How I Hacked My Schedule for Self Improvement

In a given week, I try to:

• Read books for 7 hours
• Work 10-14 hours on building Learnly, which involves me recording content, developing the platform, and keeping up with my students
• Work full time as a software engineer for Amazon
• Try to reduce poverty, one village at a time
• Workout 6 hours
• Spend time with my family being a husband, son, brother, and father to a very smart 2-year-old daughter

2021 has been my biggest personal growth year in the 27 years I have been alive. It all started with reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, a book recommended to me by my brother, Hamza. I was always high in energy when it came to building products. It doesn't matter what happens during the 40-hour workweek. Since I've been comfortable with programming, I've been building things on the side, games, apps, websites, and sometimes physical products too.

I was going through a low period at the end of 2020, I didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything outside of work, I had poor eating habits, and wasn't sure how to get out of spreading myself too thin.

Here comes Atomic Habits, telling me to take control of myself one habit at a time, teaching me two very valuable lessons:

• I'm not looking to simply change my habit, I'm looking to change my identity
• The impact of consistency, "If you get one percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done." - James Clear

So I made a list of things that I needed to be part of my identity and worked backward from there. I needed to identify myself as:

• a reader
• someone who takes care of their body
• an entrepreneur
• a proficient software engineer

So with everything that I had learned about consistency and achieving my new identity, I made some crazy cliche changes.

I start my day at 5 AM. This was the most important step. In order to consistently work on reading, learning, and my side projects, I needed to do those things before I get lazy and before there could be any distractions in my house.

My logic behind this was if I wake up that early, I'm not going to waste any time, I would tell myself "I didn't go through the pain of waking up this early to be lazy or be distracted by social media". My work allows me the flexibility to start late at 10:30 AM. So these first 5.5 hours of my day is all I give myself to accomplish my goals outside of work.

In order to be consistent, every day, in those 5.5 hours:

• I get ready to conquer the world, getting ready and breakfast (40 min)
• I work on understanding what the world has done and will do, reading (1 hour)
• Teach people computer science, working on Learnly (2 hours). I also alternate this with doing practical software courses myself too, to learn new stuff like machine learning.
• Make sure I can keep doing the above for a long time, go to the gym (1 hour)
• The remaining ~ 1 hour is used to transition between the above, e.g. walking, driving, and caffeine break.

My workout is essential to this schedule, it helps me reset before my workday. After all of the above, I get about the normal day most people have, work full time till 6:30 PM. My job is fully remote, so when I'm taking a break from working, I do small activities with my daughter, which are either teaching her something new, playing with toys or at the park (right beside our house). Yes, I do eat, in order to be "someone who takes care of their body", I make sure to eat something that will compliment my workouts. The remainder of my day is strictly family, till 10 PM. By not commuting, I save a lot of time that a person would usually not have. I usually sleep 6 hours, so I save some time there too.

With this schedule, I meet my performance goals for work too. Since software engineering also requires you to learn and problem solve throughout the day, I save my brain from the information apocalypse we live in. I have restrictions on my phone to start focus mode and disable apps, especially social media. Social media like Instagram doesn't benefit my current goals, so I have the app timer set to 15 min a day. This app was taking an hour of my time before!

Go look at your phone’s digital well-being and see how much time you spend in front of your phone. Social media apps are engineered to get our attention, if it's not benefitting your goals, you don't need more than 10-15 minutes on it to catch up with what’s going on.

The most important thing about identity is that you don't turn it off on weekends, so the same 5.5-hour schedule in the morning is kept. But after that, I have more than 10 hours to do absolutely anything with my family! Of course, I have bad days where I slip and end up doing some catching up later, but the key thing is to get right back on track. After I made this routine, I wrote it down and repeated it to myself for a long time until it became the norm. So if you are trying to build your routine, make sure you do also write it down and repeat it to yourself.

What's the end result of this craziness after 1 year:

• I became a reader. Reading books was never my thing. Now, it's something I look forward to every day.
• I've lost 26 lbs (11 kgs)
• I launched Learnly, which has $400 MRR
• I became a runner. In the past, I never ran. Now, being a runner is part of my identity.
• 10x my growth as a software engineer due to launching my startup, and by reading/practicing software-related published material (books, courses, and articles).
• Able to work on PRICE, where $50,000 was processed through an application we built for forward contracting. Giving investors 13% ROI in 6 months and farmers 40% more income than their peers.

My schedule may not be the fit for you. You may work better with taking naps in between or doing this late at night. The morning schedule works for me. It doesn't have to work for you. In order to achieve crazy, you need to be a little bit crazy and selfish. Those 5.5 hours in the morning for me are my selfish hours to soar. I can't do this without the support of my family, especially my wife, Shaheera. If you and your partner are not in sync, forget any of the above and figure that out first.

You can always share your growth and schedule hacking tips with me.

Thanks for reading.

Clock photo by Lukas Blazek.