al-waqt

I have been reading How to Become an Early Riser (Part 1 and Part 2) on Steve Pavlina’s blog and I have benefited from it greatly, as is the case with all of his motivation material.

I consider myself to be a morning person and someone who can be an early riser, but I’m just not doing so on a consistant basis. Every single day I wake up at 5 am in the morning to pray Fajr. The days where I do stay awake after praying Fajr, and begin to do absolutely any type of activity I truly feel great the entire day. On those precious days I almost always take a siesta (in Arabic it is called al-qayloolah), as is encouraged in Islam. In fact, I have a theory that the current tradition of siesta came to Spain from the influence of Muslims living and ruling the land at that time known as al-Andalus for more that 900 years. What is interesting is that knowledge and science was flourishing in al-Andalus at a time when Europe was in the “Dark Ages”.. I’m thinking maybe the naps played a role!

Anyways, once I take this nap I never feel tired until later on in the night. I predict that on this schedule of taking a 20-30 minute nap in the middle of the day I could probably sleep only 4-5 hours max at night and still be very productive. So.. that’s about 4:20-5:30 hours of sleeping max. Close to a polyphasic 2-3 hours of sleep a day? Well, if I do this schedule correctly then I would have 2 more hours in the day. To be this is an achievement and at least a step closer to implementing Polyphasic sleeping if I choose to one day. This schedule is only 1-2 hours less sleep than Polyphasic, so can 1-2 hours really matter in my productivity level? Hmm… so right now I’m thinking that I should focus on scheduling my life for early rising, which eventually may lead to polyphasic sleeping once I manage my time better and I’m prepared to take it to the next level.