- Copyright: rolffimages/123RF
What if you had the opportunity for a free gift that could improve your productivity, increase your happiness, improve your health, help you deepen your faith, and help you make progress towards personal growth? Who wouldn’t want something that could do all that?
What could possibly do all those things? Drum roll please… it’s the fall time change. This coming weekend when most of us will turn our clocks back an hour, you have an important choice to make. Will you simply sleep an extra hour on Sunday morning and that be the entire “gain” of the extra hour, or will you allow that one hour to provide compounded returns that will last for months to come?
How do you do that? Next Sunday, get up when your body nudges you to do so, an hour earlier – when you would have before the change. The first morning it will feel almost natural. Resist any urge to hit the snooze. You can harness that extra hour to propel you towards personal growth and goals that have previously felt out of reach. Motivational speakers have long spoke of the power of extra time in the early hours of the morning. The fall time change is a gift that comes just once a year that makes such a change seem natural.
“The difference between rising at five and seven o’clock in the morning, for forty years, supposing a man to go to bed at the same hour at night, is nearly equivalent to the addition of ten years to a man’s life.” ~Philip Doddridge
Not convinced yet? In Michael Hyatt’s podcast “Reengineer Your Morning Ritual,” Michael shares that “Morning people tend to make more money, be more productive, be healthier and live longer, and be more happy and satisfied in their lives.”
How can you make this happen?
1. Pick your priorities – What do you what to do with the time? What have you wished you could do but just haven’t found enough time? A few possibilities:
- Exercise
- Read a book
- Learn/ study a skill
- Write a blog or a book
- Pray, read your Bible, read a Bible Study
2. Set your alarm and get up starting Sunday. Warning: If you wait to adopt your new schedule, it will get much harder to implement with each additional day you delay.
3. Stick to it! Keep to your new schedule in the weeks and months to come.
4. Have a plan. When you go to bed, know what you want to accomplish with your extra hour in the morning. Maybe you’ll plan to exercise on certain days of the week but use the other days for a different goal.
5. Write it down. On a sticky note, index card or small piece of paper write down why you want to do this. Put it next to your alarm clock as an important reminder, a snooze deterrent.
6. Tell a friend. Share this idea with your friends. Maybe one or more of them will adopt this too. You can encourage each other to stay the course and reap the benefits.
A few facts about mornings to encourage you:
- You’re less likely to be pulled off track by distractions in the morning. Your phone and email are quiet and your family is still asleep.
- Your willpower is stronger in the morning. Your energy hasn’t been reduced by all the day’s activities.
- “Morning is an important time of day, because how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have.”~ Lemony Snicket
So who’s in? I know I am. I’ll be splitting the mornings working on specific goals on the same day each week. Some of the days I’ll definitely be working on my next book!
Will you invest your “extra hour” in your progress? If so, what will you do with your extra time each morning? Join the conversation… I’d love to hear from you!
If you’re looking for a way to organize your goals, check out my past blog 5 Steps to Jump Start your Progress.
Recent Comments