I choose to get up early every morning even though I don’t have to. I was raised to be a late bird. Most nights I’d fall asleep to the clatter of our father’s manual typewriter as he wrote plays and the loud television as our mother strained to hear it from 2 rooms away while she cleaned the kitchen. Both had worked all day as a college professor and an elementary school teacher respectively and were just starting their second shift which would continue until long after midnight.
So, to take a page from Kamala Harris, “believe me when I tell you” that I never expected to be that person who routinely sets the alarm for 530 or 6am on days when I don’t have to be anywhere early.
Note that I do have to set the alarm. Left to my own rhythms, I would sleep in. I do not particularly want to wake up early but thanks to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and The One Thing by Gary Keller, I do.
There are tons of takeaways one could have from those marvelous books, but only two of them cause me to get up early:
- Stephen Covey’s quadrant 2 activities: important but not urgent
- Gary Keller’s concept of doing the most important thing (that won’t otherwise get done) first
Most people when they hear about Stephen Covey’s four quadrants assume that the quadrant 1 activities–urgent and important (like crisis, medical emergencies, deadline-driven projects, last minute preparations for scheduled activities)–would be the focus of a highly effective person. But I understood Covey to say that because it is urgent and because it is important, that quadrant I stuff will get done. Unfortunately, what also will likely get done is the urgent but not important stuff (like interruptions, unnecessary calls, email, and text engagements, meetings, and more).
What I heard Covey say is that it is the important but NOT urgent stuff (like preparation/planning, financial management, values clarification, exercise & relationship building), that has to be my top daily priority, because that’s what won’t get done otherwise.
Gary Keller in The One Thing reinforced that by encouraging me to tease out what’s one thing that if done daily before anything else would make the biggest difference in my life/work goals?
I used to try to do all the urgent stuff first and then had every intention of, you name it: meditating, exercising, taking a break, planning, balancing my checkbook, and talking to friends later in the day. Most days, none of that ever happened. I’d get to the end of the day and feel like a failure.
At some point, I’d had enough. At that point, I began to start every day with meditation, planning my exercise and putting it in my calendar, and working on my one thing:
the book I am writing.
Another plus of this system is that I find that because I get up early, I’m sleepy early, so I go to bed early and get plenty of sleep. Under the old system of staying up trying to do everything late at night that I hadn’t gotten to during the day, I invariably got less sleep.
So that’s why I get up early.