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It is 10:30 p.m. right now,
but this actually isn't where I am.
I'm actually right here, sitting at my desk.
What am I doing?
I don't know, I'm looking at YouTube statistics,
I'm scrolling through Twitter,
maybe I'm playing a video game.
Whatever I'm doing, I'm not actually doing what
I really want to be doing right now,
which is sleeping.
See, I am the kind of person who likes
to get up early in the morning,
I like to get an early start in the day,
but to do that, and to get a good amount of sleep,
which is crucial,
I have to go to bed at a decent time the night before.
And, to be completely honest with you,
over the past few months I have sort of
fallen out of that habit,
and I found it really difficult to get my butt
into bed at a good time every single night.
So, I am making this video as a sort of
wake up call to myself.
I'm going to break down the problems
that I see in my life,
the things that are preventing
me from going to bed
when I really want to go to bed,
that are affecting my self-discipline,
or I guess that my self-discipline has
not yet been able to overcome,
and I'm going to lay out a plan
for solving those problems
and actually getting back to a decent bedtime.
But, given that you clicked this video
knowing what the title was,
I'm guessing you might have an issue
going to bed at a good time as well.
So hopefully this is as helpful
to you as it is for me.
That being said, I have narrowed it down to
three specific problems.
And also while I'm thinking about it,
I actually have to get on a plane
tomorrow and go to Atlanta to speak so,
hey Martin, do you think you could
help with the B-roll for this video?
(haunting music)
I, I don't like that,
but I don't have time to deal with it.
Anyway, so like I said, three specific problems.
There's kind of four because I do find
myself staying up playing
guitar late some nights,
but really what I find myself doing instead
of going to bed most nights is either
sitting on my computer doing stupid stuff
like scrolling through YouTube analytics,
or watching a two hour retrospective
on Bioshock Infinite and its game design choices,
cool video, but probably not something
I should be clicking on at 11 p.m.
Or, scrolling through my phone while in bed,
or watching a movie way too late.
Like starting a movie way too late
and then committing to finishing it
even if it finishes at 12:30 p.m.
These are all bad habits
that I have found myself doing,
but two of them have to do with
respecting the 20 second rule.
The 20 second rule is a concept from
Shawn Achor's book The Happiness Advantage,
and in that book he talks about,
you know, one of the most important
driving factors in the formation of good habits
and in your ability to break bad ones,
is how you set up your environment.
Specifically, making sure that your
environment is set up in such a way
that doing the good habits is very easy,
and on the opposite side on that coin,
that you set things up so your bad habits
are actually very inconvenient to do.
So for one really good example, if you, like me,
want to eat less ice cream,
maybe you would keep your ice cream out of your freezer.
Like, there is an ice cream shop
15 minutes away on foot,
I could walk to it if I wanted ice cream,
but I'm never impulsively going to
the ice cream shop 15 minutes
away to get ice cream.
It's only when there's ice cream in my freezer
that I will take a break from working
to eat ice cream instead of eating a healthy lunch.
Again, the way you set up your environment
is crucial in the formation of the habits
that you really want to build.
And in the case of going to bed on time,
I have not been respecting that 20 second rule
because I often leave my computer on all day long,
even once I'm done with work,
and what that really results in
is scenarios where I will come downstairs,
it's 10 p.m. at night,
and I'll convince myself that I'm just
going to check YouTube analytics for one second,
but then, because the internet is built
in such a way to provide constant little dopamine hits,
I'll find myself going to another website,
checking another set of stats,
and eventually, you know,
going down whatever rabbit hole it is
that leads me to that two hour Bioshock,
or System Shock retrospective
that I found myself watching.
So, to respect the 20 second rule,
I need to change my environment.
And the way that I'm going to do that is,
number one, having a specific time
at which I will shut my computer off for the day.
If it is shut off,
I'm not going to go get on that computer,
convincing myself I'm just gonna check something.
It would be too inconvenient.
And for the phone, I'm going to follow
the exact same principle.
I'm not going to be putting the phone
on the nightstand anymore.
Instead, I'm going to keep it away from my nightstand,
have it across the room,
it's still going to be my alarm clock for now,
but if it's across the room,
if it's plugged in for the night,
then I'm not going to be tempted to grab it
and check stats or social media or whatever it is.
That just leaves us with the issue
of staying up too late watching movies.
Now, I see this as a different self-discipline issue,
because it's not really a 20 second rule issue
since sitting down and starting a movie
seems to be a bit more of a significant thing,
it's not something that you just do impulsively.
For me I think part of the problem here is that
if you've been watching my channel you probably know,
I've taken a much greater interest
in the cinematography and the production
aspect of my content.
And as a result, I'm a lot more interested
to watch movies these days
because I take a lot of inspiration from them.
Especially my favorite director in the world,
who is, Edgar Wright.
So I will convince myself to watch movies
even if it's too late in the evening
to really start it and still be able
to go to bed on time.
So, I think I need to take a more holistic approach
to solving the problem from this angle.
And like I've talked about in the past,
when your self-discipline fails,
the best thing you can do is
to essentially put training wheels on the bike.
To enlist the help of an external system
to help you to get back in the correct
pattern of habits that you want,
and then slowly build your self-discipline
up from there so it can sort of
maintain those habits on its own.
So recently, I found out about an app called SleepTown,
which was created by the same people
who made the Forest app,
and I've talked about Forest before,
it's basically an app where
you kind of grow virtual trees,
if you don't touch your phone
for a certain amount of time.
Which means it actually kind of functions
as a really nice Pomodoro app for getting work done,
and SleepTown is basically
the exact same concept, applied to sleep.
Instead of growing a virtual forest,
you are building a virtual town,
and you get to build a building
every single night that you go to bed
before a specific going to bed time,
and then wake up at a specific wake up time.
So this is going to be my experiment for now,
I'm going to try using that.
And then of course, like I've talked about in other videos,
I also believe in tracking my progress over time,
so I'm going to be using the Martin System
that I outlined in my recent habit tracking video,
to also be physically checking off
every single night that I do go to bed on time,
and hopefully I'll be able to develop
that habit once again and be able
to start getting up early in the morning
once again so my morning routine doesn't take so long.
And that's going to be important,
because I'm not always doing good work
at night when I'm staying up too late.
Like I said, I'm often like watching
two hour video game retrospectives,
which is definitely not productive.
But if I get up early in the morning
and get an early start to the day,
I have a lot more time
to put into pushing my content.
Which is really what I want to be doing right now,
and you've probably seen that
in the last few videos on the YouTube channel.
There's actually one other video where we did that,
and really, really proud of the work we did
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Thanks for watching this video as well
hopefully you found it helpful,
again, I'm kind of laying these things out for myself,
and I have to make this video quickly
'cause I'm going off to a conference
that I have to speak at.
But, I think this is an issue
that is not mine alone.
I think a lot of people deal with this issue,
especially with all the social media apps
that we have such instant access to these days.
So if you did enjoy this,
definitely provide a like
if you feel like it was worth it,
that definitely helps the YouTube algorithm to,
you know, think my channel is worth promoting
to other people, which makes me feel good.
So thank you if you do that,
thanks for your support as always.
If you want to watch some other videos
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go do what you want, I'm not your dad and I'm outta here.
Special effects!