Yesterday I decided that I want to start waking up at 5AM in the morning to have time for both habits reading and working on a side project.
First going to sleep was a little bit difficult since my body is used to go to bed at around 9:30 PM - 10 PM. I tried to go earlier to bed at around 8:45, but I couldn’t fall asleep as fast as I wanted. The more I do it, the more my body should get used to it. Because of that when my alarm rang at 5AM I was not well rested as usual.
Then the plan was to start reading again in the morning, which I did for around 45min and I could work on a side project for 1h 30min because today was no workout day. The progress I did in this 1h and 30min for the side project I actually planned to accomplish on the last weekend. Some coding feature where I achieved that the functionality works as expected. Now I just need to cleanup the code and test a little bit if there are some issues with the feature which I didn’t consider.
So this first day was already a success for me and because of this I’m motivated to continue trying out to wake up at 5AM. Sure the first day of a new habit is mostly a success, like people going to the gym on January 1st, because the motivation is high. What most underestimate is the long-term value of a habit. A lot people get demotivated after a short time, myself included (it’s just human nature you want to see results from one day to another). Also here, going to gym in combination with running as an example; from my experience it took around 2-3 years until I saw the results, the power, the fitness and strength which satisfied me, which makes me happy today. So I don’t want to be overmotivated for now and I just look forward to the progress and the experience with waking up at 5AM. Also I don’t want to say
Oh yeah, waking up at 5AM is the best thing you can do to achieve what you want… (because of that sentence I have to think about cold showers, which I think of as one of the best things which happened to me in my life so far)
Other people are night owls and can better do their habits late at night. So this brings me right back to experiment with things, which work for you (or not).