Conventional Wisdom 1 - Conclusion

Well, my month of early to bed, early to rise is over and, although it didn't make me wealthy or wise as promised, I still learned a lot. So how well did I stick to it, what did I learn, what was good or bad about it, and is it a habit worth keeping?

To avoid weaseling out or tricking myself, I tracked my sleep data using Sleep as Android. The graph is a bit confusing; you have to read it bottom to top, so that first entry (New Years Eve) is 5am to 1pm. You can see that the first two weeks went pretty well, but things got a bit patchier after that. The first week I was usually asleep between 10 or 11, and consequently ended up quite sleep deprived. That was fine for a couple days, but beyond that it was just miserable. I eventually realised that to sustainably get up at 6am required being in bed at 9pm.

So my first observation is that being in bed at 9pm is hard. I had to fundamentally change the way I thought about the day, because 6pm no longer meant I could still go for a walk, do some shopping, eat dinner, play a video game, chat to some friends... Rather, it meant 3 hours left in my day, time to start winding down. I could usually only fit one leisure activity in that much time before I needed to get ready for bed, and better make sure it's relaxing because if I'm all riled up from something I was doing at 8:50 I'll probably still be thinking about it when I'm trying to fall asleep.

That stuff was relatively manageable by moving a lot of my relaxation time into the morning or during the day, but what made it so hard was other people. During the month I was invited to evening birthdays, meetings, parties, conversations, dinners, and none of them finished at 9. You have to make a constant effort to bow out of things early, and realistically it means sacrificing a lot of social stuff. I'm not enormously social, but you'd be surprised the number of evening activities you don't notice. Most memorable was my sister calling me to ask if I was coming to her birthday party while I was in the middle of getting ready for bed. Ouch.

I wrote previously about the sense of finite time that comes with getting up early. That's a good thing in as much as it stops you from deceiving yourself about how much time there is in a day, but that rigidity can also be a downside. It was pretty upsetting to look at the time and realise I had barely any day left and more to do, or feel like I was racing against the clock up until I went to sleep. So the rigid bedtime felt quite constraining sometimes, but without it I had to either be sleep deprived or wake up late.

I also mentioned the feeling of getting the jump on the day, and the benefit of being up before anything else. I think that's probably the strongest benefit I found, but I also liked the consistency because it tended to lead to more stability. Getting up at the same time made having a morning routine easier, and that routine being in the morning meant it was much less likely to get swallowed by anything else. All together, I found it led to better-organised days and more of a sense of being on top of things.

My final verdict, then, is a weak keep. I'm going to keep doing it, but I'm not going to take it as seriously. I liked getting up early, but sacrificing other things for it doesn't always make sense. I also like having the flexibility to add a couple extra hours at the end of a day sometimes. It may not mean anything in terms of the grand river of time, but for us mere mortals it can turn a mediocre day into a mediocre day with a nice evening at the end.