Cut From Steel

He wrote forty-seven novels before he got dressed

Anthony Trollope produced 47 novels, plus short stories and travel books, while holding down a full career at the Post Office.

He managed it by starting at five in the morning, before he dressed, every single day. Trollope said that he gave the freshest hours of the day to his work.

The method was the opposite of romantic and he said so himself, in print. Trollope treated writing as a trade with fixed hours attached rather than as something that turned up when the mood was right.

When his autobiography appeared and readers discovered that the novels had come off a timetable, like a man making boots to order, his literary reputation suffered for decades. Critics would much rather have imagined inspiration.

Trollope also kept the Post Office job throughout, travelled for it across Ireland and Egypt and the West Indies, and is credited with bringing the pillar box to Britain. None of the writing came out of a spare and undisturbed life.

The timetable is the entire reason there are 47 of them. A man who writes when he feels like writing produces only the books he happened to feel like producing.

Trollope's output came off the clock rather than out of the mood. Your body runs on exactly the same principle and rewards being kept to a schedule in the same way.

Your Saturday lie-in is a flight to Lisbon

You get up at six on weekdays and eleven on Saturday, and you have always called the extra hours catching up. Then Monday morning arrives and feels like a punishment you did not earn.

I want to give you the name researchers use for that gap. Social jetlag is measured as the difference between the midpoint of your sleep on working days and the midpoint on your free days.

You have been flying west every Friday night and east again every Sunday, without ever leaving the house.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things about that gap, and one wake-up time to hold tomorrow morning.

01 / How Common It Is

Population data suggests more than 70 percent of people carry at least an hour of social jetlag. Late chronotypes, meaning the men who have always come alive after nine in the evening, carry the most of it. Shift workers can run at around three hours of misalignment as a matter of routine.

02 / What It Is Associated With

Larger gaps have been linked with higher body mass index and waist circumference, with type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance, with cardiovascular risk markers including triglycerides, with lower heart rate variability and with depressive symptoms. These are associations rather than proven causes, and men with the biggest gaps tend to have harder lives in several other respects too.

03 / Why The Lie-In Backfires

Laboratory work on circadian misalignment has reported raised levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin and a greater appetite for energy-dense food. So the Saturday lie-in does not merely shift your clock a few hours. It appears to shift your appetite along with it, which is part of why the weekend eats the way it does.

Take it back today

I owe you a distinction, because two separate things get muddled together here constantly. Sleep debt means not getting enough hours. Social jetlag means getting them at wildly different times. A man can be short of sleep, out of rhythm, or unluckily both at once, and the fixes are not the same.

You should also avoid overcorrecting into misery. Nobody needs a six o'clock alarm on a Saturday, and a rule that makes weekends worse will last about a fortnight. Holding the weekend wake time to within an hour of the weekday one keeps most of the benefit and still feels like a weekend.

I want one alarm set for tomorrow morning, an hour later than your weekday one and no more than that. Get up when it goes, get ten minutes of daylight on your face, and take a twenty-five minute nap in the afternoon if you genuinely need one.

You have been treating Saturday as repayment and Monday as bad luck. Hold the weekend wake time within an hour and Monday stops ambushing you. One alarm, tomorrow morning.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits for a steadier clock:

Saturday money should go on the eight hours you spend horizontal.

01 / Wool · A wool mattress topper

Wool moves moisture and buffers temperature in a way that foam simply cannot, which matters a great deal more at 55 than it did at 25. A good one is two or three inches thick, needs airing rather than washing, and lasts a decade. It is the cheapest meaningful upgrade to a bed short of replacing the whole thing. Buy it before you buy another mattress.

02 / Light · A sunrise alarm clock

A lamp that brightens over thirty minutes wakes you with light rather than with a noise that spikes your heart rate in the dark. The real benefit is secondary... it gives you a reason to put the phone somewhere other than the nightstand, which is worth more than the lamp. Get one with a proper dimmer and no screen on it. Set it for the same time every day, including Saturday.

03 / Trip · A night on the Caledonian Sleeper

Board in London in the evening, have a whisky in the lounge car, and wake up somewhere in the Highlands with the mountains going past the window. Overnight trains are one of the few forms of travel that have got better rather than worse. Book a proper cabin rather than a seat. Do it once and you will look for excuses to do it again.