Welcome back to the Do Weekly Podcast! Won’t you stay a bit and join us for episode 12? There’s a little bit of failure here, but it makes everything else taste like success! Er, maybe not but you should continue reading along.

Last week’s challenge: Make an Educational Product Based on Your Extensive Experiences and Knowledge.

Okay. Look, we might have gotten a little overzealous for last week’s challenge. No big deal, we’ll just create an educational product in a week. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Natalie and I kinda fell on our faces with this challenge. Yep, we didn’t complete the challenge. I guess we both get cookies now!

So what’s a person to do? And more importantly, what happened???

Well, it turns out that building an educational product takes a lot of planning, thinking, and executing. In fact, it takes way more time than either of us bargained for.

Natalie decided to create a resource to help her prospective clients/leads in their next web development project. It includes questionnaires and other content that helps people make informed decisions by arming them with crucial information and questions to ask potential service providers.

Alex outlined an email course series based off of a series of blog posts he did a year ago. He plans to make them into a drip-email course aimed at existing clients and also as a content magnet to help increase subscriptions.

This week’s challenge: Get MOAR SLEEP!

via GIPHY

According to the Institute for Preventing Zombie Apocalypses (aka the Centers for Disease Control), they state that roughly 35% of people in the U.S. do not get enough sleep. A lack of sleep has all kinds of adverse side effects. A lack of sleep can affect your weight, your attitude, and overall outlook on life. That’s not good, and it’s something that, for many people, is well within their control to change.

I have a personal story. Several years ago I was around 320lbs. I knew I needed to lose weight. So I was looking for things to change. The first thing I changed, I kid you not, was how much sleep I was getting. I got maybe four to five hours of sleep every day. I naively thought that if I broke up my sleep patterns that I could be more productive every day because I had more time to get things done. Turns out that’s about as dumb as lighting a firecracker and tossing it in your friend’s boxer shorts. I resolved to get seven to eight hours of sleep per day. Within 30 days, I was down ten pounds. No joke. I lost weight just by getting sleep and letting my body recover. There’s truth that power lies in getting enough sleep.

Going to bed earlier can also propel you to have more productive mornings. You may find that you have more energy and for longer stretches than your night owl counterparts have. More sleep can help you increase performance in your chosen physical activities, whatever they might be.

Some of the things Natalie and I discussed were some tips on how to get ready for getting that sweet, sweet shut-eye.

Habits matter! Having a nightly routine that you follow is key to ensuring that you get enough sleep.

Here are a few suggestions that we have that have helped us:

* Commit to a bedtime AND STICK TO IT! Pick a realistic time that you’ll go to bed and stick to it. Again be realistic, but strive for an earlier than usual bedtime an give yourself about eight hours.

* Don’t take tech to bed with you. Eliminate any possible distractions from your room. That means removing phones, iPads, or anything that makes a noise in your room. The exception to this is your furry family members. Dog and cat snuggles are the best.