The 6am Club

This morning I watched a YouTube video on a morning exercise routine, and he mentioned the “5am Club”. This immediately made me think I’ve joined the “6am Club”. I’ve made a goal of getting up between 6–6:30am every morning, a significant shift from the 7:30–8am wake-up time I’ve followed during COVID.

Historically, I’ve always been a “night owl”, not a “morning person”. My “natural” bedtime has been after midnight. This has always made morning professional responsibilities difficult. Through the pandemic, I’ve gotten up just in time for a daily meeting, no earlier than that.

But morning, just after waking up, has also been a consistently high-functioning time for me. When I’m not bound by low-productivity events (like morning meetings), I can get a lot done. I can’t count all the times I’ve spent an afternoon vexed by a problem at work, then solved it in minutes when I started the next day. During a period when I was trying to build a startup and had no day job, I would get up around 8–8:30am, pick up my computer, and do amazing things.

Meanwhile, late at night before going to bed has more often than not been totally worthless time, squandered on doomscrolling social media (or worse, getting in silly arguments), or watching unhelpful videos. Sometimes, when I’m inspired, I can get good use of those last couple of hours, but usually not.

There are only so many hours in a day. When using an alarm clock, I’ve typically needed 7–7.5 hours of sleep most days, usually including up to a half hour of groggy snooze alarms (definitely not a good use of time!). Let’s round it to 8 hours of sleep, and that leaves 16 waking hours in a day — not all of which are equally valuable, due to some degree to the body’s own rhythms. So the task at hand is to make better use of those 16 hours, if I can.

I almost started writing about the overall goals (I was journaling about it this morning), but for now, I think “better-making” is sufficient. The changes in sleep schedule are part of broader changes in routine, meant to make my life better.

By shifting my sleep schedule earlier, I get 1.5–2 hours back from my job and external responsibilities, to use for my own interests — arguably the best hours of the day. For now, I’m using that time for journaling and reading — particularly challenging books that otherwise are hard to grok. I plan to add more routines as my sleep schedule stabilizes. This is much better than watching my morning energy trickle away on meetings.

The question is, what happens at the other end of the day? Will those squandered hours from 10 to midnight become squandered hours from 8 to 10pm? Or will I be able to use that time productively? We’ll find out, I suppose.