Way of the lark

- Are you an owl?
- Was once. Then I had to train myself to function effectively at any time of the day. But loving the morning is not necessary for this. I did not love.

Max Fry - “Key from the yellow metal”


This article is a description of personal experience. Just want to say who will not be interested. Those who do not have a permanent job or other production activities. Those who can spend 4 or more hours a day at computer games, social. networks and other time-killers and do not worry about it. For freelancers, for whom night is the best time to work, because there is a minimum of distractions. Most people without children. And the rest is not bothering the speed of time.
With whom I would like to share my experience: with those who dream of an extra hour in a day, and not in order to oversleep.

Preamble

I - a pronounced "owl", as I can remember. In the case of holidays, New Year holidays or some shocks, pulling out of the work schedule, I switched to the mode in a matter of 2-3 days, during which I went to bed after breakfast. I am delighted with the night time and have always regretted the “pigeon” people for the fact that they are deprived of these periods of calm, romance and even some kind of magic. And I was oppressed by the ubiquitous “lark-oriented” mode of operation. In short, I could imagine myself voluntarily waking up earlier than I thought it was normal for myself to go to bed, except as a joke.
Four years ago, after reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and a couple of articles by Steve Peacocks, I was fascinated by the topic of task optimization, and self-development came to the fore in the list of life priorities. Strengthening awareness is the first tool in personal growth. To a large extent, aikido classes helped (and developing awareness helps in training). And rolled two insights. The first is that the path of self-development and creation is no less fascinating, interesting and romantic than self-destruction under the motto “I’m not going to live forever.” The second is dependence on one’s own habits and “features of the organism” - simply a departure from responsibility and an indicator of weak will.
Since then, I have been actively working to gain new experience, absorb new knowledge and search for opportunities instead of reasons.

Ambula

Situation at the beginning of the year:

• New job and new field of activity (not that I wasn’t familiar with it at all, but I didn’t work closely);
• the oldest son is 3.5 years old, the youngest is 6 months, which means we can leave the house with his wife at the same time in the coming year only if the children also leave him with one of us;
• persuaded his wife to do aikido also - three evenings a week dropped out of the “personal time” category;
• he worked on the other three days a week.

')

Goals for the year:

• pull up English to the conversational level (at the beginning of the year I, like, perhaps, most IT people, could read well and somehow write technical queries and write correspondence to the ICQ level);
• learn to play guitar (using Rocksmith 2014 and Charvel DS2-ST Trans Black);
• finally get the third kyu in aikido (I have been missing for two years due to a broken collarbone and two related operations);
• learn to draw with a pencil.

The need for a guitar and a pencil is caused by the personal conviction that for a full-fledged personality development it is necessary to develop spatial thinking and logic (left hemisphere), creative thinking and a sense of beauty (right) and physical abilities (and preferably not with mindless rocking, but with body interaction) and reason - martial arts, fencing). Logic and physics were already in the process, and creativity was abandoned during the school attempts at drawing.

Start

Setting goals is easier than fulfilling them. Although I took up the case with the proper level of perseverance. I signed up for English courses with the possibility of a semi-free visit (you yourself plan your schedule of classes from among those available), carefully carried out your homework, replaced part of the evening film shows with watching movies in English, and every day for an hour strummed on the guitar, trying to get the right strings and frets. It soon became clear that human resistance to lack of sleep has its limits, and in early March I fell for two days into a coma caused by overwork. The fact is that it is impossible to do something at home that requires concentration while the children are not sleeping. That is, all of the above could be done only in the late evening, often after evening workouts.
First, the training sessions fell off - two days I supplanted English, because it turned out that the real situation is not as magical as it was described at the time of registration by the manager, and with my free Saturdays and Sundays I have one available lesson a week with a teacher and a couple of multimedia with a computer. True, the bonus was that I used these two days to the maximum, three times increasing the planned rate of passing the course, but still the thought that I would have to wait almost half a year until I had the opportunity to attend the trainings again did not contribute to psychological comfort. Then the guitar disappeared - I began to take care of bedtime. The pencil went barely starting. On the horizon loomed beautiful word "FAIL".

Way of the lark

I could not help but notice that the evening time was used inefficiently. For various reasons - fatigue after a busy day, a lingering synchronization of free time with my wife (at first I wait for her to finish her work, then she waits for me to finish what I managed to do while waiting for her), for example, to watch a movie together a lot of small things, set aside for the evening and just reading the news and small games as a rest for the brain. Unfragmented personal time appears after midnight, but most of it is allocated to the detriment of sleep, given that it is necessary to get up at maximum at 7 am.
The thought didn’t give me any thought to single out at least an hour of morning time. When the brain has restored susceptibility, and the world around us is still at rest. But for this it was necessary to go on terrible, from the point of view of reason, measures - to wake up in the morning earlier than necessary .
For a start, I turned the alarm clock back half an hour. And I started to get up half an hour later, because I got covered with a carefully worked out habit of getting up on the first call, not delaying this moment n times for 15 minutes ahead. It is, in general, and understandable, because I did not go to bed earlier, because it would mean the loss of the opportunity to communicate with my wife. Another month went to the realization of the meaninglessness of attempts. And then I decided to involve her in the following experiment:

• starting from the next day we go to bed at 22-23: 00 in the evening;
• accordingly, in order to have time to see something, if we are both at home, before 9:00 pm (the average time when children are put to bed) all small things must be done;
• rise at 05:00;
• The experiment lasts at least 30 days and covers all days, including weekends.

At the moment, it took a little more than two weeks. The impressions are the most positive - after 30 days I do not plan to stop. Here is a list of profits received:

1. Now every day I spend an hour on guitar practice. Progress is noticeable. People are often surprised - how do neighbors feel about morning guitar workouts? I want to note that for practice it is not necessary to “chop” so that the walls tremble. In "Rocksmith 2014" it is theoretically possible to play without any sound at all - the game will show whether you are hit by notes or not. And for me now the main thing is to build muscle memory, reaction and calluses on the fingers.
2. The second morning hour is spent either on English (video tutorials, homework from courses), or on reading, or on working procedures that require non-working time (and in terms of storage systems and virtualization, there is enough). Moreover, the morning time is more profitable than the midnight one, since by this time backups are already running out and nothing is loading the disks or channels.
3. The dilemma of “shaving or having breakfast?” Ceased to arise. Now, before work, you can slowly take a shower, and breakfasts have become diverse and hot in them, not only tea. And still coffee can be thoughtfully made.
4. Cinema began to look less often, but it has ceased to be the usual semi-ritual procedure and gives more impressions. Instead of “it is necessary to find a movie for the evening”, now more often “an interesting movie has appeared, we should organize to watch.”
5. Since I still get up at 5, I agreed at work to shift the schedule - from 8 to 17, instead of from 9 to 18. There are less crowding and hustle in the subway, in the office during the first hour only 2 people except me, which means quietly You can tune in to a working rhythm.
6. When I leave work at 5:00 pm, I find myself in the training schedule not previously accessible to me (from 6:00 pm) and again I get the opportunity to practice aikido. And on the same days as the wife, just earlier, so that Tuesday and Thursday are reserved for English or other events.

Total - saved workouts, added guitar and English, the latter, in addition, forced, optimized the way to work and back, a positive morning, due to the joint high-grade breakfast and extended morning exercise. A little film viewing has been cut down and a significant part of the evening "time raiders" has been eliminated.
Subjectively, after changing the mode, the duration of the day increased by three hours. Especially strong feelings at the weekend. There used to be an illusion that at the weekend you can sleep off and get up later. And that means later, and lie down, and having wasted time, as a rule. The next day, while swinging and returning to normal, it was already past noon. Now there are no illusions - to get up anyway to 5. But on the weekend, after doing a lot of things, taking a walk with the children and playing games, I was surprised to find that it was still one o'clock and there was still a lot of time ahead.

Postambula

The last factor that periodically throws me into despair is the hard 9-hour work schedule. With the acquisition of skills in managing tasks, priorities and goals, the need to work in a mode created for non-intellectual conveyor activity in factories cannot but be depressing. The fact is that I noticed that the optimal sleep mode for me is not an even 7-8 hour period, but two periods of 4-4, or 4-3, or 5-2. In the end, I waste a few business hours, struggling with sleepiness and not being able to concentrate on things that require concentration. It is sad to realize that it could be more productive, but the working conditions, seemingly designed to squeeze the maximum performance, in this way interfere. I am silent, that on some days I get 4 hours of work, and 10 hours on others, but I have to sit all day on the spot, realizing that I could have done much more useful things on other fronts without losing quality on the main job.
Unfortunately, my skills and knowledge are focused on the Enterprise segment, and it is here that bureaucracy and leveling are strong. Looking for and thinking about how to solve this problem. But that's another topic.