So, here's the thing about waking up early.
If I have to do it, if I have a event that I have to get to, then I can easily get myself
out of bed at 3:00 AM if it's a early flight or 6:00 AM if I have to get to work by 7:00.
If I'm left with my own devices, getting up early is only going to happen if I'm forced
to do it.
If I have to be somewhere at a certainly.
Maybe you're just like me in that respect and maybe you also want to be able to get
yourself up in the morning before you have to be somewhere so you actually have time
to do something like eat breakfast or maybe workout or even just to read a book.
I definitely wanted that for myself so in this video I'm going to show you a technique
that I've been using that 100%, absolutely gets me up at 6:00 AM every single morning
during the week.
Completely crazy, you say?
Well it's been working for 6 months.
Here it is.
The basis of my system uses an app called buffer, which is a social media scheduler
and I have a tweet setup in buffer that goes to my Twitter account which basically says,
"Hey, I'm sleeping in because I'm lazy.
If you reply to this tweet I will give you $5 via PayPal, assuming that my alarm did
not malfunction."
The tweet is scheduled for 6:10 AM so I have to get up every morning before that goes out,
get over to my computer and set it go out the next day instead of today.
I also have the hashtag #sleepingin on that tweet and I'm using an app called IFTTT to
watch for tweets that have that hashtag from my account.
If it sees a tweet a like that, then it will send an email over to Beeminder, which is
a service that I've talked about before, which tracks your goals and actually charges you
money if you fail on them.
If I sleep in, I will guaranteed to be charged 5 bucks from Beeminder and also be charged
$5 from anyone who sees my tweet and wants me to pay them.
An added incentive that comes from offering to pay people if they reply to me is that
there's a threat of social shame and embarrassment if I have to do it.
I'm essentially using the threats of both monetary loss and social shame to force myself
to get up every morning and I've been doing this for about 6 months now.
100 percent of the time that I've set up the tweet, I have gotten up on time.
Only one time did I actually forget to move the tweet.
I probably got distracted by my email or something and I did pay $5 to the person who responded.
Since then, I have always remembered to move my tweet forward.
I have a reminder setup and HabitRPG to do it.
Every single morning I'm up on time doing my morning routine.
If you're looking for a method that will actually make you get up in the morning without having
to rely on an actual obligation, try my method out.
I just have one warning that I'll give you before you actually start using it.
You have to be 100 percent honest when you use this method.
Because if you let the tweet go out and then lie about it later, you're essentially breaking
the method for all future instances.
If you know that you've broken it in the past, then you're probably going to break it again
in the future.
If you try to adopt this method, realize that it's a nuclear option for getting yourself
up and respect its power.
If you want to know more about how I use this method, I actually wrote a blog post about
it over at College Info Geek with a little bit more detail and this video serves as a
bit of an update to let you know that, yes it's been working for about 6 months now.
Check that post out.
If you want to get more videos every single week and being an awesome college student
and building better habits, then hit the subscribe button below.
Otherwise, I will see you in the next video.
Well hello there.
Thanks for sticking around to the end of my video on how to wake up early.
If you plan on putting my system into action, then I would love to hear about it and you
can follow me on Twitter over at @TomFrankly and let me know that you did it.
I'll be up tomorrow morning at that time, so I will definitely respond to you.
If you want to stay up to date and get new videos every single week, then hit the subscribe
button right there and you can also get links to any resources in the summary of this video
over at the Companion blog post which you can get to by clicking the orange button right
there.
If you missed the last week's video, there's a clip of it playing and you can click that
clip to watch it and also if you would like to get a free copy of my book, 10 Steps To
Earning Awesome Grades, just click the picture of it and you can get it right there.
Thanks for watching.