Day 7 of 40: Waking up by 5am

It has not been easy to get up early and work on installing this new habit in my life, but is has been very rewarding! I have learned so much during the past week as I have gone through this process and written about it on my blog. I am also grateful for the public accountability that has helped me to stay committed when I haven't really felt like doing it.

My wife recently mentioned that sometimes my 5am alarm wakes her up and she's had trouble falling back to sleep after that. This is not good because she does not share the same goal as me and considers 5am to still be nighttime (point taken).

Well, I certainly want to keep the peace at home so one of the things I did this morning after completing my Hour of Power was to get online and purchase a watch with a vibrating alarm. I found the Shake n Wake alarm on Amazon and this will enable me to wake up when I want to without disturbing her with an audible alarm. Problem solved.

At the start of this new week I have a greater desire to achieve all that I can and to make it a productive and fulfilling week! I need to remove items from my daily task list that have been there for too long. Today CAN be a good day in that respect as long as I remain focused and committed to the tasks and their corresponding priorities.

I definitely have ADD tendencies and tend to get easily distracted and off-task if I am not careful about it. This can lead to frustration especially as it pertains to my daily task lists, my Top 5 goals and accomplishing the things that are most important first. Even though I store ALL of my task lists in the Things app on my MacBook Pro and iPhone, I've found it to be very helpful to also write out by hand the list of what I intend to do that day.

By doing this each morning I am forced to look at those tasks that I did not get done yesterday and re-write them for today, if they are still applicable. This extra work brings an added level of awareness to what I am doing each day.

In the Age of Distraction that we all live in it is important to be mindful and intentional about what we are doing. I'm shocked by how many people enable every single insane notification on their mobile devices. They are getting pinged anytime they get an email, a new Twitter follower, a post on their FB wall or a reminder to feed their virtual fish. It is crazy and one of the most counter-productive things I have ever witnessed!

I love my iPhone and all that I can do with it, but I have intentionally disabled ALL notifications with the exception of phone calls, text messages and calendar reminders. The point is that I can check email, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else I want when I want to, rather than having all of the above continuously distract me throughout the day.

Back to my morning routine…I'd also like to start incorporating my Top 1-3 daily goals into the morning hours (before 8am) so I can get them done before I even leave for the office. I've heard it said that the most successful people get more done before lunch than the average person accomplishes in an entire day, or even a week! That is probably an accurate statement in many cases.

In creating my daily tasks I find it important  to craft tasks that link directly to my goals and follow through with making them happen.

I am going to do it, TODAY!