In my last post I told you that the first habit I’m working on for 2010 is waking early.  The next step in the process is to break down that new habit into 8 baby steps.  Here are the baby steps for waking early:

1. get up within 5 minutes of alarm going off
2. go to bed at 10:00 p.m.
   
3. get up at 7:30 a.m.
4. get up at 7:00 a.m.
5. get up at 6:30 a.m.
6. get up at 6:00 a.m.
7. get up at 5:30 a.m.
8. get up at 5:00 a.m.

I should clarify that this is a 6 days/week plan.  I’m allowing myself one day per week to wake up without an alarm.  Most experts suggest that you should get up at the same time every day… mostly because that will train you to go to bed at the same time every night.  We’ll see how this goes.

Update: last night I reread the 6 Changes blog post and remembered that I needed to break down my change into 8 baby steps.  So I decided the first baby step was simply getting up with the alarm, rather than laying in bed dozing for another 30-45 minutes. (I use a clock radio so I would lay in bed listening to the local radio station.)

So today I got up a few minutes after the alarm went off.  Success on Day 1! 

photo credit sean dreilinger

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