Because I got to work earlier than usual I was able to go home earlier. My wife was shocked to see me home so early and didn’t really know what to do with me.

One thing I noticed was the absence of the normal afternoon sleepiness I experience at work each day. I felt good the whole day and I believe it was because I got to bed at a decent hour last night. Now I know that one day doesn’t prove anything but I am encouraged so far.

There is a term used often on many self-development web sites. It is: Live Consciously. I experienced at bit of that today. I was much more aware of my time and what I was doing with it. I was also consciously doing what I had planned to do and not just what I happened to feel like doing at the moment. It felt good!

It just so happens that today is a Sunday and my Sundays are anything but typical compared to my weekdays. I am very active in my church and so my Sundays are generally filled with church and family activities. So, like I said yesterday, weekends are very different than weekdays. My true test of my new schedule will be tomorrow.

My hope is to have the same basic morning routine except the length of time for exercising will be longer. I like to hike or run longer on Saturday mornings. This morning my wife Lisa and I went for an hour long hike up the local mountain canyon. My regular running and hiking partner, Kurt Williams, came along with us. It was a beautiful fall hike. The rest of my day consisted of various things I needed to get done and places I needed to be.

Each weekend is different and you just have to deal with them as they come. My advice is to try as much as you can to keep the routine in place. Sometimes that won’t be possible but you just have to do your best. The goal is to get the habit deeply implanted in your brain so you can be on automatic-pilot most of the time. You don’t want to be having to make the same decisions again and again as to what you will do with your time. It’s not something you want to have to think about, but something you just do because it’s what you always do.

Most of what I write now are just theories. As we get into the day-to-day workings of this whole plan we will be finding out what really works and what doesn’t. I would hope that you, as a reader, will feel free to add your input and experience too. We can all learn from each other. Thank you.

What I want to do here is explain in some detail what the first change is all about, for my benefit and yours.

As I stated, it is Live by a Schedule. Now some of you may think the sound of that is not very appealing and wonder why anyone would want to do it. I can understand those feelings. My struggle is that I have so many things pulling me in so many directions that if I don’t organize my time I never get the things done that I want to or need to. So for me a fairly strict schedule is the solution.

Also, I find if I don’t follow a schedule and just do whatever I feel like doing I end up wasting huge amounts of time reading the newspaper or watching TV or other mindless activities. Living by a schedule will help me stay on track to meet my commitments to myself.

Living by a schedule, for me, has many benefits, not the least of which is that it will help me get to bed on time each night. Not getting to bed on time, in my estimation, is the number one thing that messes up the rest of my life. See the post Staying Up Late – Is it Worth It?

So here is my proposed daily schedule:

5:00 a.m. Get up, personal study, meditation and planning
6:00 a.m. Aerobic exercise consisting of either running or hiking
7:00 a.m. Breakfast
7:20 a.m. Shower and dress
7:50 a.m. Leave for work
8:00 a.m. Arrive at work

3:30 p.m. Begin to wrap things up at work
4:00 p.m. Leave work

10:00 p.m. Begin getting ready for bed
10:30 p.m. Lights out, go to sleep

This is the schedule I plan to live by as closely as I can each week day. For weekends it will have to be different. I’ll talk about weekends tomorrow.

Last week I had made the plan to attend an important event early on Friday morning. When I mean early I mean 6 a.m. early! In order for me to be there I would need to get up by 4:30 in the morning, get ready and leave my home by 5:30 to be to the event by 6:00. I’ve done it before and knew what I needed to do to be there.

Well, guess what, I blew it! I didn’t make it and was deeply disappointed in myself. I did what any normal person would do and beat myself up mentally. That’s fine but if I’m going to learn anything from this I’ve got to do more than just mentally beat myself up. I’ve got to analyze the situation, see what I did wrong and then change my ways.

So what went wrong? My big mistake was that I didn’t think or plan ahead. The mistake that I made was deciding to go to a movie the night before. My wife and son pressured me into it. (Placing blame here!) It was a 7:30 p.m. movie that was nearly 3 hours long. When all was said and done I didn’t get to bed until 11:30 p.m. I knew when I went to bed that I was never going make it up by 4:30 a.m. I had already blown it.

My point isn’t necessarily the missing of the event. The point is that we learn from our mistakes. When something goes wrong or something goes haywire and things don’t turn out the way that you planned, look at the situation and figure out why. Analyze it and see what you could have done differently. Why did you mess up? In my particular situation, what happened was that I didn’t think ahead. I went ahead and said, “Yeah, let’s go to a movie.” I should have thought it through and realized that going to a movie at 7:30 in the evening was going to put me to bed too late at night to be able to get up as early as I needed to. So the next time I plan on being somewhere very early in the morning I’ve got to make sure that whatever I do the night before I do early enough that I will get home on time so I can get to bed on time.

There is a great little story I read years ago that fits perfectly here:

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters
By Portia Nelson

Chapter One
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost…I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend that I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in this same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep whole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in…it’s a habit…but,
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It is my fault.
I get out immediately,

Chapter Four
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter Five
I walk down another street.

The point is that when something goes wrong in our lives, when we mess up, when we falter, that we look at the situation and analyze it and then make a change. If we are not learning from our mistakes we will keep falling in the same hole.

Thank you.