Photo: Thinkstock

I am a fake-it-until-I-make-it morning person. Which is to say, I've been getting up at 5:00 am for years, but it was only recently that I stumbled into a bleary-eyed revelation: I must be a morning person. I mean, I HAVE to be. These early mornings are going to keep happening to me: First they were on purpose, by default, to write before work. Then it was because I had this psychotically early-rising baby, and now I have two of them. And soon I'm sure they will start sleeping later (I mean, they have to, right?) and you know what, I will probably go back to getting up at 5 to do my own things. I need to just be okay with my intimate knowledge of both of the fives-o-clock, and stop groaning about it, and stop fighting it, and pretend that I like it until finally one day I really do.

And good thing, too -- since I just read that the most successful people are those who use their mornings efficiently. After all, as Laura Vanderkam writes, "Mornings are a great time for getting things done." Yeah! Take that, you ridiculous people who get to sleep in until the - gasp - double digits on weekends! Feh to you!

Vanderkam, who has written much about time management, has a great run-down at Fast Company of ways in which to be more efficient in those wee hours. Weirdly, she doesn't suggest allowing any time at all for feeling sorry for oneself about being up so early. Instead, she suggests a five-step process for reassessing mornings. One of her recommendations: Picture Your Perfect Morning. This may include steps for personal growth, like reading through a sacred text or training for a marathon, or it may be more about professional growth: using that quiet time to organize and strategize, or even taking an online development course. She also shares very practical steps you can take to make your morning dreams a reality without being too self-defeatingly ambitious.


Read More:
How to Have More Productive Mornings
17 Ways to Be More Efficient in the AM