Confessions of a Morning Person: Priorities

Over the past month, I’ve made a quite successful effort to shift my sleep schedule to buy myself a couple of hours to myself, before dayjob obligations start. I realized long ago that my first couple of hours of the day were usually when my mind is sharpest, and why am I giving those best hours to my employer, rather than claiming them for myself?

In reclaiming that early morning time, I’ve been structured about it — I started with journaling (on paper), then reading a difficult book for a while, to get myself back in the habit of reading difficult books. I was looking to squeeze other things into the time as well — guitar practice, or exercise.

Meanwhile, for the past few months, I’ve been back at work on Mixonance, a side hustle software project that will hopefully become a lucrative income stream. But work on Mixonance has been slower and more frustrating than I like, and I believe that’s because it’s been getting the crappy time. I’ve been working on it during the evening, after a long day and after dinner, assuming social activities or other things don’t conflict. So I’m not working on it every day, and it’s not my best work, because it’s not my best time.

So yesterday, I watched a video conversation between Cal Newport and Ryan Holiday, two prolific authors I admire. They talked a lot about their approaches to producing prolific and consistently high quality work. Both rely on setting aside a couple of hours every day for writing. They don’t expect to get more than a few really good hours per day at most, but when every day offers those “good hours”, consistency and quality become their hallmarks.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to shift my Mixonance development hours to that morning time. Even if it’s just an hour a day, it’s the best hour, and it’s every day, because I’ve had little problem with schedule consistency in that morning time, free of obligations and interruptions and exhaustion. Today was my first day, and it was great — I breezed through a chunk of work that I squandered over two useless evening hours yesterday, with nothing successful to show for it. Now, that code works, and I have a building block that will spread to other parts of the app. Yay!

This means, though, that I’m not going to get that morning hard-reading time. I’m going to have to keep a boundary on my morning journaling. And I’m not going to add other stuff to my morning routine. But it’s a matter of priorities. Looking from every angle, Mixonance is the most important thing I can be doing with my personal time. It offers me a chance to significantly change my financial picture, and hopefully be able to leave corporate America and live on an income stream that I own. And buying myself out of forty hours of daylight a week? That’s a huge potential change in my life, a tremendous opportunity. So it’s more important than reading great books, or public writing, or other things I might be doing with my best time.