Tiredness Level: 5/10

Dear Rubén,

Here an awesome song for the day:

Yesterday I’ve had a team event at the bunker.
I have been home at 23pm and managed to sleep at around midnight. Which means 5h sleep. I feel more tired than yesterday q.q. To make this work I definetelly need to sleep earlier. However I already feel the difference. Days appear to be longer. Ok that might be because the day was actually quite long. Anyways how was it for you today especially with your visiter?

Congrats to beeing featured by your university, nice nice! Then again, maybe they want to show students how to successfully leave the country. (and that they’re especially happy about you leaving xD j.k.)

I’ve told you before but I’m genuinely glad that your blog turned out to be so sophisticated in terms of communicated humor and knowledge. Also that other people think so, too. ^^ For me personally doing a blog was always a worthwhile activity. Although I erased like 5 blogs in my life with tons of entries already so who knows what will happen to your blog once you have the glorious idea to ‘overhaul’ it. xD

About your rabbits – how long do they usually sleep and wake up?

And nice to hear that you find this idea interesting as well. It’s certainly a good entry point to do procrastinated tasks, like your language learning progress haha.

Here is another nice missconception video of veritasium:

As always have a nice day. :)

Ruben’s answer:

Good morning Jan,

What was that bunker event about? I hope it wasn’t about shooting lessons.

Definitely days are longer, so as the increasement of the tiredness levels. I really have to get earlier in bed, as I’m getting to sleep at about midnight or 1AM and when alarm clock sounds it seems like I just set it up, a horrible experience. Though the benefits are clear! I’ve managed to work on my e-mails and improve my interview texts, which took really a lot of time. Hearing music at this time helps building up my motivation.

Things are going well with my visitor. We’ll definitely walk (and eat) a lot, though I suspect I’ll be sleeping on my own sofa so as to avoid waking him up at 6. I don’t think he’d happy about it.

I detected that you modified a few blog entries to include some sort of feedback of what you could improve. That’s great, I might copy (again) your idea in further blog entries.

What are you planning to read, though?

Thanks for your words!

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

• exercise
• read
• breakfast
• watch interesting videos
• write blog entry

Tiredness Level: 6/10

Good morning everyone!

When I told Rubén about this little self-imposed challange he was intrigued and told me he wanted to join for higher success rates. So I thought it would be cool to report my progress in a form of an open letter to him. Here it goes:

Dear Rubén,

All right, waking up early wasn’t so hard after all. Getting up is a completely different story if you’ve decided it for yourself instead of getting forced to do it. How did it go for you so far? How did you use your additional time?

I managed to sleep at around 23:30ish and got up at 5am. At the first 15 minutes I thought a truck hit me. But I’m better now. I took a shower, did a few push-ups, some crunches and lifted some weights. So here’s where it gets interesting. If you had 2-3 free hours before work. What would you do?

For this morning I read a few more pages on “Ich bin Merkur” by Ava Sergeeva. A quite interesting book that hasn’t been released yet. So I truely feel honored to be part of the group who got their hands on it first. Thanks Ava! :D Also I managed to create an actual landing page on my domain, which I own for exactly 3252 days. That’s something I procrastinated for a very long time by now, haha.

I also watched a few more science videos of Veritasium, which is a youtube channel I found the other day and enjoy a lot. For instance did you know that if you bungee jump you would accalerate faster than mere free fall?

Have an awesome day!
Jan

Things I could do due earlier waking up:

• exercise
• read
• breakfast
• watch interesting videos
• write blog entry
• sort out e-mails

Rubén answered:

In my case I slept at nearly 1 o’clock and got up at 6. It’s been a great day so far! basically I answered all my pending e-mails, especially one that my university sent me. They did me an interview via e-mail as they want me to appear in their webpage as an “honorable student”, whatever that is supposed to mean.

I was also surprised to discover that some entries of my blog were posted in reddit, dzone and some other portals.

I also had some time to play with my rabbits and they were kind of surprised to be able to freely run so early.

In the next days I’ll be doing a more detailed plan that will also involve some physical exercise and language learning.

All looks so promising! Thank you for sharing your idea; it will work well for both of us.

Have a good day as well.

Last month I’ve read an article from Jeff Finley on how he woke up early for a year and how it changed his life.  It got me inspired. At first I was wondering what would possibly be the point in that? I mean I’m quite happy by sleeping a bit longer thank you very much.

However the last couple of days I began to wonder if there might not be more to it than it meets the eye. Why didn’t I want to wake up early? Was it because I felt lazy or did I have a particular reason to stay up late? Truth is a bit of both. When did I choose to stay up late on average, when did I decide what food want to eat or how often I work out?

At the TED Talk How to make choosing easier Sheena Iyengar states that a normal person decides about 17 decisions and a CEO 139 decisions on a typical day, the CEO handles 50% of them in even under 9 minutes or less.

Basically we all do all kinds of choices on a daily basis. The weird thing that always gets me is that we rarely recognize them as choices. Many choices just ‘happen’ and stick that way for convinience reasons without giving another thought to it. (Sidenote: one reason is the choice overload problem.)

But is that really good enough? Wouldn’t it be better to do more choices conciously?

The more I think about it the more I realize that I lack a time think about these things conciously. On how I want to live in general. Therefore I’ve decided that I’ll be doing a little experiment. Not for a whole year as Jeff did. But for 66 Days, which happens to be the average time for a person to get used to or get rid of a habit.

Starting tomorrow I’ll be going to get up every morning at 5 o’clock for the next 66 days. In this period of time I’ll be doing some workout, having breakfast, getting ready for work, doing some non-work related personal development and most importantly I’ll be keeping track on a blog post every day.

No clue how successful I’m gonna be in getting up, what is gonna stick after that time or what I’ll be doing exactly – so let’s find out.