nathan and audrey

Well, I haven’t blogged in about four to five months, and would like to start things off again with a post about a new routine I am attempting to incorporate into my daily life.

I have a terrible time waking up when my alarm goes off in the morning. My wife can tell you of her rude awakening to my morning snooziness when we first got married. I was generally a five to six time snoozer in the morning. She on the other hand had and still has the ability to get up on the first ring. Over the past few years I have thought of numerous ways to either fix the problem or presented arguments for its validity in my life. Currently, I’ve only improved my wake up number of snoozes to three, and even then I usually sit in bed for twenty to thirty minutes after the snoozing has finished.

In light of my recent hardships as a first year grad student, I have realized that I must start my days more focused and productive. Too often last semester I would get up mid morning (9-ish), but then start studying around 11 to 12. Therefore, I am resolved to test out waking up every morning at six o’clock. I am going to commit to this habit for a total of thirty days and test its effectiveness in my life.

In order to carry out my new wake up routine I have done what any great grad schooler does: google it! I read a few blogs [http://www.stevepavlina.com and http://studysuccessful.com] about how to wake up in the morning when you want to. I decided that I would give these methods a try and report my findings here. Steve Pavlina gives a detailed set of posts about the intricacies of the method. Study Successful describes a simplified version of the Pavlina Posts. If you have the time they are worth the read.

Onto the wake up routine! The approach is simple: practice waking up while you are focused and alert a bunch of times. For me this meant the following:

1. Get into night clothes
2. Set my alarm for approximately three minutes ahead of the current time
3. Get into bed and attempt to relax
4. When the alarm goes off turn it off
5. Perform a routine of stretching and getting out of bed
6. Stretch my legs
7. Use the restroom and go to the kitchen (I didn’t actually use the restroom every time, but stood there for a bit to simulate the time spent in the bathroom)

The purpose of the exercise is to train your brain and body to perform the set routine when it hears the alarm rather than allow your mind to give its suggestions about whether or not you should wake up. This brings up a very important concept that I have bought into over the past few years, which is muscle memory. I play guitar and am very focused on being one of the best guitarist. Playing guitar has several facets, but the most essential is the ability to let your muscles memorize the correct way to do a task, and let them do it automatically without brain intervention. This requires extensive practice. I will post more about this later, but for now suffice it so say that the practice routine above is set to accomplish the same tasks of muscle memory for my morning sleepy brain.

The reason why it’s important to practice this is that so often our morning brains are too sleepy. This morning brain doesn’t remember the important reason why we need to get up, or rather it finds it very easy to reason why we don’t need to get up. My morning brain convinces me that I can afford to sleep a little longer. This is toughest or nearly impossible when I have no immediate reason to get up in the morning. When I have a scheduled appointment my morning brain has less arguing authority, but when I have not appointments I sleep until my morning brain is done complaining about how it needs to stay in the comfy bed.

I performed eight repetitions of the above exercise in my first practice session and employed it into my routine the next day. The result, it actually worked. The first morning my alarm failed to go off, but I looked at my clock at about 6:15 and said I’m going to do this and started the routine. It was awesome because once I started stretching I was out of bed within a minute or two without any thinking or reasoning. This is a tremendous success because I am so terrible with getting out of bed when I don’t have to. I am very impressed!

I will be honest I think I need one or two more practice sessions to really engrain the routine into my morning muscle memory, but I think that it is well worth the effort. I will report back as to the effectiveness of the routine as I get further along into it.

If you really want to start waking up on time, take a look at the aforementioned blogs or just follow the simple method laid out in this article. Exercise your morning wake up routine several times in order to really get it engrained into your morning. Let me know if it works for you!

Lately, or rather for my whole life, I have been extremely spotty with getting up when I want to in the morning. I am so bad that my habits have caused and adaptation in my wife to the snooze lifestyle.With that said it has been increasingly frustrating not getting to work when I want to over the past few months. There are usually a lot of things that I need/want to accomplish in a given day, and if I get up too late it doesn’t happen. One thing that I have been trying to make routine is an exercise regiment with weight lifting at least 3 times a week. I don’t think I have achieved 3 times a week in over a year. One of the biggest reasons for that failure is lack of early start time in the day. I have flirted with the possibility of getting up early and working out to start the day off, but I can’t get up on time to make that a viable option. So I have been left with hoping I get up early enough to allow afternoon workout time.

This morning was exceptionally annoying in that I actually got up at 6:15, but couldn’t leave on time. I have always been peeved with my inability to be consistent at waking up. The reason why I’m ranting is because today, and I don’t even know how I got there, I found an interesting blog article about waking up when you want to. The article is  http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/ by Steve Pavlina. This article gives a really awesome technique to change our bodies to wake up when the alarm goes off. The essential component to his method is muscle memory. The article is definitely worth the read.

The Method: train your body to physically do what you want when you want. When we allow our brain to control whether we get up with the first alarm or not we are allowing an untrusted source the opportunity to change what we really want. Yes, our brain works against us in the morning. The reason why our brain can’t be trusted is due to the fact that it is usually still extremely sleepy when the alarm goes off. This makes us more susceptible to the nagging excuses we always have for being lazy. Mine is… hmm… its so nice here in bed, and Audrey really wants me to stay, and I can sleep a little longer and be on time… my body must need sleep since I’m not getting up right away… and whatever other junk I come up with. Steve’s article offers practical advice on how to change your alarm waking habits.

The basic premise is to practice waking up with the alarm. You create an environment where you really aren’t asleep, but simulate sleeping and waking to the alarm. By doing this 3-10 times per training session, and for a few training sessions you can make progress on your waking habits. You really should read the article because Steve articulates the method much better than I do. I buy into this technique because I have been and athlete my whole life and know how important muscle memory is, and in addition to that I have played guitar for several years and learned muscle memory is a key component there as well. So, I really think this method should work. It is really simple.

The reason for me posting this article is that I’m wondering how getting serious about my wake up time will help my daily productivity and natural rhythm during the day. I think I will try it, but of course after I talk to Audrey. I’m so sick of starting my day off with the frustration that I wanted to be at work at 7 a.m. but I look at the clock right before I leave and it is 7:23.

That website has several other great articles on productivity, and are great reads.

-Nathan

I have had almost 10 days with my beloved Blackberry and I thought it would be a good idea to cover some of the stuff I’ve learned.

The first thing is that I love this thing. It is currently revolutionising my life. I am an avid reader of Life Hacker, and am all about the getting things done (gtd) lifestyle. I myself am preparing to embark on the crazy journey of being a grad student, which emphasises getting things done on time. The problem with life is that there is always so much to do.

In general I have a lot of trouble tracking my tasks because of a few problems (pre-bberry of course).

1. I don’t always have my pen and paper/organizer with me
2. Writing things down isn’t the only aspect to gtd, after you write it down you have to continually look at the list of tasks and prioritise the list so that you are doing the right thing at any given moment
3. I use several different methods to track gtd life: google calendar, remember the milk, filofax planner, and pieces of paper all over the place. There has been no way to centralise my gtd life tracking
4. There are so many things to get done I never have all the information in one space, so how do I know about that meeting in 15 mins if I didn’t make sure to see it somewhere else

In the past I have pretty much just written some stuff down and remembered what I could. The process was not streamlined at all. The reason why I say this is because the bberry answers all these problems. It does this in sevearl ways, but the primary function is that it allows me to centralize my gtd life. I have on my bberry my list of contacts, calendar, chat clients, internet radio, web browser, task list organizer, and several other things. The centralization of these aspects of my life are leveraged by the fact that the bberry is always with me. So when I’m sitting at school doing some research and I remember that thing that someone asked me to do I can add it into the bberry, give it a due date and priority and see it get into my list of things to do. This has streamlined my gtd process so much.

This leads into the fact that the bberry plugs into google extremely easily. I have my bberry calendar and addresses automatically synced from my google account as soon as there are updates. This allows me to input information into other devices like a desktop in google calendar and know that it will be on my bberry with not work done by me. In addition to google I have Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook applications installed that allow me to easily update each of the sites from my phone, and in the case of Facebook I get updates on my phone whenever I’m contacted by other people.

All of this connectivity has helped my life so much, but there is also a negative to this. When you get information as it is happening you have to learn how to ignore some of it. I am currently learning this process.

List of Basic Useful Applications I’m using now:

• Gtalk
• Gmail
• Facebook
• Slacker Radio
• Opera
• Flickr
• GoogleSync

This list will surely grow as I get more connected and learn how to work this process much more cleanly, but for now it has been an amazing upgrade to my gtd life.

Next steps: learn the shortcuts for the applications on the bberry so I can be faster! Check this out: http://www.bankersball.com/images/Blackberry-Shortcuts.pdf

–nathan