How I Finally Seized the Day and Took Control Over My Life
Reading “The 5 am Club” taught me that we do have control.
Routine is imposed upon most of us.
We like to entertain the idea that we have control, but we don’t.
We work the hours our bosses tell us to work, and everything is engineered around this.
The time we wake up in the morning is based on how long we need to get ready and be at our desks for 9am. Even in the remote world of the pandemic, we’re logged on at the required time.
Likewise, work influences when we have lunch, with many workers choosing to have it slightly later than the halfway point, so their afternoon feels quicker than the morning.
How often we can see friends and family, how often we go to the gym, what time we can go to the movies or have dinner or go to bed - everything is affected by work.
We don’t have control of our days, which means we don’t have control of our lives.
I’m no exception to this. But things did start to change for me in 2020, with two specific standout moments.
- Losing my job and becoming my own boss. Not commuting, being able to work out in the middle of the day, or take a longer lunch if I needed some extra time all made a difference to how I felt.
- Reading The 5 am Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life.
It’s the second point I’ll elaborate on in this article. While it’s admittedly a frustrating read and not a page-turner, it’s also packed with nuggets of wisdom, inspiration, and actionable advice.
Here are the four big lessons I took from the book.
1. Creating an intentional morning routine
A morning routine doesn’t have to be about extreme productivity. You don’t have to practice Yoga, meditate, work on your novel, or anything else.
The 5 am Club advocates a “magic hour” where you spend 20 minutes reading, 20 minutes journalling, and 20 minutes exercising. You’re allowed to vary the timings and it can extend beyond an hour.
Personally, I found that just having time in the morning was wonderful. To my surprise, it felt new, and different.
It dawned on me that I’d never had time in the mornings before. Weekends and days off from work don’t count, because they’re leisure days. Working days make up the majority of our time, and on those days, my routine consisted of the following:
- Wake up
- Drink a cup of coffee and have a quick breakfast
- Get in the car and drive to the office
This routine was consistent across jobs, regardless of distance. Over the past 12 months, though, I have become intentional.
My mornings no longer just happen to me. Instead, I craft them to set me up for success — because when you win the morning, you win the day.
The morning is not just time to guzzle coffee until the bleariness of sleep leaves you and you drag yourself to work. It is the foundation of the day ahead. Early victory sets the tone and because action causes momentum, that victory puts us on a path of wins throughout the day.
Everyone’s routines will be different, so pay little attention to the clickbait headlines around “the ultimate morning routine of top performers”. Instead, focus on this central question:
Who do I want to be?
Then break that down:
- What do you need to improve on?
- What habits do you need to add?
- What habits do you need to break?
- What goals do you have?
For me, I’m training for a marathon. My days are busy and unpredictable, so I try to run in the morning.
I have also developed stiffness in my body as a result of sitting at a desk for years, so I have a stretching routine to follow.
And the 75 Hard challenge required reading 10 pages a day, which I enjoyed as an activity before starting work.
Therefore, my ideal morning involves waking up, going for a run, stretching when I get home, taking a shower, then reading over breakfast.
There are no long meditation or Yoga sessions, no ice baths, no green smoothies. I have nothing against any of those things, I just want to highlight that your morning is, indeed, your routine, based on your goals.
2. Crafting my day with purpose
Following on from my morning routine is the second lesson: for most of us, our days are out of our control.
How many times have you said and heard a variation of “I was planning to do that, but…” Or, “I really wanted to work out today, but something came up”?
If your life is anything like mine, the answer is “a lot.”
Good intentions aren’t enough to reliably accomplish what we intend to. We need to actually commit to them and prevent interruptions by putting up boundaries to interruptions. This isn’t always possible, but we can at least hugely cut down what we allow to distract us.
We can’t control bad news, emergencies, and important interruptions — but we can turn off notifications, ignore Facebook, and put important things into our calendars.
“Important things” doesn’t just mean appointments and meetings.
It includes anything that you need to do. Workouts, meditation, studying, reading, family time, a nap, calling your parents.
In short: if it’s something that matters, that will make you feel better in whatever way, make it a concrete action for your day. Then if you don’t do it, you’ve chosen to opt-out by seeing the reminder and cancelling. This is a huge difference from just hoping you’ll have time or remember to do it.
3. Routine and systems
It’s one thing to say we’ll live with intentionality and to have specific things we want to do, but it’s quite another to actually get them done.
And the best way to do it is by using routines and systems.
The great thing about a routine is one action leads to another. This means that once you get used to that routine, you only need to think about starting the first action — everything else will follow naturally from there.
In other words, don’t think about completing everything, and don’t think about even starting everything. Just think about the first step.
Routines and systems should be a natural extension from the steps above — what morning routine do you want, what do you want your day to look like, and then work backward from there.
One routine might be that when you get to your desk, look at your vision board first. That helps you connect with your purpose. Then you can look at your weekly plan and your daily activities needed to complete that plan. And then you’re ready to check your emails or do your first work task.
4. Stop to appreciate life — both the little things and the finer things
The 5 am Club is a non-fiction book that uses a character-driven narrative. While it can make for a jarring read at times, it also gives vivid descriptions of life’s wonders, taking us into territory usually reserved for rich works of fiction.
Throughout the book, the author makes clear of the need to enjoy life. We can’t enjoy it when we’re rushing from one appointment to another, or when we feel like we have no control.
We savour it by slowing down.
By shaping our own days and incorporating the things that are important to us. There should be a blend of work, purpose, family, rest, creativity. It shouldn’t be a badge of honour to work 18 hour days — it signals a life lived without direction or control.
We don’t need lots of money to appreciate life. Sure, fancy dinners and fast cars are enjoyable.
But so is looking at a sunset with loved ones.
So is enjoying a walk in nature.
And so is practicing gratitude, taking comfort in knowing that you live in a country not at war, that gives you running water on demand, and with such technological advances as a handheld device that gives you access to everything humans have learned throughout history.
There’s a lot to love about life if we take the time to appreciate it.
Final Thoughts
Modern life is wonderful; I would like to live now more than at any other point in history.
Yet the big problem we have is being constantly on the go, struggling to catch our breath.
Reading The 5 am Club taught me that we do have control — we just have to reach out and take it.
