Forty Minutes Before the Alarm

My actual start time at the firm is seven, and my alarm goes off at five forty, which by any reasonable accounting is forty minutes I don’t need to lose. I’ve had coworkers ask, genuinely confused, why I wouldn’t just sleep that time instead, and for a while I didn’t have a great answer beyond that it’s mine, nobody else’s, before the phone starts buzzing with a client question or Hutch needs help loading equipment into the truck.

It started almost by accident a few years back, a stretch where a job had me up early enough that going back to sleep wasn’t really an option, and I picked up a book instead of lying there annoyed about it. Something about reading in that specific window, house quiet, coffee not even finished yet, light still gray outside, turned out to stick in a way none of my other attempts at a reading habit ever had. I’ve tried reading at night before bed for years and it never lasted, I’d get four pages in and my eyes would just go, too tired from the day to actually take anything in. Mornings, apparently, are when I’ve got the patience for something dense.

It’s not a lot of pages some days, maybe fifteen, maybe less if I’m reading something that asks a lot of me, but it adds up over a year in a way that surprised me the first time I actually counted. And there’s a specific kind of quiet satisfaction in starting the day having already done the one thing that’s purely mine, before the day’s actual obligations show up and start making claims on the rest of my attention. Whatever happens after that, a bad client call, a fence dispute that eats a whole afternoon, at least the forty minutes already happened and nothing can take them back.

I don’t think this would work for everyone, plenty of people I know are useless before eight regardless of how much they’d like to be morning people. But for me it’s become the one habit I’ve never once considered dropping, even on the mornings I’m dragging getting out of bed for it. Forty minutes, most days. Some mornings it’s the best part of the whole day, and it’s over before the day’s even really started.