I’ve always considered myself to be a night person, and I’ve never liked getting up early. I usually stay up late, usually doing nothing useful. As someone who likes to work out a lot, and train for uber long events like Ironman triathlons and ultra-distance trail runs, I’m always trying to find balance between spending time with my family and getting the hours logged running, on the bike, or in the pool.
One of my close friends, Marc Kaï, told me about how when he was in graduate school he used to get up and work out at 5:00 am because that was the only time he had available to do so. I’ve dreamed of being that “morning person”, but have never been able to consistently get up early and make it happen.
Somehow after reading Atomic Habits I have been able to make it happen. And, I’ve realized that this is what I’ll have to do if I want to have a happy marriage, and spend time with my kids as.
I started getting up five minutes earlier each day over the past few weeks and today the alarm went off at 5:35 am. By the end of the week it’ll be 5:10 am. That is absolutely crazy to me. I’ve also started getting my workouts done early in the morning, too. Both of these feats would have been just dreams as of a few weeks ago. There are two big takeaways here.
First, I need to continue getting up early and getting my workouts in early in the morning. It’s the best thing for my family, and it also has positive side effects of making my day more productive, and I’m not always worrying about getting a run in.
Second, making small, incremental changes (getting up five minutes earlier each day) has been the key to making this happen.
I’m trying to carry this idea into other areas of my life as well. This blog is a great example. Today marks the nineteenth day in a row I have written and posted a blog. I hadn’t even ever written nineteen posts in the past ten years before this. The key to this success was just writing for two minutes. Not all the posts are stellar, but I’m writing each day, and I’m confident that over time I’ll be writing for more than two minutes (this post!), and the quality will hopefully go up as well.
Photo by Jonas Weckschmied on Unsplash