assume I would still work best at night like I did in college rather than the 4am-7am early morning hours.

How does one cope with something like this when they're living and sharing a bed with someone? I've personally always been fascinated by rigid self-maintained schedules and routines. However, especially for me it's near impossible to maintain anything but loose schedule because my girlfriend does most of her studying at home and usually goes to sleep only a few hours before I'd prefer to get up, and of course watches the TV right when I'd prefer to go to bed. Due to the current situation, there's no distinction between living room and bedroom in our flat, so in essence we hang out in the same room 90 % of the time anyway, so it's impossible to isolate from each other for sleeping or even studying really.

It really feels a shame for me.

Married with two kids. I was prepared to criticize you until I got to the "no distinction" part. That's a pretty rough living arrangement. I can remember that being a problem in college. If you can find a way to make that distinction more distinct I think you will find time and sleep easier to manage. Until then maybe communicate your thoughts to your girlfriend?

> I don’t know anyone who consistently wakes up before 6am and isn’t doing something interesting with their life

Is this true? I'm in trouble then. I absolutely hate everything about mornings. My ideal schedule is going to bed about 2:00 AM and waking up naturally between 10:00 and 11:00 AM.

Surely there's some successful start-up founders who do this?

I know there are a lot of people who are very successful in those late quiet hours, rather than the early morning quiet hours. Tim Ferriss is a key person who comes to mind. However, the point I'm trying to make here is that in the case of the early morning risers, I find they are much more consistently doing incredible work in their lives.

To observe that early risers are consistently successful, it doesn't mean that late night workers aren't successful. I've just found anecdotally that if you were to take a sample of early risers vs late night workers, the first group seems to have a higher percentage of successful people.

I'd say the same about night owls, so you've really said nothing about anything but the company you keep.

I'm guessing the author has limited social circles.

Do they know many cleaners; road sweepers; 'binmen' (garbage truck workers)? etc.

These people are just people - maybe some of them are doing interesting things with their life but I doubt it's just because they're waking early.

The comment feels a bit like cargo-cultism.

I'm fighting my own biases here, because I feel much better if I wake early and I feel like my early mornings are much more productive.

Not to mention that lots of office workers start at 8:00 or 8:30am and have to commute an hour or more to get to work. Lots of schools start at 8:00am, so teachers have to wake up early and parents have to wake up early to get their children ready for school and themselves ready for work. Having a choice about when we want to wake up in the morning is a luxury that very few working people get to enjoy.

> I don’t know anyone who consistently wakes up before 6am and isn’t doing something interesting with their life

May be waking early is not the cause but the effect of having important goals in life.

If I spend time on my own projects before work, I often end up coming in late, as I usually get carried away as I just fix one last thing...

I find the timers people use to turn christmas lights on and off automatically wonderful for timing daily routines. You connect them to lamps, etc, and have them turn off when it's time to do X instead.

You can put them on monitors (through a surge protector), for instance, to tell you to walk off and go to work, for the room lights to tell you to go to bed, for the TV to enforce a hard bedtime, and for noisy home equipment to start waking you up (icemakers, fans, lights, etc).

Great idea, I got my first one of those this Christmas, I'll see what use I can put it too tonight.

Super advanced use: Use them to make a "digital sundown". For instance, if you want to go to bed at 11:59, you have the lights in some rooms go off at 11, and in the last rooms at 11:30.

> I don’t know anyone who...

Ah, useless anecdotes virtually always follow that opening. Could have stopped reading there.

I suspect the post was written in order to be posted on hacker news, rather than the other way round.

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