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- Tim Cook wakes at 3:45 a.m. to get a head start on his workday, with time for exercise and email.
- I tried his schedule for a week to see if it improved my productivity.
- I loved the extra time to work, and the way it let me communicate with East Coast colleagues right at the start of their day, but it wreaked havoc with my evenings and sleep schedule.
- Here are my observations about trying to adjust to Tim Cook’s early morning schedule.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Starting the day ludicrously early seem to be a badge of honor for CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook, who famously gets out of bed at 3:45 a.m. every day.
Cook is far from the only one — Richard Branson, Jack Dorsey, and Bob Iger are just some executives who wake up hours before the rest of us.
Could keeping that kind of schedule be some sort of magic elixir that unlocks the keys to productivity and success?
I am a full-time work-from-home freelancer, so in principle, I have the flexibility to set my own hours. Typically, I get up around 6:30 a.m., and after exercising, I’m ready to start my workday around 8 a.m.
But there are never even remotely enough hours in my day. I constantly juggle endless tight deadlines, phone interviews, a daily deluge of email, and the need to record, produce, and edit a weekly podcast. I generally work until about 7 p.m., but there are days when I continue to sit in front of a monitor until bedtime.
Could something as simple as sliding my wake-up time back a few hours help me to take better control of my day? I decided to reset my alarm for a week — Monday to Friday — to see if Tim Cook’s wakeup routine could make a difference.
Here’s how my week of waking up like an Apple CEO went for me.
SUNDAY: I went to bed at 8:30 p.m., which ended up being the earliest I’d go to sleep for the rest of the week.
Marjan Apostolovic/Shutterstock
The experiment really started on Sunday night, of course. We all know what Ben Franklin had to say about sleep. I can’t lay claim to wealth or wisdom, but it’s clear that you can’t successfully get up early unless you go to bed correspondingly early.
Around dinner on Sunday I did the math. To get eight hours of sleep, I’d have to be in bed at 7:45 p.m.
That was simply never going to happen. It reminded me of the weird hours I was forced to keep when I was a junior officer in the Air Force, working 12-hour shifts in a crazy five-days-on, four-days-off sleep deprivation experiment disguised as a work schedule.
But I’m an adult now, and a primetime bedtime is neither practical nor sustainable. I compromised by heading to bed at 8:30 p.m. As I would soon find out, it would be the earliest I’d get to sleep all week.
MONDAY: I felt energized and optimistic after the 3:45 a.m. wakeup and workout.
Jaromir Chalabala/Shutterstock
With seven hours of sleep under my belt, 3:45 a.m. came quickly. I bolted out of bed — lest I fall back asleep — and immediately embarked on my day: exercise, shower, and settling down to work.
The good news was that even with a 30-minute high-intensity workout at the start of the day, I was at my desk by 5:30 a.m., and I was able to accomplish by 9:30 a.m. what usually takes me until noon. Barely an hour after many people have breakfast, I had already accomplished half my workday. And even though it’s really only a few hours sooner, psychologically I felt a huge boost from seeing major to-do items cleared off my Trello board so early in the day.
In fact, this felt like a great time for an email break. I usually hide from email — with so much work on my plate, I often delay dealing with messages because I’m so nervous about getting work done. But now I could comfortably take an hour to deal with email without anxiety. Major win for the 3:45 a.m. wake-up.
Monday was a great start. Despite not wanting to get out of bed, my energy was high throughout the day, and I managed to shut down about 6 p.m., feeling productive and confident.
TUESDAY: I noticed my eating habits change as I snacked numerous times throughout the day, but I also noticed waking up so early on the West Coast has its productivity perks.
10’000 Hours/Getty Images
Unfortunately, bedtime slipped to nearly 10 p.m. Monday night, but I told myself it was fine — I’m used to getting by on about six hours of sleep anyway. When the alarm went off, I again leapt into action. As a creature of habit, I like keeping to a schedule, and I was eager to exercise, shower, and settle down to work.
This was the day, though, when I noticed a distressing trend about my eating habits while on the Tim Cook schedule. I am not generally much of a breakfast person. Sometimes I’ll have a breakfast bar, but that’s about it. But when you get out of bed at 3:45 a.m., lunch is eight long hours away.
On both Monday and Tuesday, I had noticeable hunger pangs, and took a break around 7 a.m. for breakfast. But I wasn’t done — by 10 a.m., my stomach was growling again and I snacked some more. It might be purely psychological — if lunch is just four or five hours after the work day starts, I can wait it out. But eight hours demands a worrisome number of snack breaks.
On the other hand, I discovered that waking up at 3:45 a.m. on the West Coast is an extraordinary advantage for folks like me who need to communicate with people in New York. Usually, when I open Outlook at 8 a.m., it’s already 11 a.m. on the East Coast, and I’m playing catch up with email sent to me hours earlier. I don’t like feeling a step behind, which is something else that typically ratchets up my anxiety during the day.
But today I realized that if I rescheduled my morning, I could take a break to manage email around 6 a.m., which lets me send morning email before many East Coasters even show up to the office. Getting up early levels the time-zone playing field, and that’s awesome.
Unfortunately, there was no 8:30 p.m. (or even 10 p.m.) bedtime for me today. Thanks to a show for which I’d been holding reservations for weeks, I didn’t get home until 11 p.m. With an energy level too low to be measured by modern science, I crashed a half hour later.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Dave Johnson)