Early to bed and early to rise makes an indie healthy, wealthy, and wise.
While many programmers and game developers might be happy working late at night, some choose to wake up early to get the same benefits: no one else is around to distract you from your work.
Getting more done by 8AM than most people do by noon is just one of the perks of getting up early, but what other habits do early risers get to take advantage of?
From 5 Things Super Successful People Do Before 8 AM:
- Exercise.
- Plan the day.
- Eat a good breakfast.
- Visualize success.
- Get the most important and difficult stuff done first.
While you might think that you can just time-shift everything in the list, there are incredible benefits to doing them first thing in the morning.
For instance, you probably don’t want to exercise before going to bed at night, as your body is now full of energy. Wake yourself up with exercise instead. On top of that, high quality exercise is something that gives you benefits throughout the day. It’s like having a bonus multiplier on your metabolism.
What do you do first thing in the morning that contributes to your success as an indie?
3 replies on “What Do Early Risers Do Better?”
This is good advice but “no one else is around to distract you from your work” isn’t quite correct for me and any other parents. I quite often see all this self-help advice about getting up, meditating, exercising, eating well, going for a nice stroll etc, but for parents this just doesn’t happen – in fact we often start the day stressed!
Why can’t you exercise whenever you do get up, be that 7AM, 10AM, 12PM or 4PM? You seem to be just arguing for doing it the first thing when you get up, but without any argument for why doing it before 8AM is advantageous.
Pekka, I think there’s an assumption that most people are up during regular business hours. Waking up at 4pm, you’re more likely to find your “morning” mixing with the winddown of most other people’s days.
Jake, good insight! I only have two whiny cats to deal with. Any parents running their own indie game development business with advice to share?