The last few years that I was still working, my sleep schedule was pretty regular. I’d go to bed at 9:00 PM and get up at 4:00 AM. Even on weekends and my days off. Sometimes I’d stretch the bedtime to 10 o’clock or later if there was something on television that I really wanted to watch in real time or if I went to a concert or a play, but that didn’t happen too often. The 4:00 AM rising time gave me about an hour to get ready for work so I could leave shortly after five and be sure to get there between 5:30 and 6:00, with 6:00 being the start time. I was working a 10 hour flextime schedule, four days a week at the time, so I had lovely three day weekends.

After retiring in 2006, I kept to that sleep schedule because it was pretty well burned into my habits, though I did gradually shift it to 10:00 PM to 4:30 AM, making up the difference with a couple short naps during the day.

Recently, I decided to see if I could shift it still further, and now I’m aiming for an 11:00 PM to 5:00 AM schedule. One of the benefits will be more daylight in the morning hours when I really like it.

I’m also changing my coffee habits, in this case reverting to a former habit. 

For the past few years I’ve been brewing my day’s coffee in the carafe and heating up each cup in the microwave after the first two. This has meant that I wait fifteen minutes for the coffee to brew, and only the first two cups really taste good.

So I’ve decided to go back to using the single cup brewing method that my coffee maker provides and which I used to do up until a few years ago. It means that each cup will take five minutes to brew (well, six minutes as I have to measure out the coffee and add the water, etc.), but each one will taste just as good as the first one of the day.

I can live with that tradeoff.

I think it’s good to change things around every now and then.