Day 1 of #21EarlyDays

Most of you who are reading this know that I have been trying to focus on growing my career as well as learning all I can about Servant Leadership. I recently viewed a Ted Talk by Filipe Castro Matos who spoke about the lessons he learned by waking up early everyday for 21 days. It is said that it takes repeating something 21 times for it to become a habit. I figured that I would give it a shot and see if there are any noticeable differences in my days and my work / life balance. This decision came while my family was away traveling during a hurricane so I figured it would be best to wait until they were home safely and settled back in.

Today is that day. Last night I told my wife that I had decided to do this and that I would be waking up at 4:30 am for the next 21 days. Her response, "Cool, I have to open tomorrow so I'll be up at that time too." Happy to have another human (not dog) awake while she gets ready for work, she encouraged me to pursue it. I also did some research on other people's findings who tried this and was pretty surprised what they found. They had lots more energy throughout the day because they focused on the priorities of getting things done while everyone was still asleep. Tasks that are often ignored like proper nutrition, exercise, and meditation were among the top of the lists people mentioned being able to add to their day. I also found some articles about what the most successful CEOs in the world all have in common. (We all know I want to become a CEO so it was a easy read.) Other than the shocking similarity that they get up early, they almost all have and follow a very strict daily schedule.

Day 0 - Scheduling

So on day 0, I decided it would be a good idea to create a basic schedule of things that I should be doing around my normal work tasks. These successful CEOs have hard stop times on everything they do because they know that spending too much time on their current task will decrease the amount of time they have for the next scheduled task. My morning times consist of checking emails, preparing my daily task (attack) list, having a cup of coffee / water, 1 hour workout, then getting ready for the day (including helping with the kid's insanity.)

Day 1

So I went to bed and did what people recommended. I told myself as I got in bed that, "tomorrow, I'm waking up at 4:30 because I have to stick to my schedule". It was great and I was pumped up for what the next day would bring. Until....... I woke up at 1 am and then 2:30 am then 3 am and finally I decided to get out of bed at 4 am. Ha, I'm ahead of the game, right? I made my way downstairs and prepared my coffee and started up my PC. I began working through my emails and all of the other things I said I would do.........and I was finished with my first hours worth of schedule in about 15 minutes. I picked up a book that I've been meaning to finish and read until my next alarm went off. This has been going on all day. Start my scheduled task on time and finish WAY ahead of when I though I would. What has been eating up so much of my time? What am I doing different?

Exit stage left distractions

I found tons of tips about planning your day and how to make sure that you don't get distracted from your tasks throughout the day and they have been working great. Here is a list of some of the things I've implemented today.

• Only check emails during scheduled times
• Turn off all phone app notifications
• Stay away from time sucking social media (except during allotted time)
• Focus on one task at a time until you are finished or your time is up....then move on

Day 1 lessons

So far what I have learned is that I need to work on my scheduling of time. Not my time management, I'm getting things done fine it just seems that I've given myself too much time to do these tasks. It is apparent to me just from this day that distractions have taken up a lot of time from completing my normal tasks. If I maintain the removal of my distractions then I should be able to reduce the amount of time I've allocated to each task which will increase the number of tasks that I can complete each day.

I'm not planning to do an update every day but I will post again after each week and then also at the end of the 21 days. I'm hoping that with the focused scheduling and early days I'll be building new habits that will encourage my success as I work my way towards my goal.

Chase Sutphin - CEO in training.