It’s 5:12 a.m. as I’m editing this post. And as you’ll hopefully see from the lack of typos, I’m wide awake 🙂

A younger version of me would be dumbfounded by this post. Like most, getting out of bed was always a drag. And it often got postponed well beyond the point where it messed up the rest of my day.  

It’s not like I wasn’t trying. I even had an extended stint of experimentation with a brutal polyphasic sleeping pattern. But no matter what I tried, I always ended up in the same old pattern: get into bed too late and struggle to get up the next morning. 

Then, about a year ago, the importance of consistently strong mornings finally sunk in. I understood on a deep level that early morning is the only time when I really have complete control over my life.

And as discussed yesterday, this control can be very effectively leveraged to turn the coming day into a winner. The great benefits of becoming an early riser suddenly looked far too enticing to ignore.  

Thus, I resolved right then and there to give myself a 9 hour sleeping window every night. I spent one minute setting up the bedtime app on my phone and never looked back. 

My sleeping window is from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. But most of the time I’m up and running between 4 and 5, getting a nice head-start on life. I honestly can’t even remember what my alarm sounds like 🙂

Amazingly, my mornings have transformed from a struggle to drag myself out of bed to a creative design session for shaping the coming day. Believe it or not, my brain actually wants to get up before 5 a.m. every day (including weekends!). 

If you still feel that getting up early is impossible, don’t despair. It gets much easier when you start doing something cool with the quiet time you give yourself while the rest of the world is still asleep.

More on that soon…