No one is busy at 5 a.m.

Enrich your life at unorthodox times

Between work and family responsibilities, getting together with friends can be challenging. Maybe you don’t have to work late this Tuesday, but your friend does. Or maybe your friend is relatively free this weekend, but you’ve got two swim meets, a middle school musical, and a birthday party.

So it goes. But very few people are busy at 5 a.m. If you and your friends have full lives, consider doing a regular get-together at an unorthodox time. This might be your best bet for actually making it work.

Making time

I was reminded of this when I saw a time log recently from a lawyer who worked long hours and also had a preschooler. Three mornings a week, I saw on her log that she was up a little before 5 a.m. in order to walk with a few friends. She told me later that these neighborhood walks generally covered 2.7 miles and took 45 minutes. She and her friends were back in time to get their households started on their days.

Now, to be sure, setting an alarm for 4:40 a.m. three days a week isn’t easy. It’s dark enough then that this 5 a.m. club needed to use headlamps. However, if you head to bed between 9:30-10:00 p.m., that’s not so bad, especially since the other four days per week could start a little later. This particular person averaged 7.2 hours of sleep per day, looking at the whole week. And she also got to exercise and see friends!

I love this idea. I personally am not a member of any sort of 5 a.m. club. But I understand the rationale. During peak hours of the day, people are often committed to something. So sometimes you have to get creative.

Look at all 168 hours

I’ve seen a number of time tracking spreadsheets or calendars that other people have created to teach folks about time management. But, strangely, very few actually contain all 168 hours of the week. They’ll start at some time like 5:30 a.m., or end at 10 p.m. or something, as if the hours outside that don’t exist.

But they do. If you’re not an early riser, perhaps the later unorthodox hours might be a better choice. One time log in my book, I Know How She Does It, shows a woman going out to get a pedicure at night after her children went to bed. I know people who have regular group phone calls with friends at 10 p.m.

Perhaps in the grand scheme of things this isn’t totally ideal, but I imagine most of us would agree to be on a 5 a.m. Zoom call with the London office twice a week if our bosses insisted it was important. We’d figure out how to make our lives sustainable around that commitment. Why not treat friendships with the same respect?

Now I know this doesn’t always work. My husband travels a lot for work, and in the years when I had young kids there were many days per week when I couldn’t have left the house at 5 a.m. to go walk. But rarely is not the same as never.

Anyway, if there’s something you’d like to make more space for in your life, try looking at the whole of your 168 hours. Sometimes, having the life you want requires being a little creative.