Call me Snoozer, cause I haven’t been updating my blog on my monthly basis. You’d think with amazement’s from Apple, like the MacBook Air would at least bring me back from my deep slumber. (Did I ever mention I love my iPhone and it’s still as awesome today as the day I bought it?”) The crazy thing about my absence is it really has nothing to do with sleeping, it happens to be with productivity.

How so you ask? I’m glad you asked, because I was going to tell you.

Somewhere around mid Dec 2007, I got about 4 hours of sleep one night. Not a big deal, life goes on. The next night, 4 hours of sleep. The following evening, faced with the fact I hardly slept the previous two nights I zonked out at 7:30pm. A far cry from my midnight-2am bedtimes. About 4:30 in the morning, I woke up completed rested so I got up. I had one of the most productive days I had in a long time. But with the holidays fast approaching, I didn’t really give much thought to it. I have known for a long time that the more productive I am between wake-up time and noon, the more productive I am in the afternoon. The morning time, makes it or breaks it.

Well, right after Christmas I ran into purely by chance, an article blog post on “early rising“. Normally I would not have read such rubbish but considering my experience a few weeks earlier, it caught my interest. The writer when on to talk about how he gets up around 4:30 or so each morning, and is terribly more productive and successful. He keeps his wake-up schedule no matter what, weekdays and weekends and never sleeps in. His bedtime is when he can’t stay awake anymore and it changes from day-to-day, by as much as an hour or two. This seemed like the appropriate approach. Instead of “sleeping in” to catch up on sleep, you just got to bed earlier.

I did this for about 3-4 weeks with great success. However, the 4:30 time frame was to close to my 6:30 routine of getting ready for the day and getting the girls up, dressed, fed, and taking them to school. It was a real bummer to break just when I was hitting top speed on my work. So, I decided to try 3:30am, and this was the magic number and just what I needed, by 6:30, I am ready for a break and starting the morning routine. The other end of this is I do get tired very early at night, by 6-7pm I am really starting to feel the effects of getting up early. I pretty much have to go to bed no later than 8:30pm if I don’t want to face the 3:30 alarm like a bear.