We all have 24 hours in a day. Entrepreneur to 5 products and 4 kids with well balanced life or a single full time employee who struggles to find time to do a simple reading/writing.

As I mentioned in my previous post about New Challenges, I have started a full time job after many years of freelancing. One of the first challenges I've been facing is better time and energy management.

When I used to freelance, I was was able to work on multiple things during the day including my personal projects, client projects, accounting errands, home errands, so on... However my current role in the Investment Banking requires me to join many meetings during the day and make sure that product teams have the designs they need to proceed in agreed timelines. So, once the working hours start, I'm 100% in this full time work.

I struggled to manage personal projects and errands during the first few weeks. I can no longer do long nights to catch up on things. At least for now, it is how it is. I ran out of energy and creativity after a long day of work and meetings. I'm hoping to adjust to this new pace in coming days and weeks.

So, for now what I do is,
I get up when I wake up. I know it sounds silly, however I believe it applies to most of us, alarm goes off or we just wake up but we waste 10, 15+ mins turning in bed if not longer, fall asleep for 5mins, wake up again, so on and on... You don't get the rest you are after nor use the time for something productive.

Instead, I just get up as soon as I wake up. I put my alarm for 5:30am, but I guess my mental alarm works better after a few days of training and I wake up sometime between 5:00 and 5:30am.

This gives me about 1.5 hours before kids wake up and all the meetings start. I must say I don't remember when I was so productive last time! There is something magical about that early morning with fresh mind. I get so much done in that ~1h and I'm looking forward to expand it 2h+. I'll try getting up 5am next week, and move to 4:30am next.

There is no much I want to do out of work without neglecting my family and personal health. I still get to spend time with my kids after work, and time with my wife after kids go to bed, and while everybody is in sleep in early morning, I have my time to do whatever I see value at; read, write, code, design, ...