As many of my friends and family know, I’m a morning person. When I wake up in the morning, I’m awake and ready to tackle my day. Not only that, I’m at my most productive in the morning, especially early in the morning. One way this manifests is that occasionally I wake up between 4:00 and 4:30am. Oddly, this is something that has happened to me for a fair amount of my adult life, but I’ve never really understood why – it’s simply that, some mornings, I wake up, completely ready to face my day much earlier.

Even though I typically end up with less sleep from the night prior, I actually look forward to these mornings. As you might imagine, there is almost no one else awake at that hour. In particular, anyone in my circle of friends is either at work still or just crawling off to bed (most people I know fit in the “night owl” category). So, with no distractions and my mind at its peak, I find that I’m able to get a lot more done, and be a lot more creative. It’s also early enough, that I’m not typically distracted by my imminent departure for work. As such, this is a windfall of free time that I can use to tinker with something, try something new, or even get some writing in.

I’ve occasionally thought about planning my day so that I could consistently get up this early by going to bed earlier.  Since I’m more energized in the morning than I am in the evening, I’ve often thought that if I could skew my schedule so that I went to sleep at 8:00 and woke up at 4:00, I could get the best of both worlds – enough sleep to make it through the day, and wake up at 4:00am.  The more pragmatic part of me knows that this wouldn’t work though – between my job and family time, it’s not really feasible to get to bed that early.  Instead, I just roll with it, and when my mind and body say that I need to wake up early one morning, I do.