As for sleep… It all starts the day before. Hang in there, this won’t be an article telling you to wake up very early – we’re overwhelmed with news about the most successful people waking up at 4:30am. It’s a fact, whenever I made it a habit to wake up early, I’d end up getting a lot more done, but don’t make yourself suffer if you truly hate being awake before sunrise. The problem is, if you really want to start your day at 6 in the morning, and you still want to have a social life, you will be staying awake long enough to make getting a healthy eight hours of sleep impossible.
The key to keeping control over your own life is setting up a routine and sticking to it the whole week, including the weekend. Once you decide when you want to wake up during the week, try not to go to bed up much more than 1 hour later on Saturday and Sunday. Treating weekends differently from the weekdays will give your body a similar feeling to experiencing jet lag every weekend. By falling asleep at a similar time each day, you can achieve long-term consistency.
I like to get home approximately 2 hours before I would like to fall asleep. I get home and give myself some free time to do whatever: clean up the apartment, plugin my electronics, wash dishes, get my clothes, whatever. Then the ritual begins: I like to have a glass of wine or make Tim Ferriss like evening tea, I might make some calls, have a nice chat with my girlfriend, then sit down and read a little, maybe 20 minutes. Then I check my Insta and other feeds (hopefully the last time) and then TV. But not some junk. Vlogs, TED videos and anything I saved during the day. Then I slowly start to become pretty sleepy – at least that’s what I am for. If that happens, I have the most terrible evening routine which is switching on Friends or Two And a Half Men and just listen to it while I fall asleep in the next 20 minutes.
I know, I know, this is terrible. There is this quote:
“Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
Reid Hoffman’s trick is that he thinks about one constraint or problem before going to bed and let’s his mind to think about it while sleeping. The reason I don’t do this is because if I do, my brain always feels like it cannot stop. So, rather when I wake up and have a half dreamy mindset, that’s when I think and oftentimes dictate to myself. It can even last for an hour…
The takeaway is that this everyday routine helps me to navigate my often-hectic reality and creates a structure where there may not have been before.