Optimizing your personal life

A few weeks ago I visited a temple in our church. This gave me
the opportunity to ponder on how to balance the various
responsibilities I have in my life and how to be as effective as
possible in using my time. It's nice to sit for hours and have the
ability to simply ponder, consider and organize your thoughts. So it
took me almost four hours to realise what I thought was the most
important changes I could do in my life to improve it.

Since I work a lot with optimisations of computer programs in my
work, I thought it was fun to name this blog optimizing your
personal life. When practicing this new scheme in my life I've
been able to optimize my life by about 15-20% :)

In those four hours I organised all parts of my life which is of no
general interest. However the most important aspect on how to
improve my efficiency that I concluded was around the simple concept
of getting to bed earlier and getting up earlier. My natural
behaviour is similar to most programmers, that is I prefer late
nights and sleeping in the mornings. In my younger years I have at
numerous occasions tried to change this, however what I usually have
failed in is that I have been overzealous in trying to go to far. It's
also very tempting to cut in both ends, go up early, but still being
awake late.

In Doctrine & Coventants the Lord (88:124) instructs "retire to thy bed
early, that ye may be not weary; arise early, that your bodies and your
minds be invigorated". I have had many occasions to find this
admonishment to be true. However it requires a great deal of discipline
to implement in one's life.

In my pondering I felt what I thought was the right time to go to bed
and arise. For me this new routine has worked very well, I have been
able to get up early in the morning and have a few hours of work
already early in the morning when the mind is fresh and foremost
the stress level haven't started rising yet. I have also been able to
schedule some times for relaxing and for some parts in my life which
previously there wasn't any time for.

I have seen the Lord's hand in assisting me implementing this in my
life. I am sure I will meet many more challenges in this area in my
life, but I think the general concept of not trying to run faster than
your mind and body sustain is very wise and seems to be at least one
area where age has given me some more wisdom.