Keeping the Pledge

In the April 7 issue, I told you that I had made a promise to myself to start waking up early every day – the habit that was perhaps the most important factor in boosting my personal productivity when I did it 25 years ago.

Over the last five or six years, I’d been staying up later each night watching social media because I somehow became addicted to binging on these super-short-attention-span news feeds. By the time 2025 rolled around, I was turning off the lights at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and getting up at 9:00 or 10:00 am!

According to people who study habits, publicly announcing a pledge you make is an important step in sticking to it. That’s why I told you about it. I also told K and my boys.

They didn’t believe I could do it, but so far, I’ve been up every morning at 6:00 or 6:30 – and, surprisingly, it’s been easy. I wake up with energy and feeling optimistic because I know I have two or three extra hours to get to work on goals that are important to me.

What is not working well is my plan to go to bed several hours earlier each night so I can get the seven hours of sleep I believe I need to work productively the following day.

Since I began my early-to-rise project two weeks ago, I managed to get to bed before midnight only once. The other 13 or 14 days, my going-to-sleep time has remained pretty much as it was.

The good news is that it’s not destroying my daily productivity. That’s because I seem to be doing fine on about six hours of sleep. But I’m making up for that deficit by taking a half-hour nap once or twice during the day when my brain is so foggy I can’t even pretend I can keep working well.

Experts say that a major first step in solidifying a positive habit is performing it for 13 days in a row. I’ve passed that barrier, and I do feel certain that I won’t slide back. But is there any hope that I can create a positive habit of getting to bed two or three hours earlier?

You’d think that since forming good habits and breaking bad ones are both about establishing new patterns of behavior, the psychological challenges of each would be the same. But based on my experience, that isn’t true. So I’m thinking that the experts that make a living in the resolutions/habits market will have to develop new and very different rules and protocols for each. And if I’m right, it behooves me to help the resolutions/habits industry by pointing out this theory I’ve cooked up by writing more about it and, most importantly, by creating shibboleths that make it easy for anyone that likes my idea to promote it to others.

The first step is to find out if this insight that I believe is so new and revolutionary is that and not (as I have experienced before) an idea that’s been well-known by experts in the field since forever.

To get a jump on it, I asked “Nigel” to investigate it for me. Since phrasing the questions is so important in getting answers for AI, I did my best to ask my question in a way I hoped would get me the responses I was looking for.

I’ve provided “Nigel’s” response below (in “Worth Considering”) for those interested in this.

On a (Somewhat) Related Note… 

Three months ago, I bought an Oura ring.

Actual photo of my hand and the Oura ring!

And I’m liking it!

It’s one of those gadgets that tracks a bunch of health and wellness metrics, including sleep, activity, readiness, and stress levels.

Like smartwatches and armbands, it uses sensors to monitor your body’s biometrics – e.g., heart rate, temperature, and heart rate variability. The data collected is analyzed and presented through a related app – in this case, the Oura app – which I’ve downloaded onto my phone. And that means that every morning I get to find out all sorts of interesting but largely irrelevant details about my body’s response to the work I did the day before.

It’s something I look forward to. It’s becoming addictive.

I suppose I should claim that I bought the ring because I was concerned about my health. After all, I had a stroke two years ago, a knee replacement last year, and I’ll be 75 in October.

And maybe that was a part of my motivation. But there might have been something else I hadn’t admitted to myself. I bought the ring just a week after I began my losing-weight-by-chemical injections diet.

In other words, I’m telling you this not only to remind you how incredibly anal I am – which is something you already know if you’ve read any of my books and/or essays on productivity and time management – but also to inform you of the incredible degree of vanity I have retained over the years, a personal quality most of my coevals lost decades ago.

Anyway, continuing with my effort to apprise you of personal details – accomplishments and humiliations – that you have no reason to care about, here is what I just found out from the Oura app about some of the metrics related to my efforts to make changes in my sleeping habits:

* When I started, my average bedtime was 1:22 am and my average wake-up time was almost exactly 7 hours later at 8:26 am.

* Since I vowed to wake up earlier, my average wake-up time has been 6:04 am – which is great. But my average bedtime has been 1:23 am! That means I’ve cut my average sleep time from 7 hours and 4 minutes to 5 hours and 21 minutes. (But I am averaging about an hour a day of resting/sleeping, which seems to be enough to blow out the brain fog and push my heart rate above 160 bpm at some time during my midday training.)

* I was awarded 19 crowns from Oura. (I don’t know what that means.)