a personal challenge

I've been feeling sort of insanely busy lately, so as a personal experiment, I wrote down what I did all day on a little timeline to see how I could improve my use of my time.  

This is how it went: 

6:45 - Wake up, throw on workout clothes (which I laid out the night before).  Have a cup of coffee, read emails, take out dogs.  

7 am - Run for 30 minutes to an hour, or take a yoga class.  

7:45 am - Shower, feed dogs & give them medicine, water plants, make breakfast.  

8:30 or 8:45 - Start work while eating breakfast.  Sit down at my table or on my porch and comb through emails, check in with designers, compile finished work, work on blog posts for Williamson, Evernote check ins, etc.  

12 pm - I used my lunch break to run errands and pick something up to eat.  

1 pm - Back to work!  

3pm - Make a snack, and throw on some makeup and fix my hair so I don't look like I've been working in a ponytail and yoga pants all day.  Which is what I've been doing. 

3:30 - 5:30 Work some more!   

5:30 pm - Get started on dinner.  

7 pm - Eat dinner with Darrell, then clean up the house and read, do my nails, and watch Netflix with Darrell.  

9:30 pm - Go to bed!  

I kind of abhor the idea of losing that 2 hours I get to hang out with my husband and read magazines or do my nails every night.  I also really like my 15 minutes of peace and quiet when I read the news in the morning with my coffee, but I also feel the most rushed in the morning. It's a little embarrassing - this looks like a pretty luxurious schedule!!

So I realized that what I really need to do (and this is some painful truth) is wake up an hour earlier.  I sleep like 9 hours a night, which isn't really necessary - it's just a habit!  I don't HAVE to wake up as early as Darrell (which is at 5:30 am), but I don't like staying awake after he goes to bed, so it just sort of happened.  

Here's the plan - this week, I'm going to make my wake up goal time 6 am.  After this week, I'll move it back to 5:45, and then 5:30.  I'm sure I'll fail a lot and skip my workout and end up in bed until 7.  But it's a personal challenge I'd like to take, and not one I have any reason to avoid!  I generally feel pretty good when I start my day earlier anyways - just the initial exit from the bed is hard....

Any takers for joining me?  Anybody else tweaking their schedule so they feel like they have more hours in the day?  

Also, something funny I've seen around the web that put this in perspective: