5AM Hustle
A piece advice given by many of the top hustlers (you know the uber successful, too many projects, wish you were them people) is you have to wake up at 5 AM. But why 5? Because you are able to eek out an hour where most people aren’t awake or those that are, have their own stuff in works and they don’t have time for you. Therefore, you are able to get a ton done at 5 AM. At least that’s my experience.
I have a full time job and it’s not at home. It’s an hour, on a good day, away from my house. And so trying to find time to build a community and query literary agents is not easy to do with a bad commute, full-time corporate job, and a crazy family. So, I decided let’s listen to the top hustlers maybe there is something to this 5AM Hustle. For a long time, my 5AM was 6AM and I’d try to get a lot done, but found quickly that I was either running out of time or a lot of times being interrupted. See, what I figured out too was that children don’t wake up out of character in the 5AM hour, but they do in the 6AM hour. Waking up at 5AM was literally stealing an hour just for myself out of the day.
However, capturing an hour was not something that happened overnight. Just because I set my alarm to 5 AM did not necessarily mean that was the time I was waking up. I’ve really had to train myself. The first couple of times I slept right through my alarm waking up an hour late with the alarm clock already having quieted itself. It was rough. The days where I did successfully wake up at the designated time, I did shrink my To-do list, but by 11AM, I was exhausted and no amount of coffee helped. See because although I had adjusted my wake up time, my bed time did not change. I still went to bed roughly at midnight, be damned all the advice about 8 hours of sleep makes you a happier person and to that, I say, “Happiness is relative.”
It’s been a few weeks that I’ve consistently woken up in the 5 o’clock hour. I’m proud of myself. Productivity is way up. The website is almost done. I’ve queried 16 agents for our YA fantasy novel in the month of August, a vast improvement from last month. And I’ve inspired my sister to start waking up earlier to, her hustle is more of a 6AM Hustle, but she has less obstacles than I do. To keep ourselves accountable for getting-and-going, we decided to tweet each other every morning. Except for I took it to the next level and decided to Periscope when I got out of bed. And that’s what I do, or at least have been doing for a week and half. “Hello Sister” is how we greet each other on the phone and now how I greet her on our little Periscope - #HelloSister. Every morning, I draw a picture, chit-chat while I draw, and then give her a corny,loving good morning message. They are short and fun, but most importantly get the job done, they propel my feet to the ground and they give my sis something to look forward to when she wakes up.
I’m going to keep on doing it for as long as I can the Periscope and the 5 AM, I’m sure there will be slip-ups, but I’m forgiving of myself. The 5AM Hustle, it’s real, who’d-a-thought all those super highly successful inspirational people knew what they were talking about.
