The Big Benefits Of Waking Up Early

I consider waking up early to be one of the best strategies someone can do. To me it is equivalent of doubling up your days and productive hours. And by waking up early I don't mean not sleeping enough...obviously I mean sleeping early as well.

My own routine

Now I agree that the routine I follow may be a bit more extreme than usual but what it does is accentuates the advantages of this approach even more. So let me lay it down on you.

I sleep most of the weekdays at around 8PM, for 7 hours and a half, till 3:30AM.
Since I officially start work at 10AM, this leaves me with 6 hours and a half before work.

The first 30 minutes are dedicated to preparing myself and heading over to a spot that is open 24 hours and offers the basics: Coffee, Food, Wi-FI, Electrical Plugs and Comfortable Chairs.

I now have 6 full hours, which is a lot of time and equivalent to a work day in which I can enjoy and do the following:

• Relax with not much noise, since most people are asleep
• Not having to answer any phone calls since most people are asleep
• Read an interesting book
• Watch the night slowly turn to day (sunrise)
• Answer all my e-mails and clear any pending tasks
• Plan the full work day ahead
• Passively answer any pending messages
• Have my coffee and breakfast
• Listen to music
• Read global news
• Catch up with friends & family overseas, them being on a different timezone
• Write a bit in my book
• Write this blog post and others

All of this is done in a comfortable and relaxing mood since I have a lot of uninterrupted time ahead.

Then after that I head off to work, which is now the second part of the day and not the beginning of it. Once at work you notice the following:

• Everyone else seems to be a bit lost and tired, given that they haven't woken up long time ago
• Everyone is frustrated at answering all the e-mails so that they can start getting real work done
• You are very energetic and ready to take on today's challenges right away
• You're in your middle day and simply looking forward to the next part of the day, which is work and thus give back good work quality and efficiency
• You are in a very different mood than everyone else because they are in the "The day just started" mood and you are in the "This has been a good day so far" mood

After the work day is over at 5PM, there is still 3 hours left before bedtime so in those 3 hours you can do at least one of the following:

• Prepare/have a nice dinner
• Go to the movies
• Tidy up the house and do the laundry
• Go to the gym

And then you can sleep again and start the cycle again.

Now obviously the downside of this routine is that you would have to sacrifice the night outings during mid-week, which means you can't go out with friends and stay late. But remember I don't follow this routine everyday!

But let's say you had nothing so important to do after work, then what is the difference between sleeping at 8PM or at 1AM? Between 8PM and 1AM not much changes. The sun has already gone down and you are probably tired after focusing all day long on work; so why not sleep to get relief instead of wasting the hours?

From this comes my own quote: "Whenever you decide to go to bed and sleep, it is a good decision."

In conclusion

You don't have to go to the extreme as I do but you can choose for example to sleep at 10PM sharp and wake up at 5:30AM or 6AM which still leaves you 2 or 3 hours to spend before going to work.

So let there be "before work" and "work" instead of "work" and "after work".

So during the weekdays you should:

• Sleep well
• Relax
• Work

Instead of:

• Work
• Waste time
• Sleep just enough

As a final conclusion: Hours spent in the early morning are of better quality than the ones spent at night.