My impossible goal for 2021 is to follow a sleep routine 5 days/night of the week every week: get out of bed by 5:15 am and be in bed at night without technology by 9:30, where I can read from my Kindle instead but no other devices.

I’m not sure how to write my “backup plan” in the How to Get It Done workbook that I’m working on this month. The only things I have considered and been using as a backup plan have been A) rearranging my scheduled two nights and two mornings “off” so that they happen earlier in the week than expected. Actually I haven’t been planning which two nights and mornings to use as the two off days each week, instead I’ve just been seeing which days I end up wanting to choose to stay up later. So does that count as a backup plan? It still seems like the primary plan.

Perhaps of note, last night I wanted to watch TV on my phone but I knew that even if I watched only 1 episode of a show, it would end after 9:30pm and push me past my in bed with no technology bedtime, which in the past has led to models where I think things like “fuck it” and “I’ve already stayed up ‘late’ now I might as well stay up REALLY late and watch as many episodes as I want” and “TV is designed and crafted to make me want to watch another episode after I’m done, this seems risky, and I will also enjoy my book but there is no chance of me regretting that tomorrow.”

The only other idea I had which I’ve been acting on, has been making my “minimum baseline” for the mornings to be out of bed and doing my daily thought work on paper, and then allowing myself to return to bed if I want to sleep longer before whatever’s next on my calendar, if I chose to follow through on that at all. I did a model on whether I was okay with this minimum baseline, and I think I am because it still gets me to do more and get up earlier than I would have otherwise, and it doesn’t serve me to be flip flopping on whether I think it’s a good idea or not. But I do eventually want to follow everything that’s on my calendar, but I guess I am deciding that for now I have getting out of bed and doing thought work as a minimum baseline.

Should I just focus on how I want to feel whether or not I follow through on the rest of my calendared plans for the day? That’s probably not the best use of my imagination though.

Should my backup plan be for if I were to use up my two nights and two mornings off early in the week, how I’m going to proceed for the rest of the week? As in what kinds of models will motivate me to keep going? So far I have been tracking how many days and nights I comply with the plan and I get more points for getting closer to the goal of 5 nights a week than I do if I blow off the entire week, so perhaps a good system is already in place?

There was also one day where I elected to sleep in and of course didn’t do my thought work that morning but waited until the afternoon to do it and it felt like much more of a chore, so at least that’s motivating to make me want to do it as early in the day as possible since I want to do it every day and don’t want it to feel like a burden. So I guess the backup plan I have been using in that regard is that if I don’t get my thought work done in the AM, that I’ll get it done later in the day, so that I’m still doing that daily as a minimum baseline, regardless of when it gets done, but fortunately I have been harnessing my aversion to doing it later in the day to getting it done earlier.

Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions for improving any of this? Does having a backup plan not really apply to this impossible goal since there’s already 2 break days built into the goal? My brain probably wants to be more confused than it needs to be haha. Thank you in advance for your perspective!