Hacking habits and Facebook Groups
By nature I am a late night person. I had this habit which in a weird kind of way I was proud of. And that was no matter how hard I try to go to sleep early I would always end up going to sleep at exactly 1:45 am. It wasn’t what I wanted. I would have loved to have gone to sleep at 10 pm and woken up nice and fresh 7 1/2 hours later at 5:30 am. But I think it was a throwback from my university days and I still haven’t managed to get rid of it. As a matter of fact there was almost a subconscious connection between was been sleeping that late and feeling that I’m still young and at university which made it all the more harder to break as a habit.
Why was it such an issue is a natural question to ask? Why not just be a late night owl like so many people out there? The answer was that it was fine when I was younger but as my age is catching up with me I could feel these late nights were really taking a toll on me and the impact was with me at many points in the day.
On a more personal level it was so nice to be able to fall asleep with my wife in my arms after a nice conversation on the few occasions I slept early. Irony of ironies my wife would be fast asleep by 10.30pm. And by the time I slowed into bed at 1:45 am there was no conversation to be had or no warm embrace.
So hence the journey started to actually try and sleep early and wake up early for me it was the equivalent of going on an ultra marathon or climbing a painfully large mountain. The problem I faced was that no matter how hard I try to sleep early something or another would come up and by the time I did all my bits and pieces it was 1:45 am.
Then I hatched a plan and that was to observe my wife has somehow even though we both had a very similar evening routine as we were both living under the same roof she always managed to be in bed by 10 pm. What I noticed surprised me. She would have her set routine of things to do before sleeping but if she was running late she would begin to cut out some of the things that she had to do to make sure that she would sleep on time. I refer to this as the habit of time over task. Meaning that if you have a task to do or a series of tasks. What determines whether you complete them or not is not doing them but if you have the time. If you don’t have the time then you have to drop that task and move on.
So I had my evening list of tasks and this time are use the clock as the arbitrator of when to start and stop a task. When the clock was the arbitrator I found that if I was running out of time I would stop a task and move onto the next one or only do the essential ones that I have to do and by keeping an eye on the clock I was able to dramatically cut down my sleeping time.
So you can imagine my happiness after eight months of trying multiple approaches of finally cracking the habit and actually going to sleep a lot earlier and waking up at 6–6.30am every day like clockwork. And so after this epic journey I turned to my wife and explain to her what I had achieved, but the response was not as ecstatic as I was hoping. As I realised for her this was the absolute norm for her whole life!
So there I was not really feeling that I had been fully appreciated for my epic journey and then as you do I went to Facebook for the mindless streaming of my feed to distract me from the epic lack of appreciation for my epic achievement. And that’s when it dawned upon me, I came across tons of Facebook groups of people coming together and forming groups on what they were trying to achieve. In these groups every step was a victory, people could understand what you are going through and even better people who had already tried the path could show you shortcuts and ways to accelerate your results. And even better when you shared your journey you would appreciation with a real understanding of what had just happened as everybody was on the same journey. And it was then that I understood how important Facebook groups can be to help accelerate people in learning about, practising and establishing micro habits.
Now I have a Facebook group where I know there are people like me trying to hack their habits and they understand how valuable it is when achieved as well as the journey.