Active Recall!

Okay so quick update on the whole waking up thing. Today I tried waking up with the Apple Watch, which is great because it vibrates your wrist. This means it doesn’t disturb my fiance when I’m waking up.

It also means it’s easy to turn off and go back to sleep, which is exactly what I did this morning. Still was able to get kettlebell swings in though.

I have a todo for writing a post about how I want to write 64 posts by the end of the year. It’s a post per day starting with the post I wrote the other day about posting just to post.

To get back in the swing of things, I’ll need to have some sort of system to fall back on when I don’t have a topic to write about. Today, I’ll try this: Open up my recent Readwise emails to find a book highlight and then I’ll write about that.

So here’s the highlight I picked, from “Storyworthy” by Matthew Dicks:

Moreover, by placing these most storyworthy moments in a spreadsheet, I could sort them for later use. I could copy, cut, and paste these ideas into other spreadsheets easily, allowing me to ultimately separate the truly storyworthy ideas from the ones that merely had potential.

I happen to be writing the first draft of this post in a spreadsheet. (Sort of.) It’s nice to see an overview of the different topics I have in mind so that I can slowly work toward those 64 posts.

This is recently inspired by David Perell’s daily writing, which seems to be on his blog under tweetstorms: https://www.perell.com/tweetstorms

I’ve done 100 posts in 100 days in the past. Most recently in 2016: http://franciscortez.com/100-days-100-posts

That time, it was probably inspired by Seth Godin and then probably a bunch of other copywriting material I was reading at the time.

Actually… I just read my first post from that series: http://franciscortez.com/two-crappy-pages

It’s inspired by Tim Ferriss (“Two crappy pages”) and then a couple 100-day programming challenges: 100 days of Framer and 100 days of Swift.

It’s a reminder of how memory works. Which is to say: it often doesn’t.

I don’t remember those at all.

So I’m really happy that I have it captured somewhere. And now I’m looking forward to what this next attempt at writing daily will capture.

I got up this morning and, for the first time in weeks, didn’t crawl back into bed. There was a time, probably even less than a year ago, where the thought of snoozing didn’t cross my mind.

It was a win to get one step closer to that.

Here’s what worked:

– I set an alarm on my phone and put my phone on my desk so I’d need to stand up to turn it off.

– Note: I also used to use my phone to listen to a podcast (usually an old Rewatchables episode) to sleep. Last week I got a $30 MP3 player. It’s clunky but it has a sleep function. I threw 2 episodes on it and that’s it and now I can listen to something to bed without being tempted to scroll on my phone.

– I mixed up a pre-workout (BCAA + caffeine) and stuck it in the fridge.

This worked. Why? Here are some hunches:

– The alarm matters but the position doesn’t. I used to wake up on my own before 7AM but never re-adjusted since moving from NY to SF a month ago. So I do need an alarm (trying 6:30 AM right now). I say the position doesn’t matter because I’ve had it at the desk for a few days and will just walk over, turn it off, and walk back to bed no problem. (The problem is that I usually don’t end up falling back asleep and then am both tired and frustrated that I didn’t use the waking time to do something.)

– The $30 MP3 player has been great. I fall asleep when I finally stop stupidly patting myself on the back for thinking of buying it

– Is BCAA magic? Probably not. But the last time I significantly lost weight, I was using it before and after workouts. It might just help curb hunger and that’s a good enough benefit for me. For the caffeine, why not coffee? It’d probably wake me up but I wanted to try to build a new cue. Coffee usually means I’ll sit down and work. I want the artificial pre-workout flavor first thing in the morning to taste like the beginning of a workout.

Another useful step: I started using the apartment complex gym. (Mask on! Empty at the time with huge garage style doors open for ventilation.) I have the same weights for kettlebells at home, but it probably takes 1-2 minutes from my door to the gym door.

1-2 minutes to a complete environment shift. Hard to beat.

(Let’s see if I can keep it up!)