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Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

rodrigohaenggi.com

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Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#81

Post by huhtenberg »

m_for_monkey wrote: post #49
AJ007 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My uncensored opinion is that the original article is garbage. Waking up early isn't about what you do in the morning, its about what you do the night before (or fail to do.) Forcing yourself to wake up early for the sake of waking up early is destructive as it means your body has not gotten enough sleep yet. Your going to either have impeded judgement capability, diminished work energy or both. A lot of people prete…

3. Don't do drugs. Most importantly, do not consume caffeine. No coffee, no tea!

That would depend on whether you are fast- or slow- caffeine metabolizer. For example, I am of a latter kind - I can drink few shots of espresso, then go to bed in an hour after that and pull of a full-night sleep.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#82

Post by cowkingdeluxe »

m_for_monkey wrote: post #49
AJ007 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My uncensored opinion is that the original article is garbage. Waking up early isn't about what you do in the morning, its about what you do the night before (or fail to do.) Forcing yourself to wake up early for the sake of waking up early is destructive as it means your body has not gotten enough sleep yet. Your going to either have impeded judgement capability, diminished work energy or both. A lot of people prete…

3. Don't do drugs. Most importantly, do not consume caffeine. No coffee, no tea!

Green tea has a lot less caffeine than black tea.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#83

Post by jonstjohn »

m_for_monkey wrote: post #49
AJ007 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My uncensored opinion is that the original article is garbage. Waking up early isn't about what you do in the morning, its about what you do the night before (or fail to do.) Forcing yourself to wake up early for the sake of waking up early is destructive as it means your body has not gotten enough sleep yet. Your going to either have impeded judgement capability, diminished work energy or both. A lot of people prete…

3. Don't do drugs. Most importantly, do not consume caffeine. No coffee, no tea!

I'm a green tea drinker and I've actually read that small amounts of caffeine throughout the day are okay. Seems to be working for me. Went from coffee to black tea to green tea and have been primarily drinking green tea for 2-3 years now.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#84

Post by jonstjohn »

Periodic wrote: post #42
benwr wrote: post #14

I have tried nearly all of these, and the only thing that consistently works for me is forcing myself to go to bed by midnight, and preferably at 23:00. On nights when I get less than seven and a half hours of sleep, it's like I'm a different person immediately after waking up: I don't care what my future or previous self wants. I only want to go back to sleep. On nights when I give myself eight or more hours to slee…

This is what works best for me when I need to get up. I have the problem that there are always a million more things I want to do before I go to bed. If I let myself do them I will be wide awake and focused until I hit a wall and have to go to bed, but this time will be about 2 hours after I should I have gone to bed and the next day I'll be terribly groggy if I get up at the normal time. The most important thing for…

For me the night-time is the only quiet time to get work done (full-time job, family), but I still need to get up about 5:40 AM. I aim to get to sleep by 10:30 but usually work up until that point. I know I sometimes suffer when trying to fall to sleep, but I guess it's a trade-off I'm willing to make.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#86

Post by napoleoncomplex »

mvgoogler wrote: post #63
napoleoncomplex wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One neat app I've discovered lately that helps me with this tremendously is Sleep as Android[1]. It has a "CAPTCHA" mode for alarms, where you have to do some additional task to wake up. It has a few choices for the task, but the most amazing one is QR Code scanning. You "teach" the phone a QR code of your choice, and when the alarm goes off you have to scan the code to turn it off. The use case is printing a QR code…

That's pretty cool. My low-tech version is putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room :-)

It's what I did before, the problem was that the point of the app is sleep-tracking and waking you up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle. This requires the phone being somewhere on the bed so it can register your movement. The negative side-effect of this is of course being able to turn off the alarm with your eyes more or less closed by blindly grabbing at the phone conveniently placed at arm's reach.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#87

Post by kolev »

grecy wrote: post #31

11. Get enough exercise. I find when I'm getting regular exercise, I open my eyes in the morning and I'm awake and ready to go. It's the opposite when I've been lazing around for a few weeks not doing my physical activity.

This math doesn't work - you're gonna wake up early to have more productive hours, but you'll waste the gain by exercising.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#88

Post by david_shaw »

I wrote a web application to help me with this very issue in late 2010. It's actually become fairly popular thanks to sites like HN and reddit, and recently passed the 100k Facebook "like" mark--a big achievement for me personally.

The URL is http://sleepyti.me and it's totally free.

Disclaimer: Sorry for plugging my own project, but it seemed too relevant to this discussion to ignore.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#89

Post by grecy »

kolev wrote: post #87
grecy wrote: post #31

11. Get enough exercise. I find when I'm getting regular exercise, I open my eyes in the morning and I'm awake and ready to go. It's the opposite when I've been lazing around for a few weeks not doing my physical activity.

This math doesn't work - you're gonna wake up early to have more productive hours, but you'll waste the gain by exercising.

You are right - the amount of time you wake up early may be cancelled out by the amount of time you exercise. Two things to note:

1. The title of the article is "Waking up early", not "how to have more productive hours in the day"

2. I'm personally much more interested in the health benefits gained by exercising so I have no doubt it's worth it.

Re: Waking up early, 10 tips that worked for me

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

wtracy wrote: post #17
parbo wrote: post #3

You only need one tip: get a kid. Won't help with productivity though.

How about a cat? There is no snooze button on a cat that wants to be fed. :-)

I trained my ex-cat. I'd get up when I damned well felt like it.

My ex-girlfriend at the time, would get up to feed cats.

So he'd bug her on the mornings she was in, and snuggle up with me on the mornings she wasn't.

Same cat learned not to beg at the dinner table for food. Even when sushi was being served. And yes, he loved salmon. Begging resulted in treats -- of wasabi applied to the nose.

He learned after the 2nd time.

TL;DR: with a sufficiently trainable cat, this doesn't work.

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