I prefer the stick
To make real progress you need both the carrot and the stick. I have got plenty of carrots, and last week I finally got a proper batch of stick. It’s amazing how much productivity boost that can be achieved by a feeling of impending doom. My to-do list had been growing steadily for quite some time, perhaps for a couple of months. I was adding things faster than I was ticking them off. Problems like these are appropriate to consider the saying “How did you go broke? Little by little then everything at once.” So, when you get that feeling that you are inching slowly in the wrong direction, be careful. Be very careful. Because then suddenly everything might twist and turn at once and you don’t want that.
Being a double dad with a house and two Labradors, there is a never-ending supply of things that need attention. Which means that when you realize that 24 hours isn’t enough to do what is required, it might seem like an unsolvable problem at a first glance. To crunch on in the evening is always an option, but I am convinced it is a quite horribly one. I have done just that plenty of times, but the problem is that it usually turns into a dark spiral of self-amplifying negativity. Work later in the evening => Become more tired => Lower productivity in the morning => Need more late hours to compensate => Become more tired => … repeat… I have now done the opposite. I get up extremely early around 0500 and start to work ASAP, which usually gives me 1,5-2 hours of hyper focused work while the family and dogs are sleeping, and the phone and email is dormant. I am not kidding when I say those 1½ hours can be worth three.
The beauty of doing the morning work hours is that you now have a boundary condition. You cannot crunch on! If you need more hours in the morning, the only way to get them is to get out of bed earlier. And you can’t turn back time, so the only way to do it is to do it tomorrow. In the evening I do not allow myself to work unless it is a literal emergency. When I go home from work, I now know that I must check out totally and focus on being a dad. Also, I am extremely tired in the evening, and it is easy to fall asleep. On the contrary, if you do a crunch session just before bed, you will probably find yourself on high alert when you lie down in your bed, which makes it a lot harder to fall asleep. It is so much easier to fall asleep if you got out of bed a couple of hours before the sunrise. And you will probably sleep better – even if it amounts to the same number of clock hours. Constraints are my best friend.
To find the optimal morning routing is an iterative process. When I get out of bed ungodly early and head over to my office building (which is very close to my home), my wife usually texts me when our son wakes up. After a week I now have some data and judging from the time stamps of her “He is awake now”-texts I now know that he wakes up at 06:30 give or take a few. And that’s the boundary condition I so badly need. Now I can just ask myself, how many extra crunch hours do you need tomorrow? And subtract from 06:30 and set my alarm. I tell you; this is so much healthier than to crunch on through the night. Another factor worth mentioning is that we tend to use two hours for a job if we get two hours. Give us six hours and chances are it’ll take six hours to finish the job. The morning hours has a crystal-clear boundary condition. Whereas the night crunch does not have an end time. It is easy to keep going for another half hour or so if you’re in the middle of something. In the morning hours I do NOT have that luxury. When my little boy awakens, there are no other options than to tend to him ASAP. This makes my time a lot more valuable.
Isn’t it a bit funny that the best way to make a problem easier seems to be to make it harder?!