Comments on: Practice Makes Perfect Professionals

By: J. Timothy King

J. Timothy King — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 02:32:17 +0000

Thanks, James. I too am married, and I don’t want to catch grief from my wife, either. Thanks for the encouragement. It’s actually a lot easier for me now than it was several months ago. And I do tend to wake up reasonably early, even without an alarm. But I also tend to oversleep, compared to when I’d like to get up, and to kill the alarm at the slightest inconvenience. This can ruin my morning. I love it when I can get hours of productive work done before the rest of the family even wakes up.

-TimK

By: James

James — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 19:15:36 +0000

I guess since I’m married, I don’t want to catch any grief from my wife. When I hit the floor to get to the alarm, I’m not even awake yet.

The interesting thing is, that if you force yourself long enough, your internal clock will start getting you up. I personally woke up 10 minutes before the alarm clock went off. If I set the clock ahead an hour so I can ’sleep in’ I’ll wake up a whole hour before hand.

I just wanted to say ‘hang in there.’ Steve’s advice seems to be very close to how I operate.

By: J. Timothy King

J. Timothy King — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:50:27 +0000

Hi, James. I’ve tried that. The problem I’m having is that even after I get up, even after I stretch, even after I walk across the room and turn off the alarm, even after I walk into the next room or down the stairs, I still have a tendency to lay down and fall back to sleep. Then my sleeping schedule begins to slip later and later. I need some event that I can associate with permanently waking up. Maybe splashing cold water on my face or something.

That’s actually a serious idea I think I will try. The times when I wake up the quickest are those when I have an exciting project I want to get to or an urgent commitment. At those times, a burst of adrenaline seems to push the morning stupor right out of the way. Maybe a physically shocking event, like cold water, will achieve the same result, at least long enough for my body to train itself to associate that with getting up in the morning.

-TimK

By: James

James — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:12:44 +0000

To help the “Unconscious effort” I put the alarm clock across the room. I have to turn it off before it wakes my Wife, so I’m out of bed before I think about sleeping in.

If you can similate this with the Practice Makes Perfect Professionals, some urgency (perhaps pet peeves), then maybe it’d help.

By: More Self Development - blog.dominik.net

More Self Development - blog.dominik.net — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:59:00 +0000

[…] Reading that blog today, led me to read his post on how Practice Makes Perfect Professionals. It hit a chord; I realized how I have fallen into bad habits by simply repeating them — and similarly, how I’ve fostered good habits (and defeated bad ones!) by doing the exact same thing: repeating them. […]