I wake up at 6 AM, go to pee, come back to bed, grab my phone. At 9 AM, I notice I have a warm sensation in my stomach. Oh, right, hunger! I haven’t eaten yet, because I spent three damn hours fooling around with my phone while lying in bed.
It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
Seneca
This used to be my daily routine for a long time, the procrastination king’s morning habit. Whether my phone was the reason for the extended “resting time” or that I liked the coziness of a mattress, what matters to me now is the worrying number of hours I spent just lying there doing nothing productive.
I dare to justify myself by saying it is not my fault. There is a series of highly influential elements, modern society and consumerism are just a few, that makes us enjoy laziness. Some sort of disease that is present in everything we do, but we hardly notice. Nothing a dose of reality can’t help defusing.
Buckle up for the following shocking news: according to research, we humans spend nearly half of our lifetime lying around in bed. Assuming the average life expectancy for an American person is 75 years old, it means that we may spend approximately 35 years lying in bed, alongside the finding that the time spent awake in bed is more than 3 hours.
Today, my entire existence equals the total bed-lying time for someone who is about to stop living – crazy dung 😱
Sleeping Time vs. Resting Time
We need to sleep, that is ok. Sleeping is necessary for our bodies to refuel energy. But how about the time we simply stay in bed? That time we call resting. What do we do with that time? Let me remind you, more than 3 hours.
Watch TV, maybe? Write to our crush who doesn’t reply to our messages? Whatever the reason, it is truly concerning to realize that a large portion of our time on earth could go straight to the dumpster of not very productive things.
In my particular case, being motivated to boost my time on earth led me to examine my bedtime so I could improve the quality of available time during the day. As a result, it was easy to determine that the morning time was when I stayed in bed the longest. That is the target I aimed toward: leaving bed early in the morning.
The 12/24 Challenge
Once I determined that my morning time was the weak spot to exploit, I figured I could save two dead hours every day. I would have twenty-four extra alive hours available in just twelve days. And voilà, this is how the 12/24 challenge was born.
The goal of this challenge is to transform resting time into productive time, dead time to alive time.
Think of what you could do with an extra day of life. Work out more? Finish a project? Take longer walks in the park with your dog? Spend more time with family and friends?
Think that you don’t have to do anything extraordinary to get one extra day of life. You are not stealing from the time vault. You are not purchasing an expensive time machine in the supermarket. You simply have to decide to abandon the comfort trap (or bed as I prefer to call it) earlier.
As easy as that, you can become a time hacker! You would be rescuing thirty days of dead time in a year; figuratively, you would be living 395 days a year now.
Now allow me please to explain how I executed the challenge through the following actions.
1. Plan the next day ahead the night before you sleep
As I always say, you must have a reason why you want to change this in your life. For this one, I gave you an easy one: to win one extra day of life. However, the reason must come from you, from within; otherwise, the plan can weaken fast.
I suggest creating a list of tasks or activities that you want to perform with those two hours you will rescue from lying in bed. There is nothing silly about it. It is just a productivity tool.
When you plan the night before just before going to bed, your brain absorbs this information, setting you up the next morning to perform what you expected.
What is it that you want to do with this free time? Finish a project? Learn how to dance Salsa? Just write it down the night before, let your subconscious do the rest of the work for you.
2. Throw your gadgets away
I used to be heavily dependent on my smartphone, one of the major distractions ever created by humanity, disguised as a smart item to help us achieve menial tasks. To be honest, phones are not meant to be harmful to our health, it is the way we use them that determines whether it becomes a productivity tool or an attention enslavement device. Our choice.
Same case with tablets, television, even kitchens now, anything that can hook to the internet and show you funny videos of cats. The further away they are from you, the higher the possibility that you will avoid distractions.
Make sure to keep these elements away from your sleeping area. Phones and tablets turned off in the living room, if possible.
3. Set Up An Alternate Alarm
I know this might sound ridiculous. I swear I am not calling you stupid. I am reminding myself how stupid I was to throw my phone away the first night, while I didn’t set up an alternate waking up system. I beautifully woke up very late.
I believe it is crucial to set up an alternate alarm system to wake up early if you need one. It is effortless to fall into the temptation of hooking up to the phone right after waking up. It is a powerful habit. Your fingers might move by themselves, even turn the phone on and dismantle your elaborate plan to become more productive that day.
4. Punish your pocket
To make this challenge painfully fun, admit that you have a situation that you are trying to change. Admit it to a friend. Admission leads to compromise. You won’t want to lie to your friend in case you fail one day of the challenge.
Finally, report a status every day whether you succeed or fail. In case of failure, pay a fee to your friend.
I remember I talked about this to a friend. I told her I would give her $5 every time I didn’t wake up from bed right away. Even if she didn’t have a way to prove if what I was saying was true or false, I only paid $5 for the first day I stupidly didn’t set up an alternate alarm. By admitting the challenge you create compromise, it affects your reputation, and that is something that you own as the ultimate judge of your actions.
In Case Of Emergency
To be honest, despite the elaborate plan, it can happen that the temptation to procrastinate is too strong to resist. In cases of despair, I ask for help.
I’ll drop here one of the wisest advice I ever took from Marcus Aurelius in his masterpiece: Meditations – book 5, paragraph 1.
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I am rising to do the work of a human being. What do I have to complain about, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” — But it’s nicer here …
So were you born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? — But we have to sleep sometime… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that — as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There’s still more of that to do.
You don’t love yourself enough. For if you did, you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is not then your labor in the world just as worthy of respect and worth your effort?
Resources
Data and statistics are extracted from the following articles: