The 5 AM Hybrid:
A Modified Miracle for Irregular Schedules

As exciting as it is to wake up every morning, bright and early, ready to dominate your day, not every day begins that way. In fact, for some people no two days are alike and their 5 AM Miracle never truly comes to fruition.

Photo Credit: davebloggs007

I frequently receive emails from listeners of The 5 AM Miracle Podcast who have irregular schedules. They don’t work a traditional 9-5, or they do, but they have book club on Tuesday nights, tap dancing lessons on Thursdays, and they play in a band every Friday night until midnight or later.

In the middle of all that they are dying for a little consistency, a way to streamline the variations in their schedule so they can experience their own morning miracles.

The 5 AM Hybrid

I know exactly how it feels to have a crazy schedule. You get that feeling in your gut that your entire week is going to be too crazy to handle and you begin praying for a normal day again.

Simply getting back into a healthy rhythm can seem too daunting and there needs to be a solution for now — a system that brings intentionality to the day and a little calm to the storm.

If this sounds at all familiar, let me introduce The 5 AM Hybrid, a modified miracle for those of us who don’t work a 9-5, or don’t have the luxury of consistency no matter how hard we try.

Step 1: Live in One World

I was talking with a guy last week who is an orchestral cellist and he plays concerts a few nights a week that don’t end until midnight. Since playing music is his livelihood it’s unrealistic to tell him to give up the cello in order to wake up at 5:00 am, 7 days a week.

The problem is that he wanted the benefits of both worlds: playing music until midnight multiple nights a week while also waking up at sunrise to experience the beauty and calm of an early morning.

He can’t have both.

He can’t live in two worlds at the same time.

Either he plays music and stays up late OR he doesn’t play music on that schedule and is able to wake up early.

Living in one world means acknowledging where you are and sticking to what matters most. Since music matters everything to the cellist, waking up early is not #1 on his list.

However, there is a comprise, a way to live in a late night world while sneaking in a few benefits from the early morning.

Step 2: Find Your Medium

Since the core of The 5 AM Miracle is intentionality, finding a happy medium between two worlds is not much of a stretch. The key is to identify exactly why you wake up early in the first place.

What are you trying to gain?

What benefits do you experience when you wake up early with a plan?

Why is 5:00 am miraculous to you?

With those answers in hand, now you have the ability to create your hybrid. In our example of the cellist, he can have his cake and eat it to, but maybe not all at the same time.

He can wake up early after his late nights at the concert hall, just not as early as he would like. The comprise here is to wake up as early as possible in order to guarantee quality sleep and a quality morning routine.

If he wakes up at 7:00 am, he still has time to get the benefits he wants from an early morning. He can squeeze in his few key habits, but not all of them. He can wake up early on his non-concert days and make more time for the habits that were missed earlier in the week.

In other words, not everything has to happen every day. The hybrid is the acknowledgement that you won’t get everything you want every day, but you could over the course of a few days.

With an intentional plan in place, our cellist could plan which mornings he works out, and which mornings when he won’t have time — which days he will wake up early to make progress on a big personal goal, and which days that would be unrealistic.

Once again, the keys are intentionality, planning, and preparing for the bumps in the road. Without a plan, our cellist might never experience the joy of an early morning (unless he was still up late from the night before).

Step 3: Experiment with New Patterns of Sleep

I’m not much of a napper, but I know people who can’t survive without their afternoon power nap.

If naps work for you (and your schedule), I recommend making them a priority on the days you don’t sleep enough. The cellist could even make that a staple in his schedule if he wanted to guarantee an early morning every day. Sleeping in the middle of the day could be the missing link between staying up late and still managing to wake up early without being thoroughly exhausted.

Steve Pavlina is a well-known personal development blogger and author who has experimented thoroughly with Polyphasic Sleep. This model of sleeping is similar to the model of sleeping at night and then napping during the day, except that you sleep in many short chunks and never have a longer traditional sleep cycle overnight.

For example, in the Uberman Sleep Cycle you might sleep 20-30 minutes 6 times per day, spaced out evenly every 4 hours.

This is a rather extreme method that is likely unrealistic for just about everyone, but the concept is the same. You can sleep in unorthodox patterns and still achieve your objective of getting quality rest and a quality morning routine.

Design Your Ideal Week

I have previously spoken on the podcast about Creating Your Ideal Week and that is the core of the 5 AM Hybrid.

When you know what your week could look like in an ideal world, you then know what you are aiming for and how to dodge the bullets on the way there. If you haven’t already, create your ideal week on paper and see what kind of miracles you can create with your irregular schedule.

The end result may not be perfect, but perfection is not the goal. Simply ensure that your most important objectives are scheduled and executed every week.

That might sound simple but great productivity is not inherently sexy, just effective.

Next Week

Next week on the blog I will be arguing my case for enthusiasm — that thing that makes perky people so annoying. 😉