Today I woke up 30 minutes early (5:30AM instead of 6), feeling very awake. I love when this happens because:
- It's not so early that I feel like I've meaningfully altered my sleep cycle.
- At the earliest possible moment of my day I'm already 30 whole minutes ahead of schedule.
If I had elected to get the 30 minutes of extra sleep instead of just starting my day, I would have likely felt less awake and less excited about my day. Win/Win for choosing the opposite.
A habit that amplifies the simple pleasure of being ahead of schedule is time-blocking all of my days. I do this every night on google calendar, for the following day. It felt so good to drag my morning routine block up 30 minutes, and watch the effects trickle down through my entire day.
This blog post was originally scheduled to be written at 9:30AM, but due to my choices (micro and macro) I started it at 8:45 instead. Here are some of those choices:
- Choosing to get out of bed and not sleep longer (micro)
- Choosing to move much of my schedule earlier instead of just starting my day with unplanned free time (micro)
- Choosing to stop work on my first scheduled task before I felt completely drained (micro)[^1]
- Choosing to generally make my recurring time blocks bigger than they need to be (macro)
There are a million more choices I could write, but these seem the most relevant to right now.
Some choices also put me less ahead of schedule:
- Choosing to take an unplanned 15 minute break
- Choosing to spend 15 extra minutes on a problem so that I could understand the solution a bit better
Another name for this blog post could have been "The math of choices": $30 + 45 - 15 - 15 = 45$ Minutes AoS
Being ahead of schedule is more important for me now more than ever as I attempt NaNoWriMo (Which has promptly become defunct the first year I attempt it. On less confident days I would be tempted to say "story of my life" here). I need to give myself every advantage I can as I pursue a time and energy-intensive goal. The math of each choice has a noticeable impact in how achievable this goal feels to me. Right now it's 9:30AM, when I originally was planning to start this post, and my attitude towards NaNoWriMo is like I'm up 28-3 points in the Superbowl. Oh, fuck.
[^1]: Also macro, because a general principle I think about is "Stop at the height of your day". I apply this more broadly to individual tasks because I often find that my energy is more task dependent than day dependent.