19-hour day: the Sklyar Method
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
– George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Via ILTWMT.
If you ever said ”there are not enough hours in a day”, then this is for you.
I will gift extra 2-4 hours, full of energy to your day. Every day.
You can thank me later.
I will not teach you to work absurd hours into the night.
That’s how you end up hating yourself, your life, and everyone in it. And sugar-pumping yourself with 10 daily coffees from Starbucks the next morning.
Instead I will teach you how to work even more absurd hours.
But only in the morning.
And I’m not talking about the whole ‘5-AM club’ thing – that’s ‘sleeping in’…
At first it will seem very strange and impossible. However as the time passes, you will begin to notice that this absurd idea becomes the norm and opens up room for new, more important thoughts. This will enable you to ask more meaningful questions. You will become much more aware of your time. Of your life…
Try and try again
Ability to create and be creative vastly depends on the amount of time you’re awake.
By awake, I mean alert.
It doesn’t matter what you want to do, you must be fully awake to do it well enough to create meaningful impact.
Over my career I got a chance to experiment with every schedule type imaginable for prolonged periods of time – in some cases years dedicated to each one (majority of my career I ran an agency and various personal businesses).
Like some great minds I’ve experimented with Polyphasic sleep, or more commonly referred to as Uberman/Everyman methods. These sleeping patterns involve a broken up work day where you sleep only several hours at a time, mixed in with a few naps throughout the day. The reason why this doesn’t work is because your day – and therefore your thought process – ends up being broken up by far too many breaks where you are “out of control”. By the time you get going, you need to nap. And nap you must.
I’ve tried waking up ‘early’ (5–6AM) and working before 7AM. That one obviously doesn’t stick around for long… most likely for you as well. I found that this is the wrong time for the mind and body to wake up.
I worked until 2AM, 4AM, 6AM, and then took a nap during the day. To only repeat the same thing the next day.
I worked nights and slept during the day.
I worked for multiple days with little to no sleep on many occasions (if you haven’t you must try it).
I slept a lot and worked little.
Like I said, every schedule type…
Align yourself with the universe and it will align itself with you.
The concept
What you have to understand is that this is, by far, the quickest and simplest thing you can do to trigger what could potentially be the most impactful transformation of your adult life.
This literally is the next step in your evolution that you’ve been searching for, and need, in order to advance not just to a whole new level, but a completely different game.
There is no bs, there’s no spending 10,000 hours on learning something new. There’s no reading hundreds of books. Nothing like that. Just a few straightforward directions. Because deep down you always knew there must be another way. Putting in too much effort surely isn’t the answer… And let me finally tell you that you’re absolutely correct!
It’s something you’ve been carrying inside of you your entire life. But because you fear change and do not experiment you’ve never really given it much time and thought.
Motivation
No amount of articles will make you motivated.
I cannot make you motivated.
Truth is, no one can.
The only person who can, is sitting right here reading this article. (That’s YOU, by the way.)
I’m warning you now, the switch is hard – and not in a sense of how difficult it is – but rather how abrupt the mental change must be. It literally must happen overnight in order to go through with this concept.
It is the hardest, simplest thing you will do.
And here’s another warning: anything you say against, is simply an excuse made. And that’s normal... But it won’t get you anywhere (more on that in my upcoming articles).
Who wakes up late?
A person without goals or motivation.
And one who resents personal change and self improvement.
Warnings
This will be a major change. And as with every major change, many things will end up being affected in your life.
You will lose friends.
Things that were important to you before will no longer interest you.
This can be a dangerous thing because all of a sudden you will have too much free time and energy. Unprepared (without a plan) you will not know what to do. As a result, it will make you anxious. Because you will now realize the levels at which you can perform, so all previous efforts will seem mediocre in comparison.
You will want to become more useful – all the time.
I pity people who stay up late working on their projects just to make themselves get up the next morning. What is more mind boggling is that I, too, was stuck in the same mental loop, where I believed that I was a night owl, and performed best at night – for 34 years of my life!
Truth is that I didn’t.
By the time the evening would arrive I would have to force myself to stay up into the night. I would do it, but I wasn’t performing at 110%. Not even close. Before, my “best” would be 60–80% output. I couldn’t even dream of having this much extra energy. Did I mention that this effort also required a nap?
…What a waste!
Looking back at it now, the whole “night owl” thing was only – you guessed it – an excuse I kept selling to myself.
110% energy formula.
3 nights to tweak the schedule.
2 weeks to solidify as a habit.
1 night to completely change your life.
Last time I remember myself having this much energy was when a 10-year-old me would be free-climbing 5 story trees all day long in a little Ukrainian village where my family has a cottage. Every day. For months at at time.
The first three nights is the beginning of the readjustment period. To solidify this as a habit you need on average 2–3 weeks; it greatly depends on your mental and physical state.
I set a ridiculous wake-up time of 4AM. I had to set an alarm for this.
Then 3AM.
Then 2:30AM…
I’ve discovered that 8 o’clock is the perfect time to go to bed. This is when three of my young kids go to bed too, so it works out perfectly.
By 8:30PM you fall asleep because you had a productive day.
But the last 30 min (8:30PM–9:00PM), is the deciding factor of when the body wakes up on its own in the morning.
The way that I came to this conclusion is that every time I’ve gone to bed even slightly past 8:30PM, my mind would only wake up around 4:00AM–5:00AM.
You end up missing out on the two most important hours of the day – you essentially start sleeping in all over again, except earlier on in the timeline of the day. At this point the mind and body are out of sync with the universe.
I’m less productive and encouraged to go about my day when I sleep in until 4AM–5AM vs when I wake up between 2AM–3:30AM.
My ideal time is 8:00PM-2:00AM. It’s when I’m most productive and inspired.
Tip: It is much better to under-sleep, rather than oversleep. The simple reason is one can be corrected with a nap, while the other can only correct itself the next day.
You’ve got nothing to lose – only to gain.
Tweak the sleeping cycle. Find your time slot, find your groove. Give the Sklyar method a try and let me know what it does for your life in the comments.
Next challenge: how to make things sustainable with the help of morning “routine”. I’ll tell you about my daily 10-minute workout, because that’s all the time you and I are willing to dedicate to such activities…
This is a series of short articles which I’ll be writing over the next year. These serve as a foundation to ideas I’m documenting in my upcoming book: Think Simply. A life’s manual, so to speak.
Life is about simplifying.
There have been countless books written on the subject matter but all unnecessarily bloated.
In my upcoming book, Think Simply, I’m focusing on core ideas and principles – the shortcuts, the hacks, call them what you want, the point is that in order to follow through, things must be dead simple to not only comprehend, but also to execute.
If you liked what you’ve read so far, you’ll LOVE what’s to come – be sure to subscribe!