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Over this year, I’ve noticed that as I started pushing myself harder, I tended to give up more and more sleep. At a certain point, I noticed how difficult it was to get out of bed every morning. I would set a few alarms on my phone and my computer to make sure that I got up. This was probably one of the most difficult mental parts of my day and I was missing out on some of the best productivity time: alone and in the morning.

Then Finals Week: The week that you dread all semester (or quarter) long. It’s a time of intense learning and the longest the line for your professor’s office hours will get.

Leading up to finals week, courses have their last class and the stress of being ultra productive starts to set in. With no class, the hardest part of being productive is getting up early and sitting down to study.

Lets face it, getting up early when you don’t have to is hard. After all, I could simply wake up later and cram for my finals. But I knew that the more time that I was awake and studying for exams, the better I would score.

It was the perfect time for an experiment on hacking my willpower: How could I reallocate my willpower from getting myself to a desk to study to actually learning the material and being productive?

The answer: outsource my willpower.

——–The Human Alarm Clock Experiment——–

Why do we need to allocate willpower? Studies show that your willpower is finite and therefore your productivity depends on how you allocate your willpower. Why did I pick the morning instead of the night? Same reason. My willpower in the morning after getting up would be much higher than it would be at night after a full day of exerting willpower.

For the first few days of studying, I attempted to wake up at 7am (instead of my regular 11:30am). But every time my alarm went off, I would look at the time and rationalize going back to sleep by simply picking another time that day to study. This means that I was missing out on hours of prime productivity time.

That’s when I thought to myself, “I don’t trust myself to get up early to be productive. It requires too much willpower at a time when I have none. But whenever one of my friends wakes me up to hangout/go to class/get breakfast, I wake up every time.”

Being a 5th year masters student at the same college I went to for undergrad gave me the advantage of having plenty of friends around. I called up a few of them and asked them if they would wake me up for $5. Three of them obliged and I had human alarm clocks scheduled for 3/13, 3/14, 3/15 (3/15 was my first exam…Accounting!!!).

So what happened!?

At 7am on 3/13, two days before my first exam, this guy shows up at my door:

He called me when he was outside of my front door, so I had to get out of bed to go let him in. Then we had coffee together and chatted for a few minutes before he told me to sit down at my desk and get to work. He left after 30 minutes and I was studying 4 hours before I normally would have started.

This repeated itself over the next two days. That is 4 more hours of productivity everyday, just by changing how I got myself to a desk to study. In total, I was able to add 12 hours of studying by having a human alarm clock. This let me reallocate my willpower to studying itself, which made a huge difference in my understanding of the material and vastly lowered my stress level.

In the future, I would strongly consider hiring someone to wake me up every morning. Think about all of the time gained without spending any willpower. In the long run of having more hours in your day, the gains of reallocating willpower to areas of your life that need it the most definitely outweigh the small financial cost.

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If you end up hiring your own alarm clock, leave your story in the comments below!