The First 180 Minutes of Your Day Can Dictate How Your Life Turns Out

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Majority of People don't know that most of our waking hours are solely used on demands that other people place on our time.

It's about 7 AM. The alarm goes on. You roll over still feeling sleepy, you start searching for the phone, You flip several app open. Then you begin to digest the contents.

Without a doubt this is how majority of us start the day. They have barely woken up for 5 minutes, and they are have put themselves at a significant disadvantage already.

Due to the majority of books I have read over the years, I have been able to learn how powerful and essential it is to take full advantage of the early morning hours.

For me, my mornings always sets the pace for the remaining hours of the day. This is why I guard it like a hawk. I decline every other thing but my main priorities, and ensure that I only carry out deep work when I am awake in the morning. I never spend the first hour of the morning on my devices when I wake up. I usually spend the first hours of my morning doing task or activities that add value to my life .

For sometime now my manager and I have been filming content for a very important project in our company. He noticed my daily routine and made an interesting observation. He said all my highest valued task was carried out in about 90 minutes every morning.

And he's very right.

In the last couple of years My highest valuable creative output were all performed in the first 180 minutes of the day.

It's not by accident that I get a disproportionate amount of value from these hours.

That said, let's discuss about the advantages of waking up early.

1. Your Personal Determination (Willpower) Is At Its Highest.

In the course of the day we make diverse decisions which reduces our drive (willpower). When we rise up in the early hours of the morning our minds are still fresh and we haven't made any decisions, so at that time our will power will be at the highest point.

Then this is the best time to do meaningful work, because you will hardly let any distraction get in your way. Having the willpower to get something done is a valuable commodity, sure you won't want to throw it into doing something pointless which you don't give a hoot about. Handle it with care.

2.  Your Mind Is In One Piece - Less Scattered.

Before the day ends, we must have received loads of text messages, clicked on links and replied dozens of emails. Our minds must have been in disarray after encountering all that. Such extra consumption reduces our drive and creativity and makes it nearly impossible to focus.

Our minds are in a very calm state when we wake up in the morning. We have not assimilated a whole lot of information, which enables us to easily consume less and be more creative.

3.  Interruptions Are Very Limited.

When you are not been interrupted by anyone or anything, there's a kind of great deal of inner power to create things. But as the day goes by there is a great tendency that your work will be interrupted by numerous things ranging from phone calls to meetings etc. But when you are up in the early hours of the mornings been interrupted by a thousand things is less likely to happen.

4.  Time Will Be Luxury- You Increase The Availability Of Time.

Time is very precious and the good thing is that we have it at our disposal. In as much as we cannot have more than 24 hours in a day. We can add to the hours we get value from. For instance if you remove 2 hour from your sleeping time,that is, you wake up earlier than your usual time. Then you have 7 hours a week and 364 hours a year at your disposal and you achieve this only by waking up an our earlier than your usual time of waking up.

5.  You Are Opportune To Start Your Day With  A Sense Of Accomplishment.

Most times towards the end of the day we realize that we didn't accomplish anything meaningful to our life. It sucks. When you spend an entire day on Facebook, throwing away valuable time online and doing all sort of irrelevant things, you know how unfulfilled that makes you feel when you are through. Waking up early enables you to begin the day with a sense of accomplishment.

When I start the day by writing or reading, it flows into the rest of the day and gives me momentum.

For those who are not sure of what task or activities to start their day with, am sure you will love this tips on being productive and creative, in other for you to create your own path, other than being in someone else's shoes.

I know most people are just not the early morning person. Fine. So let's talk on ways on how you can be an early morning person.

The following steps may look very simple. But when combined, they become very effective.

1.  Apply Achievable Goals -Make It Easy For Yourself To Succeed.

It is very easy to say, you will wake up at exactly 5 am, write at least a thousand words, and do some other meaningful things, you can even try it for one or two days. But this isn't achievable.

The greatest mistake we make when trying to change our behaviour is making the new behavior unsustainable. In other for you to succeed make it easy for yourself by making your only goal be setting an alarm that will ring at a specific time early in the morning. Sure, it can be very annoying especially for those of you who loves their sleep so much. You might even turn over and push the snooze button.

But if you do this consistently in a row, your body will eventually adjust.

2.  Make Use Of Incentives To Eliminate Decisions.

My Manager is currently developing the habit of waking up very early. His routine is very easy and achievable:

1. Wake up, get out of bed

2. Eliminate drowsiness.

He tends to achieve this goal by carrying out this routine 15 minutes earlier every week, the interesting part is how he set the alarm.

He set up the alarm from an app called alarmy which compels him to scan a bar-code to put off the shrieking alarm. Which means, he can't put off his phone or even put it on silence. The Barcode he scaned was not any where around his room but downstairs, the only way for him to turn off the alarm is if he goes down stairs, or destroys his phone. A gross, but outstanding strong incentive to get out of bed.

In as much as his methods sound rather barbaric, he has achieved his goal by waking up 6:30 instead of his usual 8:30. With this he has been able to finish all his task that usually drags till 6pm, by noon.

His workload is still the same, it hasn't changed. But due to the quality of attention and focus he applied early in the day, everything has changed.

3.  Relax -Don’t Worry About the Morning Routine Just Yet.

Since waking up much earlier is a new habit, observing routines will be like a heckling task. You could try experimenting to see which one works better for you. Try getting out of bed first,  if you have done that already, then you need to stop your drowsiness. 

Whatever the method might be, sipping tea, coffee, taking a cold shower or going for a walk. So far it enables you to being up, alert and energetic before everyone else, then it's worth it.

Why Worry?

To wake up early is not a superpower or it being too special. The importance of waking up early is that you get access to the highest quality hours of the morning. Zero noise, no distractions. You spend your time exclusively for yourself. When you are at your sharp state. It's an extra ordinary powerful and very rare combination.

With the rest of your time already hijacked, why not utilize the first hours of the day solely for what matters to you?

Thanks for reading, you are highly appreciated.