Why I wake up at 5 AM Every Day

It’s crazy to most, but I wake up every day at 5 AM and don’t sleep till midnight — sometimes later. That gives me 5 hours of sleep per day. I’ve been like this most of my life, I find this is the perfect balance between productivity and exhaustion, many tell me I look exhausted, and generally, they’re correct — but it’s not because of the lack of sleep.

I give myself 19 hours a day to build, create, hang out and work. My job takes 8 hours of this 19 hour day, so we’re left with 11 usable hours. In those 11 hours, I spend approximately 5 hours with my son before it’s his bedtime, that gives me 6 hours of the day left. In these six hours, I usually spend a few hours studying or pentesting, and the remaining with my wife before bed.

This all stems from my father telling me as a kid a simple piece of advice. When I was a young kid, my father asked if I had done my homework yet — I told him “no I didn’t have time” — he told me “we’re all given 24 hours in this world every day, the decisions you made such as sleeping in wasted some of the valuable time you could have used here.”

That quote has been with me for a long time, and whenever I hear people complaining they’re running out of time, I repeat that quote to them. The decisions you will make on a daily basis affect how much time you have in the day. Plan out your day, maintain a routine, and you’ll see you have much more time than you thought you had, even if you don’t wake up at 5 AM.