What I Learned From Waking Up At 4:30 a.m. For 21 days

1. Cats are incredibly passive aggressive when you interrupt their beauty sleep.

2. The snooze button is your worst enemy. Seriously, hit that baby once and it is exponentially easier to hit it again and again and again. Nike has it right – JUST DO IT and you’re already setting a personal precedent for a day without procrastination and delays.

3. DON’T use your gained time to do work. That is what 8-5 is for. Instead, use it to accomplish what would’ve been a mental distraction or time-waster during your work day – pay bills, read the news, email your Aunt Sue, learn Mandarin, organize your sock drawer, etc.

4. If you are feeling stressed and MUST work at 5 a.m. (which admittedly happened to me on more than one occasion), draft all of your emails and set them to auto-send starting at 8 a.m. No one wants to become known as the workaholic and you don’t want to set the expectation that you are always available.

5. For some people, 4:30 a.m. is a great time to work out. For me, not so much. While these early morning hours were my mental peak, they certainly were not my physical peak. Figure out where your energy is concentrated during different times of the day and adjust your schedule accordingly.

6. Just because you’re waking up earlier, doesn’t mean you will spend your day in a sleep-deprived comatose state. Sure, you might get tired at 9:30 p.m. instead of 10:30 p.m., but cutting out that extra hour of Netflix will do the trick and help you spend less time vegetating in front of the TV.

7. The challenge is not about perfection. Did I wake up every day at 4:30 a.m. for 21 days consecutively? No. Was I always productive? No. The important thing is honest effort and strategic endurance.

8. Coffee tastes infinitely better at 4:30 a.m. than it does at 6:30 a.m. It’s a fact. Try it, folks.

Overall, my #21earlydays challenge was a success, and one of the motivators that kept me going through the dark early mornings was knowing that I would be doing actually this – sharing my story.

Creating a public accountability is the easiest way to encourage, grow, and practice pushing the limits of self-accountability. So who’s with me? Anyone up for another #42earlydays?