On Thursday, the Texas House of Representatives had House Bill 1 on the floor for a second and third reading. They were deciding the fate of $150 Billion dollars for the next 2 years of state operations. Naturally, this meant that they would work into the late night. They finished around 3:30 AM. I did not get back to the apartment until close to 4 AM. This meant that I would only have an hour of sleep before waking at 5 AM to keep with my goal of becoming an early riser. That was the plan. That’s not what happened.
I did not even hear the alarm. No, I may be wrong. My phone did not have the alarm screen open when I eventually did wake up. This tells me that I must have got up and turned off the alarm at some point. That’s one of the items I wrote about in my first post regarding waking up early. You need to put your alarm far enough that you need to walk over and turn it off. I don’t think I did that.
Never mind all of that. The heart of the matter is that I ended my 2 day streak of waking up at 5 AM. The goal is to do a 30 day trial of waking up early. If after 30 days, I am not satisfied with my gains in productivity, I’ll go back to waking up at more “natural” hour. So, I need to decide whether I should start the 30 day trial over from day one, or just keep going and call this day 4.
Factors in the Decision
If I go with day one, then I can say at the end of the 30 days that I went 30 days straight waking up at 5 AM. This is like being a Hall of Fame player without an asterisk after my name. If I call it day four, I’ll have the “award” but will have the asterisk there saying I didn’t really do it fair and square.
What is the goal?
The goal is to wake up at 5 AM every day for 30 days, which includes weekends.
I understand that, technically, I would not wake up at 5 AM for 30 days straight. However, I am already seeing the benefit of waking up consistently at 5 AM. It was no big deal for me to wake up this morning and get right to work. In a sense, that’s cheating if I were to do the 30 days starting today because I would have a leg up on the process. If I were to go 29 days and then had another incident in which I slept in, doing 30 days would not be a major accomplishment because I practically had it in the bag. On the other hand, even at 29 days, I would have that asterisk next to my Hall of Fame entry.
The Decision
I guess this means that today is day one of my 30 day trial for waking up at 5 AM. I want to have 30 days without the asterisk. This means that the trial ends on Sunday April 29, 2007.
Major life lesson: If you fall, you get up and start over.
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Waking Up Early
Early Rise Kickoff
