This is week 3 of “rebooting” a habit that helps me maintain a certain level of productivity: getting up early. This is one of a series of habits that I am planning on starting, but am doing one at a time on the advice of The Power of Less.

Getting up early requires extra effort, particularly if you like to stay up late and sleep-in as much as I do. The life of a freelancer is very flexible (which I like) but this comes at a price: there’s a tendency to lose touch with your friends and family. The primary reason I want to wake up early is to help me stay in sync with everyone else, an increasingly important requirement for me. A major side benefit, as my friend Robert points out, is that I also have a lot more time to goof off in the morning. While I might use a more marketable phrase like providing adequate time to marshal one’s creative energies and ramp-up for a busy day, it is an accurate statement. I tend to lumber down the runway of productivity like an antique cargo plane, fueled only with the best of intentions. With a good tail wind at my back, a cup of coffee in my hand, and the Grace of God as my copilot, I somehow manage to lift my creaking body into a sky filled with possibility. If my energy holds I might actually get somewhere before falling back to earth. In short, the act of takeoff requires a lot of effort from me, and I need a commensurate amount of runway (e.g. time) to assure that I don’t crumple back into the ground before achieving liftoff. Getting up early is an essential part of the formula, because it gives me the runway length I need for a productive day.

Anyway, here’s the short list of what it takes for me to stay on track, roughly in order of dependence.

1. First, You Gotta Want It Enough to Really Do It

Motivation! The key to everything! My motivation is to maintain sync with my friends. Otherwise, I tend to cycle on a 28-hour day, which has me looping in and out of people’s lives like a wraith. When I’m out of sync, I spend a lot of time in “vampire mode”, sleeping during the day and working at night. Sometimes that’s OK if you just want to get things done and don’t care about or need people. Your motivations will probably be different.

When I first tried this, it was for the sheer novelty of the experience, but I learned a lot of things about the early morning that I got to like. This has given me extra motivation to get it going again.

2. You need to do the prepwork before you go to sleep

Behind every successful action is a supporting action. In this case, I need a certain amount of sleep (8 hours) which means I need to make sure I’m asleep by a certain time…

• …which means I need to be IN BED at that time, eyes shut. If I want to wake at 6AM, that means in bed at 10PM.
• …which means I am READY TO GO TO SLEEP beforehand. That means I have already showered and brushed my teeth.
• …which means I am MENTALLY WOUND DOWN. I need about an hour of deliberate non-thinking beforehand.
• … which means I should be letting go of the details of the day at around 9PM.

I have a natural tendency to seek intellectual stimulation, which contributes to late nights. I like to look up things on the Internet. I get drawn into a line of inquiry or design experiment. I get sucked into a magazine article. I might be halfway through some project work. If I don’t stop that mental activity by 9PM, I am not going to be asleep at 10PM. I have had to learn how to turn off my brain, which requires (somewhat ironically) some mental effort. I don’t like to medicate myself, so enforcing the habit is an exercise in just saying no to myself; even though I’m not a Dad, I end up having to take care of my inner child.

There are four other factors that affect the success of my sleep schedule:

• I have to stop working at 6PM at the latest, otherwise the winding-down process doesn’t have enough time to work.
• I have to eat dinner at 7PM at the latest, and not too much. Otherwise I will not sleep well due to stomach issues.
• For the first week, I have to decline late night invitations to stay out with friends. Otherwise the habit will not set.
• I have to also maintain the same hours on the weekends, to some extent.

3. You need to trump the pleasure of the moment

Getting to sleep on time is half the battle. NOW IT’S TIME TO GET UP! If you aren’t required to wake up early by an external force (like a job), then you will need a compelling reason to get moving. Otherwise, you’ll just fall asleep again. Here are the things that I look forward to in the morning, which helps me get out of bed.

• I have had friends to meet regularly at a local coffee shop for a few minutes before work. This works particularly well if they are new friends who you think might become really good friends. Just keep the interaction short if you have things to do later. It’s kind of like waiting for the school bus in the morning, hanging out with your bus-stop buddies. It also helps that over time I got to know the people at my Starbucks, and they seem glad to see me and know my name. It took about a year because I’m an introvert by nature, but it was totally worth it.
• I was curious enough to experiment with waking early just for the experience, for at least two weeks. Two weeks isn’t bad, and it doesn’t make you feel trapped by a habit you may be unsure about. That makes it easier to commit to, and if it sucks you can always stop.
• I knew from my previous two-week sleep experiment that being up before everyone else was kind of neat. You see different people, and I find the early morning sun quite agreeable.
• I added a planning ritual to the beginning of the day, on a regular paper notebook (this is how the Emergent Task Planner was born, incidentally). I avoid email until I get my head clear, because it’s too easy to get sucked into it.

4. And you have to get out of bed first

I can remember several very productive mornings at Starbucks that sadly, took place in dreamland. I once cycled through this three whole times, each time dreaming I had looked at the alarm clock, jolted out of bed, showered, and gotten to the door before realizing I was actually still asleep.

There are three countermeasures that work for me, though I don’t deploy them all at the same time:

1. I set multiple alarm clocks. Loud ones, from different sources, at varying positions and distances from your bed. If they don’t have a standard position, your body won’t be able to perfect the slam-and-snooze maneuver automatically. Don’t overdo it, though; if they are too far away you just might learn to sleep right through them. To mix things up, I sometimes use my cell phone’s alarms, set at 6AM and 607AM. The regular alarm clock is set at 6AM, and at 615AM my Voco Good Morning Sir Clock (yet another awesome present from my delightful sister) reminds me that I have important gentlemanly affairs to tend to. It’s a little too quiet to serve as a primary alarm clock, but the quiet authority of Stephen Fry challenges me to be my best.

2. I force myself to immediately open my eyes, keeping them open for 30 100 seconds. This is the minimum-effort action I can take without having to shift my entire body, though it is surprisingly difficult. Once my eyes are open. For extra credit, I look toward the window and try to determine what the weather is. This sometimes requires additional body movement. If I keep my eyes open for long enough to look around the room, that seems to start the mental processes going. It’s sometimes helpful to position interesting things within eye’s glance the night before. Maybe something to do? Something to remember? And if I get tired of counting to 100 seconds, I can always just get up :-)

3. I drink 16oz of water before I go to sleep. The amount of water varies, but when I’m serious about waking up I drink enough of the stuff to ensure I have to go to the bathroom. I believe this is an old soldier’s trick for waking up in time for their watch. A full bladder is plenty of reason to get up. If I drink TOO MUCH water, however, I end up getting up in the middle of the night, and that kind of defeats the purpose.

5. Follow-through with the habit for two or three weeks

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p>Two weeks is about the minimum time it takes to establish a habit, though for this habit I have decided to go for three weeks. The extra week gave me time to confirm the theories I had regarding habit maintenance. Some rules of thumb:

• I gave myself permission to screw up, so long as I could identify the root cause of the screw up. For example, staying up late with friends would cause me to get to sleep later, and sometimes wake up later. However, as my reason for waking up early is to stay in sync with my friends, it’s hard to really consider this a failure (at least in a holistic sense).
• I told people I was starting this habit. The more people that know, the more they are likely to inquire about it, and keep you mentally on-the-hook for following through with your word. Some of them will even go along with you, as my friend Robert chose to do. He even started going to the gym! Awesome!

It took about 3 or 4 days before I was waking up just before the alarm clock. Frankly, I was surprised at how quickly my body adapted to the rhythm. The prepwork helped, I think.

After about a week, my body developed an affinity for staying to the schedule, and this built up a kind of sleep equity that I could “borrow against” for unusual circumstances. If I stayed up late with friends, for example, my body would still wake up early because it had been conditioned to do so. However, it would become important to adhere to the schedule the next day, otherwise I would start to slip back into a later waking cycle. I have actually been a recovery mode for the past three days, due to some ill-advised late weekend nights. However, because I have been identifying the root causes of the slippage, I know what I need to do to correct my mistakes.

During this third week, I am realizing that I need to apply the same rules to the weekend. When the weekend rolls around, I implicitly give myself permission to do anything I want, which means I stay up really late. After two days of this, my Monday and Tuesday is pretty much shot. This weekend I will try to relax the schedule a bit but still maintain a regular waking time. We’ll see.

Next Habit

I’m either going to do the Gym or Drinking Water. Probably the Gym, as I’ve done this before, and I actually have discovered that the noon-time workout is a nice break from the early morning work I do writing and emailing people. Juggling TWO new habits will be a new experience in itself…we’ll see how it goes.

Last week I wrote about restarting habits one at a time, based on the insight that my previous attempt to restart them all at once wasn’t working. Thus, I outlined a sequence of habits that I believe will be conducive to greater productivity; it’s a framework for maintaining a working store of time and energy. The habits are:

1. Regular Sleep Schedule
2. Regular Gym (multiple habits here)
3. Drinking Water at Regular Intervals
4. Eating Regular Healthy Meals
5. Regular Home Chores

The common wisdom is that it takes about two weeks to form the foundation of a habit, assuming you are practicing it diligently. Armed with this belief, I have been working on reclaiming my early-morning routine. I have a tendency to be a night owl, which I had previously assumed was just the way I was. However, I’ve found in the past that the early morning routine has many benefits: not only do you stay in sync with other people, you also have more time to goof off and still get a lot of work done :-) Not to mention that I’m finding that the early morning is a magical time; I’ve grown to love the sun more in my old age, a change from my youthful preference for the stillness of the night.

permission to experiment

Once I accepted that focusing on one habit at a time was OK, I decided to also not beat myself up when I wandered from my ideal sleep pattern: 8 hours of sleep a night, up at 6AM so I could be at Starbucks at 7AM. Every time I didn’t get to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep, I would still try to wake up at 6AM and note how successful (or not) I was; it was enough that I was really mindful of it regardless of actual outcome. This had the unexpected side benefit of provided me with a collection of excuses that I could analyze for patterns. For example, I became aware of some common-sense rules I hadn’t been following:

• don’t eat too late, and don’t eat acidic foods.
• make sure the bedding is comfortable.
• don’t read in bed…this leads to more thoughts and more wakefulness.
• be showered and ready for bed an hour before “eye shut” deadline, so I have time to settle down.
• don’t use the damn computer in bed. Leads to more surfing and thoughts.

When I didn’t go to sleep by 10PM, this had an impact on the success of the next day. This feedback helped reinforce the habit, especially since I could identify the cause and effect relationships.

surprising regularity

After about a week and a half, I found that my body had started waking up at 6AM even when I went to sleep later than I should have. This indicates to me that there is some wiggle room in the pattern; so long as I’m mostly getting to sleep at the right time, there is enough “momentum” in the body’s imprint that it starts to maintain itself. Cool!

Toward the end of the second week, I’m also noticing more the benefits of waking up early in the form of increased socialization, because I have more time during the day to meet people.

I’m also “pre-testing” the next few habits I’d like to develop, such as the morning planning ritual and going back to the gym, but am deliberately NOT trying to practice them as habits. In the past I would have been tempted to start both these habits at the same time as I was establishing my sleeping pattern once it started to take root. That would have been too early, I think. It’s possible that one huge advantage of One Habit At A Time is that the successful day is achieved more easily: I either got up early, or I didn’t. The diagnostic evaluation is really simple, and still satisfying. If I had been also trying to get back to the gym and the planning habits, a successful day would have required three inter-related evaluations, which is tougher to cleanly diagnose. Not only that, statistically the odds that you will pull off a 100% successful day are correspondingly grimmer because there are more ways to fail. You could beat the odds, of course, but it requires greater fortitude and energy…if you have the time, why make things harder? I’m trying to make this easier for myself, after all.

front-end and back-end mindfulness

The habit forming experience reminds me of a concept in software development: for every “front-end result” there is a successful “back-end supporting action”. In terms of software development, the “front end” is the visible part of a piece of software. It’s the user interface. It’s the functional benefit. It’s the result you like when you press the button that says DO THIS NOW. The “back end” is all the stuff you don’t see that makes the magic possible: the algorithms, databases, graphic assets, libraries, glue code, and other stuff that people who use the front end couldn’t care less about. And so it was with waking up early.

By analogy, waking up early is my desired change. It’s the shiny part of establishing a new habit. When I wake up early, without drama and muttered curses, I immediately reap the reward that I’ve been seeking! However, as I found out with the supporting habits, I had to do a lot of boring things to make it possible. For example, going to sleep early feels like a punishment because I can’t indulge my whim to keep going until I drop from exhaustion. And NOT READING in bed? That sucks too, as reading in bed is one of my great pleasures. However, the whole reason that I’m doing this habit thing is because I’m chasing that work-life balance, and I am testing the theory that having some tuned systems and habits in place will lead to me getting more done. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I’ve had to learn to relax about not doing everything I want, a necessary focusing of energy. My boring “back end” actions are making the front end change possible, a necessary re-engineering of long-standing practice. I may decide later that waking up early is not all it’s cracked up to be, but for now my working hypothesis is that it is a Good Thing.

A few months ago I received a review copy of Leo Babauta’s book The Power of Less, and promptly lost it under a pile of magazines that had colonized the northeast quadrant of my dining room table. The pile grew majestically in size over the next 3 months, absorbing small electronic gadgets, mail, balls of cat fur, and exotic Asian cookie boxes, until one day I had need of something I thought might have been in there. So, I started disassembling the pile, and that’s when I came across the book package from Leo’s publisher. It was fortuitous timing, as I’d been feeling under-productive in my creative and business endeavors since finishing the Holocaust Museum project a few weeks prior. Leo’s site, Zen Habits, had been on my mind because I’d noticed a trend from my periodic visits: the number of readers seemed to double ever time I looked. And it seemed to me, after doing a brief dive through his site that it was due to his focus on delivery quality thoughts consistently with an honest humility. It was quietly inspiring. After reading through The Power of Less, I was impressed anew by the straightforwardness of the writing. It’s not a flashy book. And it is not even a radically original book–an acquaintance of mine, with all the authority his 20-odd years of experience on Earth could muster, declared on Facebook that it was a book that merely contained stuff we already knew, which I found deeply insightful and amusing. What I like about the book is that it concisely details a number of habits that have led to ongoing, purposeful achievement, the story of Leo told from his personal perspective.

This past week I’ve been following one of the habits that had jumped out at me: work on one habit at a time. I knew that the productivity-inducing habits that I’d adapted over the past two years had disappeared as I had gotten caught up in the last weeks of museum project, and my attempts to restart them all at the same time were going nowhere. This week, I decided to just focus on a chain of habits that I wanted to redevelop, one after the other, to bootstrap my way back to the place I once was.

a matter of faith and determination

Working on one thing at a time is a powerful concept that’s been detailed many times by other writers, so I believe in it. My greatest hurdle in adapting this idea is two-fold: having faith that it works, and being able to maintain focus to completion.

• Having faith, for me, is probably more about stemming the negative thoughts: You know what I’m talking about, that slippery feeling that time is slipping away, which leads to thoughts of oh no I’m falling behind to I need to be faster and better to omg I’m not good enough to do this followed by this thing I’m making is sucking crap crap crap. It’s not a good place to be, and its self-defeating. It’s understandable, though; our society puts a huge premium on speed and instant gratification, and as uninformed consumers we tend to expect that the creative process should be just as fast. I should know better, being skilled with a number of arcane digital media production methodologies, but I still fall prey to this kind of thinking because, well, I want to be awesome :-) To implement One Thing At A Time, I remember that I value craft and design, and that such endeavors take time. It’s ultimately worth the wait, I believe, if it’s done right. There are some situations where speed is more of the essence, but I am making an executive decision to not seek those situations. Still, it’s important to carve out just enough time to not be rushed, yet not dawdle. “Do not hurry. Do not wait”: this is a lesson I’m learning anew. I am also taking inspiration from John Carmack’s game development philosophy when asked when his next gaming work will be available: “When it’s done”. My corollary to this philosophy is that taking time to learn is going to be part of it.

• Maintaining focus to completion is probably the harder task. Certain tasks lend themselves to focus; writing and graphic design are like that for me. Other tasks that involve a variety of media and mental hats (e.g. developing interactive multimedia, establishing a design business) tend to become diffuse because they call on different parts of my brain to pay attention to different parts of the world, scattering my focus by necessity. Additionally, I’ve trained myself to see every interaction with the world as a jumping off point for investigation, so keeping unintended flights of inquiry under control is a challenge. The various Printable CEO forms are, in some sense, attempts to create systems that naturally attract my attention so it’s harnessed to the desired task at hand. They’ve also helped solidify certain principles of productivity over time, which is perhaps the greater payoff. What I need is to maintain discipline. One means to maintaining discipline is to require less of it. The statement goal is to “maintain focus to completion”, so defining meaningful intermediate deliverables is helpful. It’s also good development practice. Most importantly, being happy with smaller steps to begin with is a key mental outlook, otherwise I’ll always be dissatisfied. The perspective I’m cultivate in myself these days that when anything happens at all, that’s pretty damn incredible. You can interpret that statement as being extremely cynical or really positive, so it is compatible with a wide range of moods :-) I choose to celebrate the small achievements, most of the time.

the weeks ahead

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p>This week I’ve been focusing just on waking up every day at the same time. From my prior experiments in waking up early, I know this habit has led to feelings of well-being and productivity. I’ve been doing it for about a week, and the habit is still pretty wobbly, but I’m noticing how each violation of the sleep cycle has discernible effects on the following day. This encourages me to maintain the habit. I’ll do another week of this, and with luck the habit will be set firmly enough that I can move to the next habit on my list: returning to a regular gym schedule.

This is the chain of habits I’m trying to recreate, roughly in the order I’m thinking will work:

1. Regular Sleep Schedule: Up at 6AM, Eat by 6PM, Showed by 9PM, Bed by 10PM.
2. Regular Gym: 30min Cardio 3x week, expand to 60min Cardio, expand to Resistance Training alternate days.
3. Drinking Water at Regular Intervals: When I’ve been drinking more water, I’ve felt great. I keep forgetting to do it.
4. Eating Regular Healthy Meals: I’ve never done this, so I have no methodology for this yet.
5. Regular Home Chores: I suck at doing chores. Yes, I know about The Fly Lady, so I will pay them a visit.

Each of these habits, I am thinking, will take two weeks minimum to establish themselves. I’ll only move to the next one when I am convinced it’s sticking. I may break up the gym habit into the three stages and interleave them with the other habits so it’s not so massive.

I also need to figure out are the recovery protocols for when the habits are disrupted. The gym habit, for example, tends to fly out the window when I’m away from home or have a lot of work to do. Creating an at-home workout that I like, that doesn’t require additional gear, will be helpful. Adding fun physical challenges that can be met only with conditioning will help too. I’m pretty clueless when it comes to sports and stuff like that, so it will be a whole new adventure.

Implicit in this list is the idea that these are prime directives for supporting a high quality life. I am hopeful that working the “discipline muscle” will trickle into other aspects of my life, as my friend Senia [describes].

There’s a different list for establishing a good design practice and social life, but I’ll address that some other day.