I’m currently reading Laura Vanderkam‘s Tranquility by Tuesday. I’m a longtime fan of hers—I follow her blog and I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of her books, including Juliet’s School of Possibilities, her fictional time-management allegory; which is to say, I've gone deep into the Laura Vanderkam universe. I love me a good book on time management and productivity!
Tranquility by Tuesday is more of a straight-up advice book, which is what she does best. The premise of Tranquility by Tuesday is that there are nine everyday practices that will help you not only manage, but truly enjoy, how you spend your time. One of Vanderkam’s main points is that how you spend each hour translates into how you spend your life. Time is always passing—and it will pass whether we plan for it or not, she writes—so we might as well use a little forethought to make sure we’re getting the most out of our time.
The first, and most foundational, of the nine practices Vanderkam recommends is the very unsexy practice of giving yourself a bedtime. Vanderkam anticipates that this rec is likely to do down like a lead balloon, so she gives lots of (very compelling) reasons why we should do it anyway. In short, most of us don’t have much say in our wake-up time (e.g., if we have jobs or classes that start at a certain time, early-rising little kids, etc.) but we can control what time we go to bed. Getting enough sleep for your body’s individual needs will give you the energy to make everything during your waking hours go more smoothly—you’ll work more efficiently if you’re well-rested, and you’ll have more resilience to deal with any unexpected obstacles that may arise. [I’ve also had this book on my to-read list for a long time; I’ll circle back and update this post if/when I do.]
Once you possess the underlying rationale for why you should give yourself a bedtime, all that remains is the pesky little task of following through. To calculate what time you need to go to bed, you should have a general sense of the number of hours of sleep you personally need each night to feel your best (sources say most adults need between 7-9 hours). If you know your number, according to Vanderkam it becomes a simple math problem—start at the time you need to wake up and calculate backwards, working in some time to read and relax in bed, if that’s your jam, and adding on some padding for your getting-ready-for-bed routine. Et voilà, there’s your bedtime! For me, there was something kind of comforting about seeing it presented as simply as this. Life is complicated enough as it is; sometimes I just want a hard-and-fast rule! (If you don’t know your number, Vanderkam recommends tracking how much sleep you get for a few weeks and taking the average; the body will usually make sure you get your needed amount over time.)
But what I found most interesting about Vanderkam’s recommendation to implement a bedtime was in the reflection questions she offered for readers at the end of the chapter. Here, she explicitly asked readers to name a) their bedtime, thus committing to it by writing it down, b) any obstacles they envisioned possibly encountering in the course of trying to stick to this bedtime and, finally, c) how they might deal with such obstacles.
In the executive function coach training program I’m completing, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare refer to “b” and “c” above as implementation intentions. Articulating our implementation intentions is a great strategy for making sure we meet our goals. If setting the goal is like placing the ladder on the wall so that you can climb to your destination, setting implementation intentions is like laying a safety net under the ladder, ready to catch you in case you fall. Implementation intentions are formulated as an if-then statement that adds a layer of resilience to the goal, thereby increasing your chances of meeting it: If this obstacle happens, then I will do this.
For example, an immediate obstacle that popped into my mind as soon as I thought about giving myself a bedtime is the fact that at night before bed is pretty much my only time to read, and I really love to read. So, for me, an implementation intention would go something like this: If my bedtime arrives and I am tempted to keep reading, I will remind myself of all of the health benefits of getting a full night of sleep and I will put my phone (the device I read on) in my top dresser drawer so it’s harder to access. I think it’s also worth saying that just the process of thinking through some implementation intentions around sticking to a bedtime prompted me to think about ways I could set myself up for success—for example, trying to find times to read earlier in the day and making sure my kids are in bed early enough that I’ll have some time left over for myself to read before my bedtime arrives.
So, I thought it was great that Vanderkam went there with her readers—indeed she goes there at the end of every chapter, prompting readers to think through how they are going to apply the practice she has recommended, thinking through possible obstacles, and identifying a plan for what they will do if those obstacles arise. Other recommendations of hers that I’m looking forward to putting in place include aiming to do one big and one little adventure per week, spending 20 minutes planning the upcoming week every Friday, and doing what is “effortful before effortless.” I’ve already started using this last rule to encourage me to work through 10-20 pages of a drier, but still important-to-me, book I’m reading before picking up a lighter one.
How about you—are you giving your body enough sleep to function at your best? Could you benefit from giving yourself a bedtime and (harder still) sticking to it most nights?
I know that I’m inspired to try it out.
Photo by Greg Rivers on Unsplash