This early wake up trick was inspired by Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret posted by Brad
Isaac at LifeHacker.com, link to
which I’ve run into while browsing Jim Gibbon’s blog (Thanks Jim!). I’ll quote Brad, because
I probably won’t come up with a better explanation anyway. According to Brad, he once approached
Jerry Seinfeld asking if he had
any tips for a young comic.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on
one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.
"After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day.
You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only
job next is to not break the chain."
"Don't break the chain." He said again for emphasis.
This is excellent advice, which is applicable to any situation when you want to strengthen your commitment, and it works very well if you want to develop a habit of waking up early, especially for those who are serious about it.
By putting calendar on the wall and marking every day when you wake up early in the morning you visualize your
achievements and inspire yourself to continue your challenge. It gives an additional “publicity”
to your new habit, too – another reason why you wouldn’t want to fail.
Probably the easiest way to go with this tip is to print monthly calendar, put it on the
wall and track you wake up time daily (use your editor such as OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft
Word) to create and print calendar. Or just generate it using Sciral online
calendar tool, it only takes few seconds. If you're a geek like me who does everything on a computer,
use Joe's Goals - online goal tracking tool.
If you follow our Tip# 13. Start Slowly But
Start Now and shift your sleeping time 5-10 minutes every few days, you can write down
your wake up time in calendar cells. It helps to keep track and again, visualizes your progress.
And once you started it, don't break the chain.
