How to wake up by 6:30 every morning - for the serious procrastinator By markovich in Op-Ed Sun Nov 05, 2006 at 12:18:45 AM EST Tags: sleep wakup sleep (all tags)
	Many of us want to wake up earlier in the day. We stay up all day doing nothing but think how much more nothing we could get done if we woke up even earlier. The problem is - we are procrastinators, and we just keeping pushing the decision to wake up earlier till later. I am a procrastinator! I admit it! I'm lazy, I have zero self control and even less self discipline. My life consists of simply rolling down the path of least resistance. You know what I've done? I've gone and taken the biggest changes I wanted to make in my life, and modified them so that they BECOME the path of least resistance. The first lesson is this - how to wake up by 6:30 every morning.

ADVERTISEMENT Sponsor: rusty This space intentionally left blank ...because it's waiting for your ad. So why are you still reading this? Come on, get going. Read the story, and then get an ad. Alright stop it. I'm not going to say anything else. Now you're just being silly. STOP LOOKING AT ME! I'm done! comments (24) active | buy ad ADVERTISEMENT This is not the first how to wake up early article. There are hundreds of them constantly floating past on digg and delicious and reddit. The problem with those articles in my opinion is that they require a little effort on my part. They require me to change something about my fat lazy self, and I simply refuse to. Are you sure you want to wake up earlier? Seriously, dude, you really want to wake up earlier? Let me destroy the first illusion that you have - that if you wake up earlier you will have a longer day. No, you will not! Your day length will stay the same, because you'll be going to bed earlier. If everyone you know is awake till 12, then stay up later and wake up later. Nothing wrong with that. You know how you used to code to 11p.m? Forget that shit if you wake up by 6.30. By 9pm you will be brain dead, as your 9pm in body clock time will now be your 2am. Why is Markovich waking up earlier then? I'm waking up earlier because I do software development at home, and I prefer to have my extra hours at the start of the day instead of at the end of the day. I start work by 7, and finish by 6, instead of starting by 11 and finishing by 10. It gives me a lot of uninterrupted time before lunch, and the lunch lethargy does not spoil my efficiency. Furthermore, I need to sometimes meet with people by 7:30, and instead of feeling like shit at having to wake up at the unaccustomed time, I'm waking up at my usual time. The meat I tried many different methods of waking up earlier. The problem has always been this morning lethargy. You are in bed, you are warm and comfortable, you can easily switch off the alarm clock, why get up out of bed! I don't have a boss,  I don't have anybody controlling me! I do what I want! So I sat down and drew up the battle plans. Morning lethargy is the biggest enemy we have, that is the brother that we have to conquer with whatever system we use. I figured and figured, planned and strategized, mapped out and refined, till I finally discovered the formula. Preparatory Step 1 Go get some sleeping pills. Look, I never said we were going to do this clean and healthy, we are trying to make a bloody change here, and some blood has to be spillt. Go to the drugstore and buy some sleeping pills. Just get something light, you'll need only about 7 - enough for a week or so. Preparatory Step 2 Go to the shop and buy a weeks worth of apple juice or coca cola or whatever your favorite non-water drink is. I'm not talking coffee or anything you need to prepare, I'm talking something that you can keep beside your bed and that you can easily grab and drink. Preparatory Step 3 Get something you eat for breakfast that is in a package. Something like sweet bread or crackers or so. The plan Make sure your PC is in your bedroom with the monitor pointed at such an angle that you can see the screen perfectly. Go to the bios of your pc. Set your PC to startup automatically by 6:30a.m. Set your alarm clock to startup by 6:20a.m. Set your alarm clock to Radio, preferably, talk radio, not music radio. Put it at the far end of your room. Download a whole bunch of stand-up comedy routines that you have not watched. Make a link to one of them in your autostart menu. Set VLC so that it startsup in fullscreen mode. Strategically place bread and the juice beside your bed. By 9pm on the first day, swallow one of the sleeping tablets. As an optional step, put on some Jenna and squeeze out some tadpoles. The Effect Now what happens in the morning? By 6:20, your alarm clock goes on. The guy will start talking. This will probably not wake you, but it will disturb you enough to take you out of deep sleep into a restless slumber. By 6:30, your PC will go on. This sound alone will wake you up, because of the strong body association between PC and mental work. So you are now basically is a state of light slumber, and left alone, you would fall back into sleep. But as soon as your PC goes one, the standup comedy goes on. Well, what happens here. Even though you are half asleep, your brain will listen to some of the jokes, and as soon as one funny joke comes through, your brain will suddenly kickstart, and you will open your eyes to look at the screen. As you watch, you will discover you are thirsty, so you will drink from the water. You will discover your snack and start eating. So you are there eating and watching stand up comedy and drinking juice. In 10 minutes, you will admit to yourself - aww shit, I'm fully awake. It's friggin great, and it's such a gentle awakening. It's not like those terrible BEEEP, BEEEEP, BEEEP of the alarm clocks. Alternative My original strategy was this - shock myself into awakening by tricking my brain into believing that something horrible was happening. So I put the sounds of people screaming and dying on the PC. Well, trust me, that's something you don't want to do. Those sounds got absorbed into my dream and for some reason, it was my family screaming and dying. Which is a sucky way to wake up on a monday. Conclusion If you're a serious procrastinator, this method makes waking up a much more pleasant experience than staying asleep. Your brain gets activated immediately, and you are awake in 15 minutes without any problems at all. Try it tonight!

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What time do you get up? 5:00 5% 5:30 4% 6:00 8% 6:30 8% 7:00 15% 7:30 13% 8:00 11% 8:30 1% 9:00 9% Later 15% Whenever she is gone! 6% Votes: 86 Results | Other Polls

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