A week and a half ago, I started tracking my sleep and wake times (and a couple other factors, such as whether I took melotonin, and if so, at what time) via spreadsheet. The reason for this being that I had been trying to improve my bedtime, and hadn’t been making much progress. I haven’t had anything I NEEDED to get out of bed early for (early work or school, etc) in over a month, but I find that I am much more productive overall on an earlier cycle.
I noticed, however, that my waking time has been slowly getting better. I think this is a bit of a feedback loop, because once I noticed it (about a week in), I didn’t want to break the pattern, and so subconsciously try to wake up at least 5 minutes before the previous day. (But I don’t overtly push the issue, or anything)
I think the reason that this is much easier for me to improve on is mainly because my go-to-sleep times are all over place due to Real Life (game nights, discussions with friends, etc). So even though I HAD been succeeding in slowly pushing my sleep schedule back, the randomness/noise in my bedtimes was too high for me to perceive that pattern. I won’t be surprised if I graphed my bedtimes after a month or two of recording data, that they WILL, in fact, have gotten generally much earlier, even if the data is too noisy to see any pattern in for just a week’s worth.
This was a huge revelation to me when I was recovering from my stroke. What sometimes felt like no progress at all turned out to be, when i measured it, steady and significant progress. I am a huge fan of tracking the stuff I want to improve.
A week and a half ago, I started tracking my sleep and wake times (and a couple other factors, such as whether I took melotonin, and if so, at what time) via spreadsheet. The reason for this being that I had been trying to improve my bedtime, and hadn’t been making much progress. I haven’t had anything I NEEDED to get out of bed early for (early work or school, etc) in over a month, but I find that I am much more productive overall on an earlier cycle.
I noticed, however, that my waking time has been slowly getting better. I think this is a bit of a feedback loop, because once I noticed it (about a week in), I didn’t want to break the pattern, and so subconsciously try to wake up at least 5 minutes before the previous day. (But I don’t overtly push the issue, or anything)
I think the reason that this is much easier for me to improve on is mainly because my go-to-sleep times are all over place due to Real Life (game nights, discussions with friends, etc). So even though I HAD been succeeding in slowly pushing my sleep schedule back, the randomness/noise in my bedtimes was too high for me to perceive that pattern. I won’t be surprised if I graphed my bedtimes after a month or two of recording data, that they WILL, in fact, have gotten generally much earlier, even if the data is too noisy to see any pattern in for just a week’s worth.
This was a huge revelation to me when I was recovering from my stroke. What sometimes felt like no progress at all turned out to be, when i measured it, steady and significant progress. I am a huge fan of tracking the stuff I want to improve.