The 5 am club - admission denied!

(This was a blog post I had written in 2020. It had got lost in one of my many notebooks. Today when I was decluttering my writing, I found it and decided to post it)

I can sleep standing up in a crowded train. I can fall asleep anywhere. I can sleep 20 hours a day, and I really, really love it.

Unfortunately, that means a lot of things I want to do and need to do, don’t get done. My manuscript doesn’t write itself, I don’t finish my walk and my unfinished crochet project glares at me from the sofa.

Then I reached the wise old age of 56 and got a bit of a scare, courtesy of Mr. Covid. I realised life was too unpredictable and I needed to stop sleeping so much and start getting things done!

So Google baba was invoked and Amazon devi was appeased. Given my obsession with reading and planning, books, videos and blogs filled my waking hours. Atomic Habits was read like a bible. So was Getting Things Done. I bought a pretty planner and spent hours decorating it before creating a morning and evening routine.

That night I went to sleep by 9.30, my to-do list already running in my head. I love filling every hour in the planner with things that I would do and I was looking forward to waking up at 5 am and getting my walk, bath and morning pages out of the way even before I had breakfast.

Sure, the next morning, when the alarm rang, I jumped out of bed, ready to begin the day with birdsong at dawn. But instead I saw that it was bright outside. The alarm was actually a phone call to tell me my groceries had arrived.

It was 11.30 am. The morning and all my planning had disappeared. After doing everything else, I had forgotten to set the alarm.

P.S. I really do want to know: how do you get out of bed early? My daughters tell me to just get up the moment the alarm rings, but how? It’s so lovely to snooze and go back to your dreams. If you’ve cracked it, please tell me in the comments.