The lie you’ve been told about snooze buttons

I have to admit, there are days when I hit the snooze button 6 times before I get out of bed? [insert judgmental look here]

And I beat myself up about it when I hear people say, “When you find what you’re passionate about you’ll jump out of bed in the morning.”

LIES! All of it. I’m incredibly passionate about what I do, but sometimes I stay up WAY too late and I simply can’t stop slamming that snooze button!

But the snooze button is not really the issue.

The real mistake is that I’m measuring the wrong thing.

What if instead of measuring the number of times I hit the snooze button, I instead measured something like… how many hours of sleep I need before I wake up without needing an alarm clock?

I’ve read about 15 blog posts overcoming the snooze button and the number one tip from the majority of them is this: “Put your alarm clock across the room so you have to get up to turn it off.”

What are you talking about?! Shouldn’t the number one piece of advice be: “Go to bed earlier”?

This example shows the second problem with measuring the wrong thing… it leads to us making unnecessary changes to compensate for our original mistake.

But this really isn’t about snooze buttons.

What about your child’s behavior? My son doesn’t take the garbage down because he forgot so I ground him or have him go to bed earlier. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have him put a reminder in his phone?

Or with our health, we think we need to get more exercise so we buy a gym membership, when the real problem is that we are buying the wrong groceries. Not eating wrong, but shopping wrong.

Before you can make real, efficient, effective, sustainable change, you need to do some deep thinking to figure out what the real problem is. If not, you’re wasting your time. And if you’ve read many of my posts, you’ll know that I despise wasting time… even to the point of not tying my shoes!