30 Day Challenge - 5:30am Wake Up

It's been about 8 months since my last 30 day challenge, programming using the MEAN stack. I still love the idea of a 30 day challenge, improving on one specific thing at a time in an achievable time frame. While I didn't continue my habit of coding everyday, mostly I think due to life changes like starting a business and buying a house, I still learned a lot. I was even able to help leverage that experience to get a new job at a great company where I'm using the MEAN stack every day at work (we're hiring at K4 Connect)!

I was excited when my friends, Page and Amber started a Facebook group for their friends to do 30 day challenges at the same time. I finally posted that I was going to wake up at 5:30am each day before I could wuss out. Now I have my wife, and this whole group to motivate me to stick with it.

I chose this challenge because I've been kind of overwhelmed by all the little stuff im supposed to do lately. Half-assing a bunch of different things and not really doing any of them well.

I think the discipline from waking up early will trickle down and help me get just get stuff stuff done. Working out (just joined the Y last week), sticking to my daily Bible reading, chores around the house, getting in to work early, etc.

Also I'm going to experiment with how I wake up. Much to the dismay of my wife, I typically snooze my alarm about 4 times before finally getting up, waking her up each time in the process. I want to get out of bed when I set my alarm and not just browse the internet when I'm supposed to be getting ready. I'm going to try setting my phone away from the bed so I have to get up to turn it off.

Below will be random updates and thoughts on the challenge throughout the month:

Day 1, Jun 5th - I almost immediately regretted my decision upon waking up. Thankfully my wife had to get up for work around this time as well so it was a little easier. I'm thinking the phone away from the bed may not last that long as it was like torture knowing I immediately had to get out of bed and walk over to the dresser. If I don't go to bed at the same time every night, this is probably a bad solution as some days I may be in deep sleep, causing me to be more tired when I wake up and throughout the day. I'll have to think about this on, maybe I'll need to add going to bed at 10:00pm to this challenge.

Day 2, Jun 6th - I think I need some kind of sleep alarm device. My alarm went off right in the middle of a dream and I was really tempted to just shut it off and go back to sleep. I have Sleep Cycle on my iPhone, which will wake you up within 30 minutes of the time you set based on the stage of your sleep, but you have to have it on the bed with you.

Day 5, Jun 9th - Woke up when alarm was going off, and next thing I knew alarm stopped going off and it was 6:30am. Easy to feel like I broke the chain, but it's better to slightly break the chain and keep going than to get down about it and give up.

Day 9, Jun 13th - It's hard to wake up this early when you don't also go to bed earlier. It's hard to go to bed before 10pm and have a social life often times. I was out of town for a wedding, and the lack of sleep was really starting to take a toll on my body. For the sake of my health, I woke up at 5:30, got out of bed like I was supposed to, read for a few minutes, then got back in bed to give my body some rest. Like taking a nap, just 10 minutes after I woke up!

Day 16, June 20th - Same as above. If I can't stay healthy while I do this then I won't keep it up, so I think I will need to occasionally catch up on sleep somehow.