Get Up Earlier

Something simple that stuck

There was a period in my mid 20s when I was working long hours and struggling to get my workouts in. By the time I got home from work it was dinner time, and my workouts began to suffer. So I decided to start going to the gym before work, which worked for a while, until I encountered a different problem.

My morning was now rushed, and was adding more stress to already stressful work days.

I was getting up at 5:45 am and rushing to be at the gym at 6 am. Giving myself 2 hours to train, shower, change and be at my desk by 8 am. But it wasn’t working, and I really wasn’t enjoying it.

I was telling this to a friend and he made a very simple and obvious suggestion.

“Why don’t you get up earlier?”

“Why don’t I get up earlier?” Holy shit. You’re right.

Why was I waiting until 5:45 to get up and get out the door? I was embarrassed at how obvious a solution this was and why I hadn’t thought of it. The next day, I changed my routine.

I started waking up at 5 am. With the same goal of being at the gym by 6 am. But now I had a full hour to myself to have my coffee, go to the bathroom, and get my bag, breakfast and lunch ready for the day. The 45 minutes of sleep lost had a negligible impact, and, if anything, the benefits of an extra 45 minutes to get ready in the morning far outweighed the negative effects of sleeping less. Moreover, after a few weeks of getting up earlier, I started going to bed earlier, gaining back my lost sleep.

I feel stupid for even sharing that the idea of getting up earlier was not something I had thought of, and was actually a novel idea to me, but the truth is, it was. I had programmed myself to sleep right up until the point when I needed to get up, and that programming made me miss the simple solution that was right in front of me. “Get up, and give yourself extra time.”

It’s little things like this that I remind myself of constantly to try and figure out what else I might be missing if I just looked through a different lens.