Sleep. I have a love/hate relationship with sleep. It is important to be well rested. My mental alertness, creativity, and working efficiency are at their best shortly after waking up and after a couple of cups of coffee.
However, sleep, aside from getting you rested, is completely useless, wasted time. I mean, it’s great because our bodies need rest, but if they didn’t need rest so frequently, we could easily be like 50% more productive overall (assuming you performed some productive/useful activity during at least some of the re-captured time).
Living in the lovely San Francisco Bay Area, which has about the best climate one could ask for, is great. No snow (you don’t have to shovel rain), and most years, it is blue skies and sunshine from like May to September. I could probably be a fill-in meteorologist the weather is so benign.
In the central valley, heat in the summer is definitely an issue for outdoor activity, but only during peak daylight, because it is low humidity here, once the sun begins to go down and if there is any breeze at all, things typically cool off substantially at night.
The one downside to Bay Area living is the traffic, which rivals LA and New York. Because prices are so high in the communities surrounding the bay, there is an ever-present creep outwards in the search for affordability, but it is a trap. You want to buy what you can afford, and even in the valley, new houses are 450k and up.
When I first moved to CA, I stayed in Livermore for a bit, and in the late
As Elon Musk put it, traffic is soul draining. I had a job right next to Intel in Santa Clara. It’s about 45-50 miles from my house, and unless I left early enough to beat traffic, which is a silly 1:30 pm for the ride home, it was always a 2 hour + drive each way. That is enough to turn a 40-50 hour workweek into a 50-60 hour workweek. its rough and really has an adverse impact on quality of life.
That was a very long side diversion about traffic in the Bay Area, leading up to the point of the post. For the past 6-12 months, I had been doing just that. Getting up at 2:30-3:30 AM and hitting the road to beat traffic. It’s funny, humans are amazingly adaptable. If you adjust your wake time that early, you are pretty much smoked and ready for bed by like 9 pm. But one finds a
I was fortunate that many of the clients I visited were
It worked great on paper, and it is one of several habits that contributed to my 4 straight quarters as top billing technician. My ex-boss, unfortunately, was the type to always assume people were trying to get over on him and cheat him out of labor time. Not for nothing, he
I think it’s mainly because he talks about his days as a service tech/sales guy where he would get a few visits in early and then head to the delta with his
Anyhoo-back to Old Man sleep schedule. After getting in the habit of rising so crazy early – I started to really enjoy it. Also, about 3-4 nights per week, my stupid dog wakes me up, often for no apparent reason. Maybe she thinks she’s helping me get to work on time to keep the gravy train of dog food coming – don’t know. I wouldn’t expect that level of forethought from a canine, but it’s hard to tell. Sometimes she comes downstairs with me and goes out to take a leak, but often she just pesters me to get up and then once I do, goes back to her bed and goes to sleep. Bitch.
Long story, getting longer, I remember stories of older men who just dont need as much sleep when they get older. Oldsters waking up at like 4 AM, and just being done sleeping. I used to think, man that sounds like heaven. Not having to wake up to an annoying alarm or worry about oversleeping. As I mentioned earlier, I’m no fan of sleep (in principle, not actually), so this seemed very appealing to me.
As a teen, there were times when I could sleep well into the early afternoon, especially if I had been out partying the night before. Over my twenties, this pulled back into the typical schedule, and on weekends, I might sleep till like 8 or 9 AM. Then came kids, and erratic sleep schedules, erratic work schedules etc, but not much changed in terms of my sleep habits. I did find, however, that I liked to get up at least an hour or two before everyone else, because that time of the day is so peaceful, and I enjoy the quiet time “before the zoo opens” as I like to call it.
It sort of progressed from there to waking up around 5:30-6 most days. Currently, I’m on a break from working, and find that I still love the early morning hours. I get up whenever the dog gets me up, or when I am done sleeping, which is usually 5-6 hours. Because I get up so early, I’m usually ready to go to sleep around 9, so if you add 6 hours to 9 PM, you get 3 AM. I find this is usually when my body is naturally ready to get up.
It’s fantastic. I use some of the time for what I call my “grateful hour” where I try to consciously be grateful for getting the gift of another
It’s not for everyone. Some people, like my beloved wife, love sleep. Many value sleep more than productivity. If that is your tendancy – go with it. Maybe your peak productive times are afternoon or evening. We’re all wired a little differently in this respect, and for some – this schedule would be to radical, but I really enjoy it. If you are a type-A who likes getting stuff checked off the to-do list – give the 3 AM wake up a try for a week or two, its an adjustment, but you might find you like it too.