While slacking off doing research on the internet recently, I stumbled upon Raptitude.com, where David Cain writes about getting better at being human. One thing that intrigued me were his self-improvement experiments. He did a total of 22 experiments, with objectives like going vegan for 30 days or following a specific workout regime for 6 weeks. I really liked that idea and decided to that myself someday. That day is today.
Today I attended FemtoConf, a tiny conference for bootstrappers in Darmstadt. It was set to start at 9:30 am, so if I would get up at 7 am I would have plenty of time to go for a quick run before breakfast. But when my alarm rang, my morning instincts kicked in and I immediately hit the snooze button. I repeated that procedure until running wasn’t going to happen. Not a great start into the day.
In the end, I did go for a run before dinner and while out running, I had a brilliant idea for my first experiment: I will evaluate a tactic to kill the snooze button.
So here is what I’m going to do for the next 30 days, as it is already past midnight as I’m writing this, technically starting today:
Within 30 seconds after the alarm rings, I will get up and start doing 30 jumping jacks.
In practice, I will set a second alarm one minute after the first and consider the day a success if I manage to complete 30 jumping jacks before it rings.
Check back in 30 days to read how it went!
Header image by eflon, CC BY 2.0