A few weeks ago I started waking up at 5am.
My schedule was as follows:
5am – Wake Up
5:15-6 – Journal
6-7 – Make Music
7-8 – Workout
8-9 – Morning walk with my wife
9 – 5 – Work
5 – 6 – Wrap up work/Make dinner
6 – 7 – Eat dinner
7 – 8 – Relax with wife
In bed by 8
Asleep by 9
It was an aggressive schedule, but for the 2 weeks I was doing it consistently it felt great.
It felt great to have completed all these tasks before work started, great to have the evenings to just decompress with my wife, great to make music every day, great to know exactly when I was going to work out. I felt like I was on top of the world.
So what happened?
Well, work got busy and I got thrown into a new project. My equilibrium shifted and my schedule paid the toll.
I couldn’t make music everyday, which stressed me out and made me feel like a failure. The morning wins I was stacking for disrupted and I got emotional about it.
My routine, which was a way for me to maximize my happiness turned into a new way for me to be perfect.
The shame spiral started.
Disruption led to guilt, which led to using food to cope, which led to sleeping in, and then the schedule got abandoned. The guilt of not following it stayed though.
My wife made the point, while I was lamenting about how frustrating it was that my body wanted to sleep until 6:30 lately, that perhaps this schedule was fool’s gold from the start. If it was so precarious that one thing could throw it out of whack, then how could it actually serve me.
Said another way, how often is my life predictable versus unpredictable.
I think CEO’s get to wake up at 5 and have a very tight schedule because CEO’s are in control of their life fully. Their life and jobs are demanding, but they have designed it.
Most of us, do not have control or flexibility over things like work. Our schedules, and through it sense of peace, can easily be disrupted when new projects land, responsibilities shift, and work just generally increases.
We have an idea that if these extremely successful people can craft a meticulous schedule we should be able to do the same. But these people have minimized the variables in their life.
They don’t live in apartments where the fire alarm could go off at 12am at any point. They have chefs making dinners and meals, balanced precisely to their needs. They can take extravagant vacations to make up for the short windows of time they dedicate to their families.
In short, they have designed their entire being to be productivity superheroes and have put all of their resources into it. The same way LeBron James spends millions on his body yearly, these people spend their waken hours obsessed with maximizing their usefulness.
Life is unpredictable. We are human. Complex creatures constantly reacting and absorbing and digesting new information around us. The likelihood that we will be able to have a perfectly consistent day is low. Something or multiple things are going to get in the way. Sacrifices will be made. Recalculations and prioritizations will be needed.
I was upset about the inconsistencies. The things that were throwing me off the stable, productive path I outlined. In doing so, I was upset about being human.
The Beacon Beats 