Early to Bed, Early to Rise, Shut the Hell Up

About this whole "getting up early" thing...

I'm failing pretty miserably.

During the day, it sounds like such a great idea. I'll get up early! I'll get to work earlier than usual! I can leave work early! It will be such a relief! I have fantasies of quiet mornings spent basking in the sunrise, mentally preparing for my day, and having profound epiphanies about life, the universe, and everything.

But then I get home at night (late, because I got to work late, and OH the vicious cycle!), and I eat dinner, and perhaps I'll watch some television if one of my stories is on, and then I talk to Lee, and then dammit, it's midnight. And of course I, being the delicate flower that I am, require 8 hours of sleep a night, so simple math tells us that I will not be getting up early the next day as planned.

I mean... I could, I know. There are other factors, as well. For example, I use my cell phone as my alarm clock. It sits right next to the bed, within easy reach, so that when it goes off I can reach over and turn it off without even opening my eyes. Sometimes I even forget to change the volume from 'vibrate' to 'whole lotta noise,' so I'm even LESS likely to wake up. My phone's alarm also has a unique snooze feature - it tells you that if you hit snooze, you will get 5 more minutes before the alarm goes off. Well, who doesn't have 5 minutes to spare? I know I do! Let's go back to sleep! What they don't mention is that if you do that 12 times, you've actually slept an additional hour, you fool. It's so just so eaaaasyyyy to reach over, grab the phone, and cuddle with it while I semi-consciously press snooze every 5 minutes. And then, my ambitious plans for the day are ruined before I even get out of bed.

Anyway, enough whining. I found this post at Zen Habits about why you should get up early and how to do it. This guy gets up at 4:30 - which, no thank you - but he has some good points like maybe I should be using a real alarm clock placed away from my bed, for example. When I was in college I had my bed lofted and kept my alarm clock on the shelf above my desk across the room. That meant that if I wanted to hit snooze, I had to climb down, turn the alarm off, and climb back up into my tree-bed for another 7 minutes of sleep. I didn't do that for an hour, I can tell you that much. Thus, step 1 in somehow salvaging this challenge I have set for myself is to dig out my old alarm clock tonight. Wish me luck!

(If this doesn't work, I'm going to rig up a complicated pulley system that will release an angry cheetah each morning if I'm not up by 7:30.)