productivity

Scared to sleep
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Let Me Scare You to Sleep

The science behind the toxic effects of chronic sleep deprivation

Our modern world is laced with slow poisons — things like tobacco, empty-calorie foods, and binge-watching platforms — that patiently shorten and dilute our lives over years of habitual indulgence.

History shows that society’s interaction with these poisons follows a predictable 5-stage process: uninhibited indulgence, risk recognition, risk communication, public concern, and policy action. As the example of smoking shows, this process can take decades to play out despite overwhelming evidence that billions of healthy life years are being lost.

Chronic sleep deprivation is one of the most potent poisons ever to enter this frustratingly slow process. Currently, it’s transitioning between the risk recognition and risk communication stages. We need to speed things up.

Today’s article aims to do just that by summarizing the scary details about the effects of sleep deprivation contained in Matthew Walker’s landmark book pictured below.

This daunting collection of science-backed findings certainly scared me to sleep. I hope it does the same for you.

Denial and Diagnosis

Sleep deprivation has two particularly pernicious qualities that help it proliferate through society:

  1. Sleeping less for the sake of cramming more into each day is still seen as a sign of productivity and ambition that is viewed in a positive light.
  2. Chronically sleep-deprived individuals believe they are performing optimally, even though objective tests definitively prove otherwise.

Here is a simple test to help you determine whether you’re chronically sleep-deprived and at risk of all the scary things outlined in the remainder of this article. To be safe, you must be:

  1. Able to function optimally without the need for stimulants (e.g., coffee)
  2. Unable to fall asleep before lunch (even if you tried)

If you are dependent on stimulants to get you through the day or if you regularly feel drowsy before lunch, you’re likely severely handicapping yourself by willfully taking the slow poison of chronic sleep deprivation.

Also, know that binge-sleeping over the weekend after a sleep-deprived week is of little use. Most of the adverse effects of sleep-deprivation are locked in after one or two bad nights and cannot be reversed by catch-up sleep.

If any of this applies to you, I sincerely hope the serious issues discussed below will motivate you to give sleep the priority it deserves.

Degenerative Disease

Chronic sleep deprivation could be the most underrated driver behind the global non-communicable disease burden, with strong causal links to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia.

Heart Disease

Sleep deprivation traps our sympathetic nervous system in a constant fight-or-flight mode. More stress hormones are released, increasing blood pressure, and weakening our arteries over time. Simultaneously, growth hormone concentrations decrease, inhibiting the body’s ability to heal the damaged arteries.

These effects of sleep deprivation increase the risk of heart disease by 45%, jumping to 200% for middle-aged individuals. Given that heart disease is by far the biggest killer on the planet, these are truly terrifying numbers.

Immunity and Cancer

Lack of sleep also compromises the immune system, increasing our chances of catching a virus and lowering our chances of fighting off malignant tumors. In these Corona times, you should know that sleep deprivation increases rhinovirus (common cold) infection rates from 18% to 50%.

More worryingly, cancer rates increase by 40% in individuals sleeping 6 hours or less, mainly due to a large decline in the natural killer cells responsible for destroying malignant elements in the body. In fact, tumor growth is enhanced by sleep deprivation, strongly increasing cancer risk.

Obesity and Diabetes

Sleep deprivation disrupts the hormonal balance responsible for appetite control, leading to significant weight gain. Furthermore, these unnatural food cravings are strongly biased towards all the wrong kinds of foods, caused by suppression of the higher centers of the brain responsible for moderating primitive cravings. To make matters worse, if a sleep-deprived individual is put on a strict diet, weight loss occurs mainly from lean muscle mass.

In addition, sleep deprivation makes our cells unresponsive to the message of insulin to absorb dangerous levels of glucose, putting healthy individuals in a pre-diabetic state. All these effects increase the risk of diabetes and other serious illnesses associated with obesity.

Alzheimer’s Disease

The connection between sleep deprivation and dementia is particularly troubling. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by plaque build-up in the brain. Deep sleep can counteract this development, but the plaque inhibits our brain’s ability to generate deep sleep. This causes a vicious cycle where inadequate sleep causes plaque build-up, which again causes inadequate sleep.

Once this cycle is underway, complete mental invalidity is inevitable. On the flipside, preliminary results have shown that effective treatment of sleep disorders can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in high-risk patients by 5–10 years.

Genes and DNA

Sleep deprivation even distorts our genes. Researchers have identified 711 genes that are either abnormally revved up or suppressed by sleep deprivation. These effects are not yet well understood, but it is clear that chronic sleep deprivation is a potentially dangerous genetic engineering experiment being conducted on a global scale.

Furthermore, sleep deprivation causes telomere damage, resulting in faster aging and visibly older physical appearance.

Mental Health

As with physical health, the world’s major mental health problems are also closely linked with our chronic sleep deprivation epidemic.

Emotional Instability

In simple terms, a lack of sleep renders you bipolar. An underslept brain becomes emotionally unstable, swinging wildly between depression and euphoria. This effect is caused by a 60% amplification in the primitive fight-or-flight centers of the brain (amygdalae) combined with a suppression of the more evolved rational center (prefrontal cortex).

This causes all manner of problems, including violence, suicide, excessive risk-taking, and addiction. These emotionally unstable behaviors plague many sleep-deprived people in highly influential positions such as doctors, fund managers, politicians, and military personnel.

Sleep also enhances our ability to pick up on subtle emotional cues in waking life. Without it, we become unable to properly discern the emotional reactions of others, leading to serious miscommunication and conflict.

Stress and Anxiety

One of sleep’s most important functions in our highly-strung modern world is a soothing balm of free and effective overnight therapy. Specifically, sleep strips away the emotional edge from traumatic events, saving us tremendous amounts of unnecessary stress and anxiety.

This therapeutic effect originates from dreaming (REM) sleep where we process emotionally charged experiences in an environment devoid of noradrenaline (the brain’s version of adrenaline).

In fact, the potentially debilitating condition of PTSD is characterized by noradrenaline levels not receding during dream sleep, illustrating the terrible effects of forgoing this vital therapeutic benefit of sleep.

Cognitive Function

Scientific studies have proven that a lack of sleep degrades creativity, intelligence, motivation, effort, efficiency, effectiveness when working in groups, emotional stability, sociability, and honesty. It makes you wonder how many of society’s grave problems can be solved simply by all of us returning to natural sleeping patterns.

Memory

Sleep is essential for memory creation and retention. To use a computing analogy, it frees up the brain’s RAM by shifting memories to permanent storage so that there is space for new memories the next day. Thus, for effective memory function, we need good sleep the night before (to free up RAM) and after (to permanently store memories).

Sleep deprivation disrupts this memory processing, hampering our ability to recall distant memories and form new ones by 20–40%. After one night of insufficient sleep, the damage is done and that day’s memories are forever degraded. Students pulling all-nighters present a prominent example: Information is crammed into the brain’s RAM to pass the test, but the lack of sleep results in minimal longer-term retention, making the exam pointless.

Sleep also intelligently decides which memories to remember and which to forget. This avoids the buildup of useless memories that can interfere with the recall of useful memories. It also serves to soften painful memories.

Motor Memory

Memories related to physical coordination (e.g., playing a sport or musical instrument) are affected in a similar way. For example, musicians routinely report being able to play a piece much better after a good night of sleep.

Sports performance is also strongly improved by plentiful sleep. Most strikingly, the risk of sports injury declines from 73% to 18% when sleep is increased from 6 to 9 hours.

Creativity and Problem Solving

Sleep also plays an important role in the transition between learning and comprehension. It helps not only to store new information but also to connect it in novel ways (creativity). Dream sleep stimulates a kind of fuzzy-logic knowledge processing, leading to insights we could never achieve with wakeful rational thinking.

Experiments have shown a 15–35% increase in puzzle-solving ability after awakening from dream sleep. In addition, a set of strenuous tests with a hidden cheat code revealed that well-slept individuals found the cheat code 60% of the time versus only 20% of underslept individuals.

Creativity and problem solving are incredibly valuable in today’s world, making chronic sleep deprivation a severe handicap in the competitive job market. On a societal level, a universal lack of sleep significantly degrades our ability to solve our long list of global challenges.

Attractiveness and Reproduction

If you have dreams of attracting your soulmate and starting a family, you better make sure you get your beauty sleep.

Both sexes are clearly perceived as less attractive when in a sleep-deprived state. As mentioned earlier, a lack of sleep also promotes unhealthy eating habits that further detract from physical attractiveness. Furthermore, sleep deprivation dumbs you down and makes you emotionally volatile, clouding your personality. All these factors reduce your attractiveness as a mate.

For those planning to start a family, note that both men and women suffer lower fertility with sleep deprivation. If both partners are sleep-deprived, problems to conceive compound.

Accidents

Here’s something to think about: Driving your car after a night with only 4 hours of sleep is equally dangerous to driving when legally drunk, increasing your chances of causing an accident by 1150%.

Drowsy driving is therefore just as irresponsible as drunk driving. And the worst is that drowsy drivers believe they’re just fine.

There are two reasons why sleep deprivation makes us much more accident-prone: degraded cognitive performance and the occasional brief loss of consciousness, also known as a microsleep. It’s easy to imagine scenarios other than driving where reduced alertness or a brief bout of unconsciousness can endanger many lives.

Sleep Disorders

Even though the vast majority of sleep deprivation is the result of people simply giving themselves too little sleep opportunity, there can also be medical causes.

Insomnia is the most common of these. Often, people who think they have insomnia are just practicing poor sleep hygiene. However, if you are diligently following all the best sleep hygiene and sleep duration practices and still struggle to get enough sleep, insomnia may be the cause.

In these cases, it’s now well understood that sleeping pills should be the very last resort. They have a wide range of negative side effects and produce very poor quality sleep that fulfills little of sleep’s vital functionality. Cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia is a much better method.

Other sleep disorders include sleepwalking, narcolepsy, and fatal insomnia. Sleepwalking is mostly harmless, narcolepsy is a serious condition that requires dedicated management, and fatal insomnia is incurable, resulting in certain death. Fortunately, such serious sleep disorders are very rare.

Sweet Dreams!

There you have it. Sleep deprivation is bad for you in almost every way imaginable. Continuing to take this slow poison day after day will both shorten and dilute your life.

As stated earlier, the vast majority of sleep deprivation in our modern world is caused by people simply giving themselves insufficient sleep opportunity or practicing poor sleep hygiene. And the good news is that both these problems need little more than the right motivation to cure.

So please, buy Prof. Walker’s book. Read it with care. Then proceed to make the world a better place by spreading this vital sleep motivation far and wide!

The images in this article were custom-made by Janet Cloete.

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The Complete Guide to Morning Mastery [Infographic Included]

Here’s an interesting question for you: What is the best possible investment we can make with two hours of the finite amount of time at our disposal?

My answer? Creating a morning routine that is so beautifully designed and choreographed that it will last a lifetime.

Yes, in two focussed hours, you can build a routine that will boost your health, productivity, creativity, relationships, and energy for the rest of your days. As far as investments go, this is as good as it gets.

Today, we’ll dive deeper into this brilliant investment, starting with the following infographic:

Why Bother Building a Morning Routine?

As illustrated below, the choices you make in the morning echo throughout your day. In addition, morning choices tend to be self-sustaining. Good choices make it easier to maintain a consistent sleep pattern that, in turn, makes it easier to make good choices the next morning. In contrast, bad choices lead to erratic sleep schedules and more bad morning choices.

Imagine the difference between a lifetime spent repeating the pattern on the left and a lifetime spent repeating the pattern on the right. Which one do you want in your own life and the lives of those you care about?

The left-hand option? Awesome 🙂 Let’s build it!

3 Steps to a Lifelong Morning Routine

Humans are not robots. We cannot simply decide to establish a good routine, download one from the internet, and live happily ever after.

Instead, we must ensure that executing our morning routine day after day remains a deeply rewarding experience. This requires three steps:

  1. Commit. You must desire the rewards promised by a lifelong morning routine enough to invest the effort needed to complete steps 2 & 3.
  2. Take the time needed to design a routine that is uniquely you. It should contain some of your favorite things and make it easy for you to get emotionally invested.
  3. Choreograph your routine to a morning playlist. This extra step creates an effortless flow between the different elements of your routine.

The first step is where it all begins. The second will make sure your routine doesn’t disintegrate with the first challenge that crosses your path. And the third is the secret ingredient that makes it last a lifetime.

The Foundation: Rediscover Your Rhythm

The first step in a good morning is to wake up refreshed at an hour that allows you to comfortably complete your routine. Such a consistent sleep-wake rhythm is embedded in our genes, but, unfortunately, it often gets disrupted by all the artificial stimuli in our modern environment.

You must rediscover this natural rhythm to build a solid foundation beneath your morning routine. This can be done in three steps:

  1. Make sure your latest allowable wake-up time is set in stone. It doesn’t need to be super-early, it only needs to be fixed (weekends included).
  2. Build a quickfire wake-up ritual that stimulates all five senses. Repetition of such a ritual at a similar time each morning is just what your Circadian rhythm needs.
  3. At night, allow yourself some time to wind down in a space with minimal sensory stimulation. Learn to time this wind-down just right to avoid going to bed when you know you won’t be able to sleep.

Our modern world presents many temptations that disrupt our natural Circadian rhythm. Follow these three steps to rediscover how it feels to be in sync with life, and these temptations will quickly lose their appeal.

The Morning Movement Fun Factor

Exercise is one of the most commonly recommended components of a good morning routine, with good reason. Not only is it good for your health; it’s also great for quickly getting you up to speed and energized for the day.

But none of this will matter if exercise devolves into a huge battle of will every morning. No, you must make sure that your morning movement is fun and convenient. Without these elements, your noble morning exercise ambitions won’t last a month, let alone a lifetime.

Finding such activities is easier than you might think, especially if you smartly integrate them into your choreographed morning playlist. I found five, including gems like bad dancing and double-time yoga. If you think about it, I’m sure you can find some of your own.

The Value of a Good Plan

It gets a lot easier to have a great day if you have a clear sense of where you’re going. That’s why a quick revision of your most important tasks deserves a slot in your morning routine.

But we must be wary here. Planning can easily turn into a tedious chore and, if it does, it threatens the permanence of your routine. That’s why I recommend doing your planning organically throughout the day and in the evening, only to add the final touches each morning.

This natural way of planning requires a system that allows you to easily note down tasks whenever they pop into your head and organize them with minimal effort. For me, this system is Google Tasks.

Accept the World’s Wisdom

Read. The wisdom of the world is at the disposal of anyone who does. And there’s no better time to fit some valuable non-fiction reading into your schedule than the morning.

A quick 10-minute session every morning will bestow upon you the wisdom of about ten great thinkers each year. For me, this turned out to be a lifechanging habit — one I wish I’d started many years ago.

The key to sustaining this precious habit is to read in areas that genuinely interest you. It pays to do your research beforehand to make sure you buy books that will grab your attention. Also, there’s no shame in not finishing a book that fails to live up to expectations.

Discover the Perfect Breakfast

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. A perfect morning meal will deliver you energized and craving-free to your lunch break, helping you stay healthy and get more done.

This is the morning routine element I’ve spent the most time perfecting. And after years of trial and error, I think I’ve finally found the best solution.

My ideal breakfast contains 16 healthy ingredients (mainly nuts, seeds, and berries) that can be combined into a delicious meal in 2 minutes flat.

This blend is a pure joy to eat and boasts the perfect breakfast nutritional profile. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Taking Things to the Next Level

The points outlined above deserve a place in any good morning routine. But, like most things in life, there’s another level available to enthusiasts.

First, try to incorporate a practice to gradually condition your mind towards a calm and positive space. Journalling and meditation are common candidates. My preference is an advanced form of affirmation training I like to call my Personal Constitution.

Second, I highly recommend taking one or two minutes out of your morning to score how you performed yesterday. This habit is great for keeping you securely on your growth path and helping you to really get to know yourself. I use a spreadsheet called a Graph of Life for this purpose.

Third, consider getting yourself an accountability buddy to maximize your consistency, while simultaneously improving an important relationship. An accountability buddy is someone who will be waiting for your call early in the morning and be disappointed if you don’t show up. If there is someone in your life you know you should be spending more time with but never seem to get to, this is your chance.

Start Simple, Keep Innovating

Try to be as pragmatic as possible when you embark on this journey. Avoid designing an overly complex and time-consuming routine. Start simple, including only the elements you think you’ll enjoy the most.

After your first dabble into morning routine choreography, you may well find it to be surprisingly interesting and engaging. Then, you can ride that natural motivation to experiment with new elements.

If you just go with the flow and keep innovating, it’s only a matter of time before you attain the coveted rank of MORNING MASTER 🙂

Image by Avi Chomotovski from Pixabay.

Unless otherwise stated, all images were created by Janet Cloete.

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The Complete Guide to Planning Your Day with Google Tasks

Simple, clean, effective.

Modern life is complicated. Most days, there are way more things happening than our limited working memories can handle. That’s why we need an efficient planning system to take some of the load off.

After several years of experimentation with different solutions, I eventually declared Google Tasks the victor. Here are the four main features that won me over:

  1. It opens next to Google Sheets, offering the perfect integration to longer-term planning in a spreadsheet.
  2. For computer users, the addition of multiple tasks and sub-tasks is highly streamlined, making daily planning a breeze.
  3. Recurring tasks are supported. This feature is ideal for building the consistency needed to make real progress in life.
  4. It has a decent mobile app, which is essential for logging tasks that randomly pop into your head when you’re not at your computer.

Hence, this article is for people who spend plenty of time on their computers and believe in the power of planning and consistency. If that’s you, here are the five steps to the complete Google Tasks experience.

1. Get Started

On the off-chance that you don’t yet have a Google Account, create one now. It gives you access to all Google’s free software, conveniently syncs your Google universe between different devices, and facilitates one-step sign-in to a wide range of other services.

Google Tasks opens as a side panel next to Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, or Slides. Just look for the Tasks icon (shown by the red arrow below). This icon will be visible on the far right of your screen next to any of the apps mentioned above.

The two most useful integrations are Gmail and Sheets. We’ll be taking a closer look at the Sheets integration in Step 5, but the Gmail integration is so simple, it only needs a single paragraph:

Whenever you get an email that requires follow-up, just right-click on it and choose “Add to tasks.” This action will automatically create a task titled according to the email subject. You can do the same thing in the Gmail mobile app by opening the appropriate mail and tapping the three dots at the top right.

2. Add Regular Tasks and Sub-Tasks

Google Tasks makes it super-convenient to add tasks on a computer. Simply click the “Add a task” button and start typing. With the intuitive keyboard shortcuts covered below, adding tasks and sub-tasks in a focussed daily planning session is a breeze.

After you’ve typed your first task, simply press Enter to jump to the next task. In this way, you can compile your daily task list in seconds. Want to delete a task? Simply navigate to it using the up or down arrows and erase it with the Backspace key.

If you have a big task you need to break down into sub-tasks, you can do that by pressing Ctrl+Enter after you have entered the name of the big task. Additional sub-tasks can then be added using the Enter key. When you have written the next main task, press Ctrl+[ (may differ on international keyboards) to remove the indent. Here is a typical example:

Entering tasks on the mobile app is less convenient, though. You need to add each task separately, and, most annoyingly, there is no voice command capability. It’s disappointing that Google has not gotten around to this yet.

Thus, Google Tasks is not yet the best solution for those who organize their lives on their phones. But if you only use the app to record occasional tasks that pop into your head when you’re away from your computer, it works just fine.

You can also add tasks with reminders, but I’ve found that other services are better suited for this purpose. For example, your Outlook or Google calendar can automatically remind you in time for all your meetings, and Google Assistant is great at setting random reminders in seconds.

Once your list is all set up, you can get to work. Every time you complete a task, simply click on the little circle to the left of that task and watch (with deep satisfaction) as it gets crossed out and disappears.

3. Set Up Recurring Tasks

Success comes from the completion of thousands of coordinated actions over time. Recurring tasks ensure that you complete these actions with the required level of consistency. And Google Tasks is the ideal companion for this effective personal development strategy.

Adding a recurring task is very simple. First, add the task you want to make recurring. Here, we’ll use “morning routine” as an example. Then, click on the little pencil symbol shown by the red arrow below.

As shown in the next figure, this takes you to the task details panel, where you can choose “Add date/time.” On the next panel, you can specify the task to “Repeat.”

Next, you get the chance to configure the repetition of the task. Most recurring tasks should happen daily. In this case, simply click “OK” and then you’re done. If you tick off this recurring task, it will automatically return to your task list the next day.

You can also specify the task to repeat only on certain days of the week, month, or year. In this case, simply click on the drop-down menu showing “day” in the image above and follow the intuitive selection process.

I have 12 such recurring tasks that keep me doing the right things day after day. Ticking them off never gets old! Two of these tasks are so-called not-to-dos — items I can only tick off at the end of the day if I have not done them. Not-to-dos offer a strong incentive for improved discipline.

4. Multiple lists

Google Tasks also offers the opportunity to create multiple task lists. Having many lists can quickly become more complicated than useful, but just one or two adds considerable value.

To create a new list, simply go to the top of the Google Tasks panel and click on the drop-down menu beneath the word “TASKS.” As shown below, you will find a “Create new list” option at the bottom of this menu. Click this button and name your list in the next panel.

In my experience, the optimal solution is to have two lists: Today and Later. I often add tasks that do not have specific near-term deadlines. Sometimes, these tasks keep hanging around on my “Today” list, taking up space and making my list look unnecessarily intimidating. That’s where the “Later” list comes in handy.

Moving a task between lists is easy. Start by clicking the pencil symbol to the right of the task. In the next panel, you can change the list in the drop-down menu directly above the “Add date/time” button we used to create the recurring tasks in Step 3 above.

Using the sub-tasks mentioned in Step 2 makes such moves between lists extra convenient. If you move the main task, all its sub-tasks automatically go with it, saving you the effort of having to move each sub-task.

So, whenever a task on your list is not getting done because it’s not of sufficiently high priority, move it to the “Later” list. Every morning, you can take a quick scan through your “Later” list and move tasks back to the “Today” list when their time has come.

5. Using Tasks next to Sheets

Finally, one of the best features of Google Tasks is that it opens next to Google Sheets. This integration creates the perfect opportunity to coordinate your short-term planning in Tasks with your longer-term planning in Sheets.

Spreadsheet applications offer endless possibilities for structured longer-term planning, which we’ll get to in a future article. For now, let’s just find the most convenient way of opening Tasks next to Sheets.

First, go to Google Sheets and choose your desired template from the “Start a new spreadsheet” menu (above). Your new sheet will open (below). Then, give it a name on the top left and click the Google Tasks button on the far right. And Voila! Your combined short- and long-term planning solution is good to go.

For maximum convenience, copy the URL of this page and make it one of your startup pages. In this way, your planning sheet will open automatically each time you open Google Chrome.

If you’re a heavy MS Excel user like me, you can sync your Excel planning file to Sheets. To do this, start by installing the Google Drive desktop application. Once installed, you can select any folder on your computer and sync it to Google Drive. Simply right-click on the selected folder, find the “Google Drive” line, hover over it, and choose “Sync this folder.”

Any Excel file you put in this folder will then be available for selection in Google Sheets. Upon selection in Sheets, the file opens in exactly the same way. You can then set the URL as your starting page, as described previously.

Once this connection is established, any changes you make to this file in Excel will automatically update in Sheets and vice versa.

That’s it!

I hope you derive as much value from this awesome free Google app as I have. Happy planning!

Sleep and Wake Up
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How to be Awake in the Morning and Sleepy at Night

And not the other way round.

sleep and wake up easily

“Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.” — Glen Cook

You’ve probably heard of the circadian rhythm — the natural 24-hour sleep-wake cycle governing the lives of most animals, humans included. For 99% of our history, we moved naturally to this rhythm, guided by nature’s dependable patterns of light, temperature, and sound.

But that’s all in the past. Today, we have the power to artificially manipulate the triggers that regulate our circadian rhythms. And sadly, we’re not blessed with nature’s great sense of rhythm.

The result is a society filled with millions of minds that are sleepy when they should be awake and awake when they should be sleepy. This is robbing many people of much of their lives, and the world of much of its human potential.

If you’re stuck with a deeply confused circadian rhythm, today’s article can help. It can give you back your mornings, often the most productive time of the day. For me, the advice shared below worked so well that I’m usually in full productive swing well before my 6:15 alarm was supposed to go off.

The spread of different productive activities throughout my average day for the first half of 2020, automatically tracked using RescueTime. As shown, plenty of action already happens at 6 a.m. and earlier.

So, without further ado, here are the three steps to a rediscovered circadian rhythm and a mind that’s awake at all the right times.

Step 1: Set Your Latest Allowable Wake-up Time (LAWT)

The first step is also the hardest, at least initially. You need to set your LAWT and make sure it’s set in stone. Weekends, holidays, or late nights don’t change a thing. Your LAWT is law.

Initially, this is a very tough rule, one that puts many people off. But any sleep expert you talk to will back this up. If you want the kind of sleep required for high performance, consistency is the #1 recommendation. Without it, your confused circadian rhythm traps you in a state of permanent jet lag. And that’s no fun.

You can make it easier on yourself by accounting for your natural sleep rhythm. If you’re a night owl, don’t start with a 6 a.m. LAWT. But our society rewards early risers, so it makes sense for owls to push their LAWTs a little earlier over time. It’s possible. I was a notorious late sleeper, but now, I generally get up around 5 a.m. — alarm-free!

Great, so you’re willing to give this a go. Where to start? In my book, the best way to establish this invaluable habit is to find yourself a committed Accountability Buddy.

man on screen

Your Accountability Buddy is someone who will be waiting for you shortly after your LAWT and be quite disappointed if you don’t show up.

My Accountability Buddies are my parents. After I moved to Norway from South Africa, we slowly drifted apart for many years. But when my brother also moved to Norway, leaving their nest well and truly empty, it became clear that something had to be done. That was when I, somewhat reluctantly, decided to give the Accountability Buddy idea a try.

It worked like a charm! For the past 30 months, we’ve talked for about 15 minutes at 6:30 every morning. The habit is now so deeply ingrained that sleeping past 6:15 is not even an option.

And if you can’t find an Accountability Buddy? Well, there are some evil alarm clocks and apps out there that are guaranteed to drag you out of bed. You can also throw a bit of positive motivation into the mix by adding a timed coffee maker to Step 2 outlined below.

Yes, it’s tough initially, but keep your eye on the prize. Your LAWT brings back the beat to your circadian rhythm. And that steady beat will let you shine on the great dancefloor of life 😉

Step 2: Maximize Early Morning Sensory Stimulation

Getting your body and mind fully activated in the early morning is something of an art form. The secret? A quickfire stimulation of all five senses.

Like most music, the first beat of your daily rhythm should be strong and punchy. Don’t hold back!

three lights

Sight is the best place to start. If the sun is out, open every window to invite it in. If not, turn on every light you can find. Light is a key trigger for our circadian rhythm, and a healthy dose at about the same time each morning is a great way to get your life back in sync.

music notes

Next in line: hearing. If you do the smart thing and choreograph your morning routine to your unique soundtrack, this part happens automatically. A loud and inspirational song is a great way to start a fully automated, handcrafted morning routine.

While your wake-up song is playing, take care of the other three senses. For touch, a splash of cold water in the face is always a winner.

splash of water

For taste and smell, coffee is undoubtedly the most popular option. That’s fine, especially if you invest in a timed coffee maker to help pull you out of bed before you LAWT. I’m not a coffee person, so I just put on some fragrant deodorant and take a mouthful of some surprisingly pleasant mouthwash to get that morning taste out of my mouth.

coffee and beans

If you choreograph your sensory barrage well, it can wake you up in two minutes flat. Consistent repetition of this wake-up ritual is a great way to set your internal body clock for natural wakefulness every single morning.

Step 3: Minimize Evening Sensory Stimulation

When evening comes, the exact opposite applies. Everything in your environment should send out subtle signals that bedtime is approaching. Most important: no TV or any other screens.

If you want to be awake in the morning and sleepy at night, you need to give your circadian rhythm every hint imaginable. This means a powerful sensory barrage in the morning and a soothing sensory winddown at night, administered consistently day after day.

Start by defining your desired sleep opportunity — the amount of time you want to be in bed with the intention to sleep. For most people, this should be around 8 hours.

From here, your desired bedtime is only a bit of basic arithmetic away. For example, if you decide on 8 hours of sleep opportunity and your LAWT is set at 6:30 a.m., you should aim to be in bed before 10:30 p.m.

wind down before bed

The 30 minutes before bedtime is sensory winddown time. Dim the lights, put on some soft and relaxing music, and quiet the mind with some relaxing reading, yoga, or meditation.

Initiating your winddown period at the right time takes some practice. Unlike your LAWT, your bedtime is not set in stone. Listen to your body, and start your winddown ritual only when you start feeling sleepy.

So, what to do when bedtime is approaching and you’re still wide awake? My favorite strategy for these nights is to spend some time on the most boring task on my plate. This hastens the onset of sleepiness and ticks something tedious off my to-do list — a lovely double-win.

But whatever you do, don’t indulge in digital entertainment when you should be winding down. Late-night TV or streaming seriously confuses your sleep rhythm, especially if it’s any good. Such sensory and mental stimulation is the polar opposite of what you want during this critical time.

Finally, if social duty calls for a late night out every once in awhile, no problem. Just make sure it doesn’t become a ridiculously late night and religiously maintain your LAWT. Your body will automatically demand an earlier bedtime for the next night or two, restoring balance and keeping your circadian rhythm intact.

To Sum Up

Here is the simple 1–2–3 to a restored circadian rhythm and a mind that actually wants to wake up in the morning:

  1. Set your latest allowable wake-up time in stone. To get through the tough initiation phase, call on the power of an Accountability Buddy or an alarm clock/app that shows no mercy.
  2. Maximize morning sensory stimulation. Build a quickfire ritual that covers all five senses and runs every morning.
  3. Wind down at the right time. Determine your ideal bedtime to make sure you give yourself enough sleep opportunity. Your environment should send every conceivable hint that sleepytime is approaching.

In today’s technological age of badly confused circadian rhythms, being able to wake up alert and refreshed at a decent hour is a huge advantage. Rediscover your rhythm, and this advantage is yours!

All images were custom-made for this article by Janet Cloete.

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How to Build a Morning Routine that Lasts a Lifetime

Self-help gurus have been preaching the virtues of morning routines forever. There’s a simple reason for that: Morning routines work. Time to make them work for you — permanently.

“Your morning routine generates a 10x return for good or for bad. Make it good.” — Todd Stocker

Todd is right: Your morning echos throughout your day. Get ahead early, live life on your terms, and set up an even better tomorrow. Or fall behind early, live life playing catch-up, and repeatedly sabotage tomorrow.

Just like your morning echos throughout your day, your day echos throughout your life. A good morning routine will help you get more stuff done, sleep better, reduce stress, learn faster, build better relationships, eat healthier, and move more. Every one of these effects offers serious compounding benefits when done year in and year out.

But I’m sure you know this stuff already. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be here. Most likely, you also know from experience that all the morning routine advice in the world (and there’s a lot) won’t get you to follow through with the required level of consistency.

It’s time to address this problem once and for all. Here are the three steps that will take you from recognizing the importance of morning routines to enjoying the benefits of morning routines.

Step 1: Commit

Back in the noughties, there were still some tough initiation rituals at South African universities. The hostel I attended introduced us to a specially designated tormentor of first-year students whom we had to address as “General.” And there’s one quote from the General that stuck with me through the years:

“Jarre, dis of fokken alles of fokken niks!” — General Greeff

It loses most of its zing when translated to English, but here goes: “Freshmen, it’s either f***ing everything or f***ing nothing!”

This sage advice applies to a surprisingly large swath of life, morning routines included. If you half-ass your attempt at establishing a morning routine, it simply isn’t going to work.

Step 2: Design

If you want a morning routine that lasts, you must invest considerable time and effort into its design. The finished product must be uniquely yours. It must fit your life like a glove.

The design process involves plenty of research, trial, and modification, especially if your life is relatively complex (e.g., small kids or frequent travels). It will take time before your creation truly clicks. And it’s during this time that most people give up and return to randomness.

Getting through this trying period requires an architect’s mindset. Your job is to design the most practical and rewarding morning routine the world has ever seen. If you fully commit to this fascinating challenge, the difficult formative weeks of your morning routine actually become fun!

Clear this hurdle, and your routine becomes 10x more likely to stick. Not only will your creation add substantial value to your life, making it easy to maintain, it will also claim a special place in your heart, making it hard to give up. If humans get deeply invested in something, they rarely let go.

Step 3: Choreograph

If you want to permanently embed your handcrafted morning routine into your life, add the finishing touch: Choreograph your routine to a custom-made soundtrack.

I’m not talking about simply throwing a few of your favorite songs together on a playlist. Your soundtrack should contain a good variety of audio inputs, and, ideally, it should vary subtly from day to day to keep things interesting.

As an example, my morning routine playlists (I have one for every day of the week) contain inspiring music at a high volume, yoga instructions, background music at a low volume, and guided meditations.

Right after I get out of bed, I go to my computer, launch that specific day’s playlist in two seconds using Launchy, and then everything happens automatically from there. My mind effortlessly glides from one activity to the next, guided by these carefully designed and automated audio triggers.

If you get to this stage, you’re set for life. Executing a beautifully designed and choreographed morning routine of your own making is an awesome experience you simply won’t see any point in ever giving up.

A final note on families: Ideally, you would enjoy your handcrafted and choreographed routine together each morning. But that’s a tough ask in the real world. Yes, share your routine whenever possible, but, for all those other days, make full use of wireless headphone technology and execute your well-choreographed routine without bothering anyone.

Summary

Here’s the simple 1–2–3 to a lifelong morning routine:

  1. Fully commit or don’t bother. There’s nothing in between. Doing it properly takes time but promises 1000x returns.
  2. Assume the role of an architect to put together a handcrafted routine that is uniquely yours.
  3. Assume the role of a choreographer to bring an effortless flow to your routine using custom-made soundtracks.

18 months of perfect morning routine consistency have made me a better person in every way imaginable. And, since better people create a better world, I sincerely hope you commit to design and choreograph yours!

All images were custom-made for this article by Janet Cloete.

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Season 1 Summary: Productivity

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

Contributing to society is essential for human happiness. It’s also vital for overcoming our great 21st-century sustainability challenge: lifting billions to decent living standards without destroying the planet. That’s why the productivity chapter of Supermorning was one of the more important ones.

So, let’s start with the philosophical foundation behind sustainable high productivity. 

Finding meaning in work

We all want to be productive, but, most of the time, we just don’t feel like working. Overcoming this disconnect requires a simple ingredient: meaning.

  1. Why do you work? There are two main pathways: You work to earn money to build a good life or you work towards an inspiring purpose doing something you would happily do for free. 
  2. Debt, work, and consumption. The first option typically gets people stuck in a vicious cycle between high consumption and stressful work. This cycle is responsible for most of the unhappiness and environmental destruction in the middle-class today. 
  3. Liberty, purpose, and obsession. The alternative is a virtuous cycle between liberty, purpose, and high life efficiency. This cycle easily leads to obsession, which could become unhealthy if left unchecked. 
  4. Life is long enough to do special things. A truly worthwhile purpose is a multi-decade project. Over such a time frame, you can produce awesome things thanks to the power of compounding. 

In short, working only for money and consumption leads to low life satisfaction and high environmental destruction. On the other hand, if you find true meaning in your work, consumption becomes almost irrelevant, and outstanding contributions to society become possible. 

Effective planning

One of the key ingredients of meaningful work is complexity. And complex tasks get a whole lot more rewarding (and less frustrating) when planned well. 

  • Smart work. Proper prior planning is the difference between the hard daily grind and smart inspiring progress. It should happen on three distinct timescales: days, months, and years. 
  • Daily planning. Everyone should have a daily to-do list. Google Tasks offers the three key features of a good to-do list: user-friendly, always accessible, and recurring tasks. 
  • Monthly planning. Monthly planning is about coordination with others, coherence over time, and getting interesting ideas out of your head. A Gantt chart in Google Sheets next to Google Tasks is just the right tool for the job. 
  • Long-term planning. This plan keeps you pointed in the right direction year in and year out. Over a couple of decades, such consistent progress can take your life to awesome places 🙂 

But a good plan is just the start. Putting this plan into action is where the rubber meets the road. 

Time management

Time is our one truly non-renewable resource. We all get the same amount of it every day. And we all get a chance to spend it wisely. 

  1. Planning time. Don’t skip the planning phase. 
  2. Execution time. Make sure you have the five E’s well covered: Effectiveness, Engagement, Environment, Efficiency, and Energy. High efficiency needs sharp focus, the right tools and expertise, an ordered workplan, and great information organization. 
  3. Communication time. Here, we switch from E’s to P’s: Purpose, Preparation, Presentation, Positivity, and Participation. These P’s take a bit of practice, but they’ll give you much more value from your collaborative efforts. 
  4. Recharge time. Never push beyond breaking point to a highly unproductive (and unhealthy) crash. Find your ideal recharge rhythm. It may well be something different from the societal norm. 

All this time management theory is great, but it’s not going to work if you rely too heavily on willpower. We need to make sure that good productive actions happen automatically. 

A productive environment

The topic of smart environment design is a regular Supermorning feature. And it gets a cameo in the productivity chapter too. 

  1. The perfect working environment. Remove all friction from the process of adding value and line up several creative relaxation mechanisms to keep your mind fresh and healthy. 
  2. Digital mastery. Install RescueTime to protect yourself against the horde of digital distractions out there. Then manipulate friction to make good digital actions natural and bad ones tedious. 
  3. Efficient collaboration. Use email sparingly, turn off those distracting notifications, and keep your inbox clean. Use your calendar to avoid being interrupted, while remaining a 100% reliable collaborator. 
  4. Proactive workload shaping. Master the “art of no” to maintain a manageable workload of agreeable tasks. The best tasks contain complexity, autonomy, and a link between effort and reward. 

With this environment firmly in place, productivity becomes second nature. And this is a big win both for you and your society. 

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Save the World by Embracing Your Creativity

Monday’s post outlined how environmental destruction could disrupt the valuable ecological services we currently get for free from Mother Nature. If Nature goes on strike, our lives will suddenly get very uncomfortable. 

Less consumption is the single best way to address this problem. And luckily, a sustainable lifestyle offers much more health, wealth, and productivity than the consumerist norm. 

Health and wealth were covered over the past two days, so we’ll explore the link between sustainability and productivity today. 

The double benefit of a more creative life

The pursuit of happiness can be broadly split into two classes: consumption and creation.

  • Consumption typically offers plenty of short-term pleasure and serious long-term problems.
  • Creation is much more effective in creating lasting life satisfaction and can also be surprisingly pleasurable in the moment. 

From an environmental point of view, the consumption pathway contributes to the problem, while the creative pathway often contributes to creating solutions. 

Thus, while a creative pursuit of happiness will certainly reduce your environmental footprint, you can further increase the benefit by creating sustainable solutions for society. 

Sustainability and productivity

Both consumption and creation require time and energy. The more we create, the less time and energy we have left for consumption. 

In addition, both a creative and consumptive lifestyle tends to reinforce itself. Consumerism typically traps people in the vicious cycle of debt, work and consumption shown below. 

The creative alternative to this cycle is shown below. The only danger with this virtuous cycle is that you can become so caught up in your creative work that it affects your health and relationships. But this is issue fairly easy to identify and manage. 

Sustainability, contribution, and happiness

Creators simply have less time and less drive for environmentally destructive consumption, automatically making their lives more sustainable. They also continuously contribute to society, which makes them happy, both in the short term (flow) and the long term (esteem and self-actualization). 

So, just like health and wealth, productivity contributes strongly both to sustainability and life satisfaction. Go on, embrace your creativity. It might just save the world 🙂  

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Recap: Productive Environment

And so we come to the end of another Supermorning chapter: Productivity. 

Over the past week, we looked at four ways to tie together insights from this chapter into an environment that makes inspirational levels of productivity fully automatic.

Let’s check out the summary. 

The checklist

  1. The perfect working environment.
    • Remove all friction from the process of adding value. Your work space should be perfect. 
    • Line up a wide range of creative relaxation mechanisms to keep your mind fresh and healthy. 
  2. Digital mastery.
    • Install RescueTime to protect yourself against the horde of digital distractions out there. 
    • Intelligently add and remove friction to make good digital actions natural and bad ones tedious. 
  3. Efficient collaboration.
    • Use email sparingly, turn off those distracting notifications, and keep your inbox clean.
    • Block off focused work in your calendar and employ reminders to achieve 100% reliability. 
  4. Proactive workload shaping.
    • Master the “art of no” to maintain a manageable workload of agreeable tasks. 
    • Always be on the hunt for meaningful work containing complexity, autonomy and a link between effort and reward. 

Sustainable productivity is essential for fulfillment and self-esteem in the individual and for progress in society. Mastering this art is a win for you and all those around you. 

Give it a go! I think you’ll like it 🙂

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Shaping Your Workload for Sustained Productivity

Our final environmental trigger for a high level of sustainable productivity is created by proactively shaping your responsibilities at work. 

True, you cannot just freely pick and choose all your tasks. But, as you gradually build your capabilities over the years, you’ll undoubtedly win more freedom to shape your responsibilities. 

Shape them well, and you’ll find that sustained productivity comes naturally. 

Learn to say “no”

“No” is one of the most difficult words for productive people to say. But this little syllable is key to protecting you from burnout. 

So, if you often feel overwhelmed, commit to saying no to future responsibilities until you get yourself back to a good balance. 

Ironically, having too many obligations reduces your ability to meet those obligations. On the flip side, controlling your responsibilities through the “art of no” allows you to get a lot more done. 

Although this added productive power can be used to take on greater responsibility, it can also be invested in two other interesting ways: 

  1. Complete your current responsibilities to a higher quality standard. This is especially valuable when applied to strategically important tasks that can open many future doors.
  2. Invest this extra productive capacity in the accumulation of intangible assets. 

Both of these can pay off handsomely in the long run. 

Load up on perfect tasks

A perfect task is something you genuinely want to do and does not have a stressful deadline attached to it. 

Sadly, most tasks are the exact opposite. But perfect tasks are not unicorns. They really exist and you should do your very best to track them down and make them yours. 

If you manage to fill up most of your responsibilities with perfect tasks, sustained productivity is guaranteed.  

What makes a perfect task?

Malcolm Gladwell gives an interesting characterization of meaningful work in his book Outliers:

Meaningful work always involves complexity, autonomy and a relationship between effort and reward. All three elements must be present for work to be meaningful. 

This makes a lot of sense. Complexity makes the task stimulating. Autonomy gives you a sense of ownership. And a relationship between effort and reward gives you motivation. 

So, as you gradually gain more power to shape your responsibilities, keep this simple three part formula in mind. Filling your life with meaningful work is one of the smartest moves out there. 

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Efficient Collaboration

Doing special things in our complex modern world requires plenty of interaction with others. Such collaborative efforts will take plenty of time out of your life and can be quite stressful. 

Building an environment where collaboration automatically happens as cleanly and efficiently as possible is therefore a great investment.

Let’s set this up. 

Email

First thing: turn off email notifications on you computer and your phone.  

You should only check email when between tasks. That little banner popping up in the corner of your screen distracting you from the task you were doing is costing you and your company dear. 

Emails are not supposed to be answered immediately. If someone needs your immediate attention, they should call or message you. 

Second, completely clean your inbox at least once per week. 

Have well organized archiving folders to which you can move any important emails from your inbox in your weekly cleaning session. Make sure you have answered all important emails and delete the rest. 

Third, don’t overuse email. 

When communicating about anything that will require lots of back and forth, call the other person. Then send a summary of the key insights from your call by email afterwards. 

In general, try your best not to contribute to your own or others’ email overload. 

Calendar

Your calendar is a powerful tool for keeping your collaborations productive and avoiding unnecessary distraction. 

If you have a busy-looking calendar, an important first step is to book regular blocks of focused time. 

Make sure these blocks show that you are busy to discourage people from booking meetings during those times. Of course, this should be done within reason to ensure you remain open to important meetings.  

Make sure you plan your most demanding tasks for your focused time sessions.

Simpler tasks where interruptions are less costly should be done during times when your door is open. 

Reminders

Reminders represent one of the few cases when your phone should call for your attention. 

Make sure you set reminders for all important commitments well in advance of the time you need to be there. 

Never miss an appointment and never be late. Reliability is a critical trait in the professional world. Smart use of your calendar can ensure that this trait becomes yours. 

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