The alarm was set for 4:50.
For about three weeks in early 2022 I lay there and listened to it go off, then got up whenever, then spent a good part of the day on Netflix, YouTube and Call of Duty Mobile.
I had three paying clients at the time. That is the part that makes this worth writing about, because everybody tells this story the wrong way round.
The routine did not make the business work. The business starting to work is what broke the routine.
What the thing actually was
Written down, from the version I was keeping in January 2022.
Up at 4:50. Twenty minutes of cardio. Twenty minutes planning the day. Fifteen minutes reflecting on the day before, with five minutes of meditation at the end of it. Then chores. Then at 7:30 I’d go cycling, minimum five kilometres. Back, freshen up, breakfast, and work until 3pm.
Reading that back four years later, it is both faintly ridiculous and completely ordinary. Nothing in it is clever. There is no supplement, no cold plunge, no app. It is just a sequence of short things in a fixed order, which is the only reason it worked at all.
Week two is what did the damage
I had quit a four year job at the start of that January and given myself until the end of March to make this pay or go back to employment.
In week two I got my first client, a couple running a traditional food and nutrition business who I’d met at an event months earlier. They did not interview me. They just said yes, because the relationship already existed. Then they introduced me to two more people, and both of those signed.
Three clients in week two. Around 90% of my first month’s revenue target, hit in a fortnight.
And that is precisely where it fell apart.
It was not burnout. I want to be accurate about that, because burnout is the respectable explanation and it was not what happened. It was relief. Nothing feels more like permission to stop than hitting your number early, and I took the permission.
The cost turned up somewhere I wasn’t watching
Here is what I expected to lose by abandoning a 4:50 start. Energy, probably. Mood, maybe. Some vague sense of being on top of things.
What I actually lost was follow-ups.
I had leads from the first two weeks that I simply did not chase. I stopped generating new ones. The three clients I had were being serviced perfectly well, so nothing looked broken from the outside, and the pipeline quietly emptied.
So at the end of month one I had three paying clients and I was still about Rs 2,000 short of a Rs 15,000 target. That is a slightly absurd sentence and it is what happened. My friend Karthik had set me three monthly targets of Rs 15,000, Rs 20,000 and Rs 25,000, and I had to tell him I’d missed the first one while holding three contracts.
The routine was never producing energy. It was producing follow-ups.
The twenty minutes of planning and the fifteen of reflecting were not self-improvement. They were the only mechanism by which a lead from Tuesday got contacted on Thursday. Take out the mechanism and the work that has no deadline stops happening, which in a one person business is all the work that decides whether you exist in six months.
What restarted it was not discipline
In the last week of that month I started doing it again, and the thing I got right by accident was that I made it smaller.
My own words at the time were that I kept it simple and easy to begin with. Not the full stack. Not 4:50. Just the shape of it, at a size I could actually do on a bad day.
I also started learning to cook that month, which sounds irrelevant and I don’t think it was. It was another short daily thing with a visible result at the end, and at that point I needed evidence that I could still finish things.
The one line from back then I would still defend: it got harder to do every day I skipped it. The restart cost compounds. Three days off is not three times as hard as one day off, it is considerably worse, and knowing that is more useful than any amount of motivation.
The month that worked, and what actually won it
February went well. A contract I’d been chasing came through and took me past my third month target inside my second month.
But I am not going to pretend the routine won that, because it didn’t.
I was in a meeting with a founder whose product I genuinely believed in, and I was losing him. Twenty minutes in I could feel it. So I stopped presenting and let him talk, which was the only intelligent thing I did in that room. Ten minutes later two names came up, people I had worked under in my job for four years, and he knew both of them personally. The conversation went from forty minutes of me explaining myself to two hours of us talking. He signed.
That was luck, plus four years of other people’s goodwill arriving at a useful moment. No morning routine produces that.
What the routine produced was duller and more important. It kept me chasing the leads that eventually put me in the room, and it kept me in business long enough for the lucky meeting to happen. Those are not the same claim as “my 4:50 habit made me successful”, and the difference matters, because the first one is repeatable and the second one is a story people tell after the fact.
Three years on
I wrote a post about exercise and freelancing in 2023, which you can still read, and I’ll be honest that it contains no actual experience. It is the generic list of benefits that anybody could have typed without having done any of it. Better sleep, more confidence, clearer head. All probably true and all completely useless, because it had no cost in it.
This is the version with the cost in it.
Where I’ve landed: I don’t get up at 4:50 any more and I no longer think the hour matters at all. What matters is that the first thing is the same thing every day, that it includes a few minutes of writing down what actually needs doing, and that when it slips, which it will, you make it smaller rather than abandoning it and waiting to feel motivated.
The slip is not the failure. Treating the slip as a verdict on your character, and therefore doing nothing for three weeks, is the failure. I know because I did that, with three clients on the books and a target I missed anyway.
If you’re in your first few months of something and it has gone quiet, the thing worth checking is not your energy. It is whether anybody heard from you this week.
If you want to talk through any of this, or your own situation, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn. There is more about me and how I work in my notes. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.
Cheers!