Tip #8: Have Important Things Planned for the Morning

If you want to wake up earlier, make sure you have something important planned for the morning—something that you really want to do first thing when you get up, and something more important than taking an extra hour of sleep.

Having something important planned for the morning can be the pushing force that makes you get up. Things that you really enjoy doing work best, but sometimes things that are really pressing on you work just as well. The key is to have strong reasons to get up early in the morning.

Check what important tasks you have planned for the upcoming days and schedule some of them for the next morning. Perhaps you have a hobby that you haven’t found time for lately, or some coursework that you have been putting off. The more important something is to you, the higher the chances are that it will push you out of bed.

We often have important or extremely interesting things that we couldn’t do during the day, so we try to do or finish them in the evening. A good tactic I want to recommend is to postpone them until the morning. For example, you need to answer an important email from your boss. It doesn’t really matter if you do it at 11 pm or at 6 am the next day—your boss will see it only in the morning. But knowing that you have to do it before he sends you another “reminder” email will make you get up and go to the computer as soon as the alarm goes off.

Another example is when I find a good book and keep reading until midnight because it’s so interesting that I just can’t stop. What I usually do then is stop reading at an interesting point (yes, you need willpower to do it!) and put the book near my bed. Then, instead of spending another hour late in the evening, I wake up one hour earlier in the morning to read the book. It’s not an absolutely “important thing” to do, but curiosity definitely works just as well here.