Path lark

- Are you an owl?
- It was once. Then I had to accustom myself to function effectively at any time of the day. But loving the morning is not necessary for this. I didn’t fall in love.

Max Fry - “Yellow Metal Key”


This article is a description of personal experience. I want to say right away who will NOT be interested. Those who do not have a permanent job or other production activities. Those who can spend 4 or more hours a day playing computer games, social. networks and other time killers and do not worry at all about this. Freelancers, for whom night is the best time to work, because there are a minimum of distractions. Most people without children. And other things that do not bother with the speed of the passage of time.
With whom I would like to share my experience: with those who dream of an extra hour in a day, and not in order to oversleep it.

Preamble

I am a pronounced “owl”, as I recall. In the event of a vacation, New Year's holiday, or some kind of upheaval that breaks out of the work schedule, in a matter of 2-3 days I switched to the mode in which I went to bed after breakfast. I am delighted with the night time and always felt sorry for the “pigeon” people for the fact that they were deprived of these periods of calm, romance and even some kind of magic. And I was depressed by the ubiquitous “larks” oriented work mode. In short, to imagine myself voluntarily waking up earlier than I thought it was normal for me to go to bed, I could only as a joke.
About four years ago, after reading David Allen's Getting Things Done and a couple of articles by Steve Pavlina, I was fascinated by the topic of task optimization, and self-development came to the fore in the list of life priorities. Pumping awareness - the first tool in personal growth. To a large extent, aikido exercises helped here (and developing awareness helps in training). And rolled two insights. First, the path of self-development and creation is no less exciting, interesting and romantic than self-destruction under the motto "I'm not going to live forever." The second - dependence on one’s own habits and “body features” - is simply a departure from responsibility and an indicator of weak will.
Since then, I have been actively working on gaining new experience, absorbing new knowledge and finding opportunities instead of causes.

Ambula

The situation at the beginning of the year:

• new work and a new field of activity (not that I was not at all familiar with it, but I did not do it tightly);
• the eldest son is 3.5 years old, the youngest is 6 months old, which means that in the next year we can leave the house with his wife at the same time only if the children also leave him with one of us;
• convinced his wife to also do aikido - three nights a week fell out of the category of “personal time”;
• he practiced the other three days a week.

Goals for the year:

• pull English up to a conversational level (at the beginning of the year I, like, perhaps, most IT specialists, could read well and at least write technical queries and correspond with ICQ level);
• learn to play the guitar (using Rocksmith 2014 and Charvel DS2-ST Trans Black);
• finally get the third kyu in aikido (I’ve been missing it for two years due to a collarbone fracture and two related operations);
• learn to draw with a pencil.

The need for a guitar and a pencil is caused by a personal belief that for the full development of a person it is necessary to develop spatial thinking and logic (left hemisphere), creative thinking and a sense of beauty (right) and physical abilities (moreover, it is desirable not with a mindless rocking chair, but with what ensures the interaction of the body and mind - martial arts, fencing). Logic and physics were already in the process, and creativity was abandoned at the stage of school attempts at drawing.

Start

Setting goals is easier than fulfilling them. Although I got down to business with the proper level of perseverance. I signed up for English courses with the possibility of a semi-free visit (you plan the lesson from the available ones yourself), carefully completed your homework, replaced some of the evening movie sessions with watching films in English, and strummed on the guitar every day, trying to hit the right strings and frets. It soon became clear that human resistance to lack of sleep has its limits, and in early March I fell for two days into a coma caused by overwork. The fact is that doing something at home that requires concentration while the children are not sleeping is impossible. That is, all of the above could be done only in the late evening, often after the evening workouts.
At first, the training fell off - two days replaced English, because it turned out that the real situation was not as magical as the manager described at the time of registration, and with my free Saturdays and Sundays I have one available lesson per week with a teacher and a couple of multimedia with a computer. True, the bonus was that I used these two days to the maximum, tripling the planned pace of the course, but still the thought that I had to wait almost half a year until the opportunity to attend training again appeared did not contribute to psychological comfort. Then the guitar fell away - I became more careful about sleep time. The pencil left barely beginning. On the horizon loomed the beautiful word “FAIL”.

Path lark

I could not help but notice that evening time is used inefficiently. For various reasons - fatigue after a busy day, prolonged synchronization of free time with my wife (first, I wait until she finishes her business, then she waits until I finish what I had time to do while I was waiting for her) to, for example, watch a movie together, a lot of small things set aside for the evening and just reading the news and small games as a rest for the brain. Unfragmented personal time appears after midnight, but most of it is allocated to the detriment of sleep, taking into account the fact that you need to get up at a maximum of 7 in the morning.
The thought to allocate at least an hour in the morning was haunting. When the brain has restored susceptibility, and the world is still in a calm state. But for this it was necessary to go to terrible, from the point of view of the mind, measures -wake up in the morning earlier than necessary .
To start, I set the alarm half an hour ago. And he began to get up half an hour later, since a carefully developed habit was formed to get up on the first call, without postponing this moment n times for 15 minutes ahead. It is, in general, understandable, because I did not go to bed earlier, because this would mean a loss of the ability to communicate with my wife. Another month was spent on realizing the meaninglessness of the attempts. And then I decided to involve her in the following experiment:

• starting the next day we go to bed at 22-23: 00 pm;
• accordingly, in order to have time to see something, if we are both at home, until 9:00 p.m. (the average time when the children are put to bed), all small things must be done;
• rise at 05:00;
• The experiment lasts at least 30 days and covers all days, including weekends.

At the moment, just over two weeks have passed. The impressions are the most positive - after 30 days I do not plan to stop. Here is the list of profits received:

1. Now every day for an hour I devote to guitar practice. Progress is noticeable noticeably. People are often surprised - how do neighbors feel about morning guitar training? I want to note that for practice it is not necessary to “chop” so that the walls tremble. In "Rocksmith 2014" it is theoretically possible to play without sound at all - the game will show whether you hit the notes or not. And for me now the main thing is to build up muscle memory, reaction and calluses on the fingers.
2. The second morning hour is spent either in English (video lessons, homework from the courses), or for reading, or for work procedures that require after hours (and there are enough of these for storage and virtualization systems). Moreover, morning time is more profitable than midnight, because by this moment backups are already running out and nothing is loading either disks or channels.
3. The dilemma “shave or have breakfast?” Ceased to arise. Now, before work, you can take a leisurely shower, and breakfasts have become varied and not only tea is hot in them. You can also make coffee thoughtfully.
4. Cinema began to be watched less often, but it ceased to be a familiar semi-routine procedure and gives more impressions. Instead of “it would be necessary to find a movie for the evening,” now more often “an interesting movie has appeared;
5. Since I still get up at 5, I agreed to work to shift the schedule - from 8 to 17, instead of from 9 to 18. There is less crush and crush in the metro, in the office during the first hour there are only 2 people except me, which means it’s calm You can tune in to a working rhythm.
6. Leaving work at 17:00, I find myself in a previously unavailable training schedule (from 18:00) and again get the opportunity to practice aikido. Moreover, on the same days as the wife, just earlier, so that Tuesday and Thursday are saved for English or other events.

Total - saved training, added guitar and English, the last, in addition, boosted, optimized way to work and back, a positive morning, due to a joint full breakfast and an extended morning exercise. A little movie screening has been cut and a significant part of the evening "time looters" has been eliminated.
Subjectively, after changing the regime, the length of the day increased by three hours. Especially strong feeling at the weekend. There used to be an illusion that at the weekend you can sleep off and get up later. This means that later and lie down, and wasting time, as a rule. The next day, while he was swinging and came back to normal mode, it was already past noon. Now there is no illusion - to get up anyway at 5. But on the weekend, having redone a bunch of things, taking a walk with the children and playing games, I am surprised to find that there is still a lot of time ahead of us.

Istanbul

The last factor that periodically throws me into despair is a tough 9-hour work schedule. With the acquisition of skills in managing tasks, priorities and goals, the need to work in a mode created for the intelligent conveyor activity in factories cannot but oppress. The fact is that I noticed that the optimal sleep mode for me is not an even 7-8 hour period, but two periods of 4-4, or 4-3, or 5-2. In the end, I wasted several hours of work struggling with drowsiness and not being able to concentrate on things that required concentration. It is sad to realize that it could be more productive, but the working conditions, calculated, it would seem, to squeeze the maximum performance, in every way prevent this. I’m silent that on some days the work falls for 4 hours, on others for 10,
Unfortunately, my skills and knowledge are focused on the Enterprise segment, and it is here that bureaucracy and egalitarianism are strong. In search and reflection on the subject of a solution to this problem. But this is a completely different topic.