The virtue of getting up early

“Wir stehen frueher auf!”

(Province of Saxony-Anhalt Motto)

Last year when visiting my family in Germany, I had to drive again from Berlin to Magdeburg. On the way one passes the province of Saxony-Anhalt sign that has the province motto: “We get up earlier [than everyone else]”. Thinking about new years resolutions, I made getting up earlier one too.
These are some experiences of the first attempt of doing so this year. Still suffering a bit from a jet lag from Europe this was actually easier than expected.

In order not to blow the newly gained time on useless activities, it is best to implement some policies upfront like:

• Do not touch computer before sunrise,
• Do not blow newly gained time on reading newspapers or watching TV, particularly business news or RT, or the progress of the Ron Paul election campaign (ok the latter is not necessarily useless, but a huge time consumer),
• Do not allow yourself to rationalize going back to bed. Once you are up, you should stay up.

As a result:

• You get more stuff done,
• You have a much more relaxed start into the day,
• You can exercise without rush,
• You can enjoy an elaborate and healthy breakfast,
• ...

To get an idea my morning schedule today looked like this:
4:30 Getting up
4:30 - 5:45 Morning exercise: stretches (dynamic & static), push-ups, sit-ups, free weight exercise, Karate Katas, Tai Chi Chen form
5:45 - 6:00 Insight meditation
6:00 - 6:40 Breakfast: Miso soup, oat meal, omelet on home-baked toast, grapefruit AND dish washing
6:40 - 7:00 Washroom: the usual but a bit more relaxed and elaborate... not yet comparable to a beauty spa :)
7:00 - 7:30 Brain training and sharpening engineering basics (was explained earlier here)
7:30 - 7:45 Getting outside with freshly brewed coffee to take sunrise picture (see top of post)
7:45 - 8:00 journalling

Now at 8:00 am, where I usually get up in a hurry the entire morning routine is already finished and the day has not even started yet. I actually used some spare time after that to quickly throw together this blog post.

The big downside of this approach is that one needs to get to bed earlier to get enough sleep. By moving potential fitness activities in the morning and cutting back on useless blog reading activities, soap watching, or other TV in the evening this seems doable. In some cases fitness activities in the evening (i.e. in my case going to Karate club) may cut this attempt short. I’ll have to experiment a little with pre-sleeping or getting up a little later on those days. Another issue are noisy roommates that potentially enjoy all these time-wasting activities all night long. My solution for this issue are 3M heavy duty earplugs (thanks Ivan!) or UVEX German military issue earplugs that are commonly used for practice on granate throwing stands. With proper “protection” there is no disturbance.

The DG crowd also came up with an article about this topic and have interesting ideas too.

Comments and ideas welcome.