Systems vs. Willpower

This is the deep end, and it's the one day of my newsletter regimen that is purely philosophical and not design related. Enjoy.

My alarm goes off at 4:30am.

There’s a second alarm in my dining room set for 4:33am. If I don’t get out of bed and shut it off in time, it wakes up my entire house. My wife. My kid. Everybody, and boy those consequences are brutal.

Haven't had it happen yet (apart from the one time we had power outage and my alarm clock didn't reset).

That’s not discipline, I just refuse to be the guy who woke his whole family up because he wanted five more minutes and hit the snooze button. I'm forced to get up or suffer the consequences.

I'd tried to become an early riser before, but failed every time.

Here’s why: I assumed that at 4:30 in the morning, half-conscious, warm, with nobody watching, I would make a good decision.

Nobody does. Not when there is no consequence and your bed is nice and warm.

The second your plan depends on having willpower at 4:30 a.m., the plan already lost. So stop trying to become a person who wants to get up, and start building something that gets you up whether you want to or not.

Here's how I did it:

Pick a time you can actually hit, then ratchet it down.

I didn’t start at 4:30. I started at 5:30, still earlier than what I was already doing, boring enough that my body didn’t file a complaint. Once it stopped feeling like a negotiation, I moved to 5:15. Then 5:00, 4:45, 4:30.

Fifteen minutes at a time. Fifteen minutes is nothing, and that's exactly the size of change that survives.

Buy the light.

I’m sensitive to light. I can’t sleep unless a room is genuinely dark, the little red standby dot on a TV is enough to keep me up. Which sounds like a problem and is actually the lever. If light can keep me awake, light can wake me up.

A sunrise alarm brings the room up gradually and gets the adrenaline moving that your nervous system needs to come online at all. Walmart sells one for about sixteen dollars and it'll do the trick. I run a Hatch Restore now, but I bought that after two years of already doing this, as a reward. The cheap one works 😎

Put a consequence between you and the snooze.

This is the part everyone skips, and it’s the only part that works.

Mine started ridiculous.

There’s an app called Alarmy that won’t shut off until you complete a mission, so I taped a barcode inside the center console of my car parked outside. The only way to stop the noise was to put clothes on, get out the front door, walk to my car, and snap a photo of the barcode.

Once you’re standing in your driveway in the dark with your workout gear on, there's no way in hell you're getting back in bed

I ran that about two months and then switched to a subtler system once I'd built the habit.

That secondary alarm set to go off 3min after my light alarm is enough of a push. Otherwise I suffer the wrath of a cranky toddler and an angry momma.

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You are not going to win a fight with yourself at 4:30 in the morning. Or when you're hungry, annoyed, tired, or whatever.

So don’t have the fight.

Find the decision you keep losing, and put up a system that forces a function.

— Zach