Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I would almost always get up late the next morning.

But after a while I couldn't ignore the high relationship between success and rising early. On those rare occasions where I did get up early, I noticed that my productivity was almost always higher. So I set out to become a habitual early riser. But whenever my alarm went off, my first thought was always to stop that noise and go back to sleep. Eventually some sleep research showed me that I was using the wrong strategy.

The most common wrong strategy is this: You assume that if you're going to get up earlier, you'd better go to bed earlier. It sounds very reasonable, but will usually fail.

There are two main schools of thought on sleep patterns. The first is that you should go to bed and get up at the same time every day. The second school says you should go to bed when you're tired and get up when you naturally wake up. However, I have found both of them are wrong if you care about productivity. If you sleep at fixed hours, you'll sometimes go to bed when you aren't sleepy enough. You're wasting time lying in bed awake.

If your sleep is based on what your body tells you, you'll probably be sleeping more than you need. Also, your mornings may be less predictable if you're getting up at different times.

The solution for me has been to combine both methods. I go to bed when I'm sleepy and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time. So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5 am), but I go to bed at different times every night -- sometimes at 9:30pm, and other times at midnight. Most of the time I go to bed between 10-11 pm.

However, going to bed only when I'm sleepy, and getting up at a fixed time every morning is my way. If you want to become an early riser, you can try your own.