I was listening to the SILY Episode 322 where Darrel talks about setting goals. That reminded me of a goal I had and failed to reach until a took counter measures. But let’s rewind back for a second.
The engineer and continuous learner inside me kept me awake. Every time I sat down in front of the computer there was something to explore. A good blog post, a new shiny open-source project, an idea in my mind waiting to be born in code… Why bother about sleep? I’m young, energized and the thoughts are spinning. Midnight, 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM, crash. Eat, sleep, code, repeat. The night becomes the day; the day becomes the night. It went on even after my son was born. Sleeplessness became my companion. One day I realized the journey can’t continue like that. Without sleep, I lost energy and my creativity. I tried to compensate by staying up even longer. This endless loop had to stop.
The goal was set: Get to bed earlier. Simple, isn’t it?
The path towards that goal wasn’t. Apparently I just wasn’t disciplined enough to turn the distraction off:
The Internet kept me awake.
Suddenly it hit me. There was a simple solution to push me towards my goal. I programmed my router to turn off the internet at midnight and not turn on again for a couple of hours.
I encourage you to seek for little tricks like these to bring you closer to your goals.
It’s 23:30 CEST. I have 30 minutes left. Have a good night!
Ps: I do this over a year now, and so far I turned the internet on again only twice.
Brilliant! It can also silence device notification sounds late at night.
I know that problem, I use an alarm bell in my cell phone to tell me that I have to go to bed. It rings at 22:30.
Just turning off the internet won’t help for me, because there are way too many offline interest.