Early to bed, Early to rise.
This morning I woke up at my usual 4:30 A.M. , laid there for a bit and thought about the whole early rising thing. I don’t always get up at that time, but my neighbors help make sure that I’m at least awake. There are 6 houses in our little grouping of homes, 2 are retirees, 2 are self-employed, 1 is a bus driver and 1 is a Realtor.
The retirement crowd always seems to be getting up at that time, lights are going on but they aren’t making too much noise. 1 of the self-employed often leaves at that time so I can hear his car start, the bus driver is always up, but he doesn’t leave till a little later in the morning. The Realtor is the only one who never seems to be up before 6:30 or so.
The biggest plus of getting up fairly early in the morning is the vast amount of things you can get done, assuming of course that you aren’t going to be using power tools to accomplish your tasks. Nothing seems to piss off neighbors more than firing up a circular saw at 5:00 in the morning.
Using a computer, I can put in 8 hours of work by 2:00 P.M. and still have a significant amount of daylight left for anything else I may want to do. I used the do the same thing working construction in my early twenties, we’d start at 6:00 and close the day out at 3:30 or 4:00.
So what do you give up when you go to bed earlier so you can rise earlier? Television? Reading? Socializing?
Books don’t care when you read them, digital recorders provide television when you want it, so really the only thing that might be affected is getting together with friends. It seems that most of our friends also follow a similar pattern of early rising, so that doesn’t affect us much, your mileage may vary.
I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who coined the phrase about early rising and although I didn’t really plan my early rising, I do sometimes feel wiser. 