How to Wake Up Early with Enthusiasm: The Ultimate Guide

For the past few weeks I’ve been talking about how I had a surprise for you today. Well, this is it. I’m sorry if it isn’t what you were expecting, but I promise it will be worth your while once you start reading. I also have special guest contributors who were kind enough to share their thoughts.

Update: Want to wake up early but unsure when to go to bed? Well I found an AWESOME (free) tool to help you, and it’s called the Bedtime Calculator. Simply enter what time you want to wake up (or the time you’re going to bed) and it will spit out times in which you should go to bed (or wake up) according to the average human sleeping cycle.

Photo by Vince Alongi (flickr)

Do you struggle to wake up early each morning, only to rise out of bed later in the day – rushing to get things done without enough time to accomplish your goals? By the time the sun sinks down into the earth, you still haven’t gotten everything you set out to do done and the day has turned out to be a total bust.

Believe me, I’ve been there. In fact, it got to the point where I was sleeping 10-11 hours every night, with very little time left during the day to work on what I wanted to do, while also having time left over to truly enjoy myself.

I wanted a change.

If you’ve been following my progress over the past few months, you’ll see my various attempts to create that change by changing up my daily writing routine, with the first one being 4 months ago when I posted Finding Motivation: How to Adapt a Routine. I then expanded on the topic in my post A Confession and Report: How I Developed My Writing Routine a little over a month later. My most recent attempt at analyzing my writing routine and creating a writing schedule that worked for me was just earlier this month when I posted A Writer’s Reflection: My Life as a Writer Revealed.

There’s no secret that, after feeling how it feels to wake up earlier at 7am and getting so much done, my mind has been consumed with the thought of waking up even earlier than I am – 5:30 or even 4:45am.

Well, now I’m doing it again. I’m going to make a change in my life. And so can you.

But let’s start from the beginning. (more…)

A Trip Back in Time: My 7 Link Challenge

Photo by Michel Filion (flickr)

Yesterday I was browsing Marian Schembari’s blog (if you haven’t checked it out yet, you should definitely do so – her blog is filled with social media and blogging tips), when I came across her post Let’s Do the Time Warp: My 7 Link Challenge. In the post, she mentions how she got the idea of the 7 Link Challenge from Stanford’s post 4 My Tweeps on the blog Pushing Social (a blog all about social media) who got his idea from the post Take the 7 Link Challenge Today on ProBlogger.

Basically, the 7 Link Challenge is where you create a blog post consisting of 7 links, sharing with your readers a little bit more about you and the history of your blog. It’s really just a fun activity, and I figured I’d join in and do the 7 Link Challenge with you all since I hadn’t participated yet.

Before I move on, I must say that Marian’s 7 Link Challenge post was really encouraging and, in a way, inspired this one. It was also interesting to see how Marian’s social media career took off since the very beginning and continued to grow with her throughout her blogging career.

I hope this post shares a bit about me as well. (more…)