I tried Haruki Murakami's 4AM writing routine ☁️☕

4 23 a.m it's now time for me to go for a run sometime 1841 words hello everyone and welcome to another video now before we jump into this video i just wanted to share a really quick announcement a very cool opportunity has popped up i'm going to be hosting a group trip a travel with me trip to japan in may 2023 we're going to be heading to tokyo kyoto and osaka the itinerary is super cool we're going to be eating so much amazing food checking out a lot of local culture and beautiful locations visiting bookstores and just generally having a magical time the trip launches in just a couple of days so if you're interested click the link in the description down below to check out all the details today's video or rather this week's video is going to be an interesting challenge some of you may remember that i used to have this really productive motivated 5 a.m writing routine now i had this when i still worked a 9 to 5 in marketing i used to get up really early before work quickly get ready make my breakfast and then get some writing done before i went off to my nine to five and on top of that i'm also a really big haruki murakami fan i've spent a lot of time speaking about haruki murakami on this channel haruki murakami is a prolific author with a really strict writing routine for his writing routine he gets up at about 4am every day during the times when he's drafting a novel and i've seen a few people try out this routine as a kind of challenge this is not a new idea this has been done many times before given my love for hiroki murakami as an author and the fact that i used to have a really early morning routine i thought this would be a fun challenge to see if i could do the haruki murakami very early morning writing routine for a whole week and by week i mean work week like monday to friday i do not want to get up at 4 a.m on a saturday i don't think i have the result for that we're doing this for five days and we're gonna see how we go now there are some logistical differences with me trying out this challenge notwithstanding the fact that he is an amazing author who's a full-time author he has spent many many years building up this routine he's run marathons ignoring all of that some of the challenges for me are going to be number one the fact that my circadian rhythm is not attuned to waking up at 4am your circadian rhythm is your natural sleep cycle and it's very important to helping you sleep it is you know the production of melatonin in your brain throughout the day you produce more and more and more melatonin until it's time for you to go to sleep it's to do with your body temperature there's so many factors here suddenly getting up at 4am after not really leading into it is gonna feel kind of similar to having jet lag so that's something to be aware of for me also number two hiriki murakami lives in tokyo or like technically he lives in chiba prefecture i'm pretty sure but i know this from when i used to live in tokyo the sun rises super duper early there let me double check what time does the sunrise in tokyo at the moment 4 26 am and they're in the middle of summer and i remember when i lived in japan this being super duper annoying hurricane murakami is rising with the sun i'm in australia in the southern hemisphere it is the middle of winter so the sun rises for me 7 24 am that's quite the difference i am not rising with the sun the sun and sunlight also affect your circadian rhythm makes it just slightly more challenging but i am excited for this and i want to give it a go anyway first of all we need to have a look at hiroki murakami's routine and form a plan in terms of research i've read what i talk about when i talk about running which is his memoir on writing and running if you're interested in hirohi murakami and if you like running then i definitely recommend it because it's a good read however you would think he speaks more specifically about his writing routine in this book it more focuses on his running and the analogy of running a marathon to writing a novel the quote that everyone seems to use which is what i've deducted from my research is from a article in the paris review in the summer of 2004. this is actually from an interview with hiki murakami and the quote is when i'm in writing mode for a novel i get up at 4am and work for five to six hours in the afternoon i run for 10 kilometers or swim for 1500 meters or do both then i read a bit and listen to some music i go to bed at 9 00 pm i keep this routine every day without variation the repetition itself becomes the important thing it's a form of mesmerism i mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind but to hold to such repetition for so long six months to a year requires a good amount of mental and physical strength in that sense writing a long novel is like survival training physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity i ask you what what does it mean if you want to write novels but you don't have very much physical strength should i be concerned i cannot do more than three push-ups i can now do two push-ups in a row now though that's a bit of an improvement going to get up at 4am i'm going to very quickly get ready for the day and hopefully be sitting at my desk by 4 30 a.m the early afternoon let's say 1pm i'll go for a run i need to be in bed by 9 00 pm to get six hours of sleep and do it all again what have i agreed to we're going to give it a go and let's see if the huki murakami 4am writing routine works for me [Music] hello it is very very early oh my god it's like 4 25 i haven't done anything yet like it literally just took me 25 minutes to get here because i was so tired basically my strategy here is that i'm gonna turn my internet off because i can just feel it because i'm so tired i'm gonna not concentrate and i'm probably gonna spend all my time just like on twitter [Music] i'm gonna get breakfast now just past 5am i did a little bit of work it was very slow though like i i'm already wearing exercise clothes so i'm ready for when i eventually have to go for a run i've just realized i can hear the sound of them doing the bins like the bin people bin people makes them sound ridiculous the people who take out the rubbish i can hear the trucks and i haven't heard that sound in a really long time so it's kind of like an ominous banging sound so yeah the the sounds of the early morning that you don't hear when you're cozy and asleep in your bed [Music] it's now just past 6 a.m i have been working very slowly as i mentioned before it's been sort of a challenge to really buckle down and get a lot of good productive work done because i did not get a lot of sleep oh my god my eyes are itchy i'm working on a non-fiction piece i can't even i can't even form words right now i can't work out if this article is just a little bit of a challenge or if i'm just a bit tired and it's taking me a while to get going on work for the day i've started work on this article many many months ago like six months ago or something and so i have that dump of writing to sort of look at and work from i think today in terms of usable words so far i've written about let's say 350-ish [Applause] it is currently 7 30 a.m but i'm taking a very small break i feel pretty good my goal today is to finish that first article and then tomorrow start on the second and third because i want to submit three articles to this magazine and they're all really short like informal kind of humorous like laid-back articles it's kind of fun to work on something a little bit different but i'm gonna stop procrastinating now i'm gonna get back to work 10 30 a.m i'm all done was writing that first article i think is pretty good it feels like it's 95 of the way there like it feels pretty close it's now time for me to go for a run in haruki murakami's schedule he goes for a run in the early afternoon he goes for like a 10k run i'm not even gonna come close to doing that i'm not even gonna try i can do a 3k run and maybe towards the end of the week i'll try for a 5k i'm just cognizant of trying to pace myself a little bit because i haven't been running very much recently so if i go full pelt into just running every single day i don't want to cause myself an injury and i don't want to tire myself out too much and then just completely ruin this challenge let's go for a run on this monday i do not feel like running i'll be honest i feel like curling up and going back to bed but i'm gonna do it i'm gonna go for a run yep let's just get this over with oh three k's all done what haruki murakami does after going for his run is he spends the rest of the day reading or listening to jazz music now i i have work to do yes gonna go get a little bit of work done and then maybe chill out and do some reading and go to sleep [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] hello today is wednesday yeah yeah i'm look i'm not gonna winch i'm not gonna winch too much in this video about feeling tired because this is a challenge maybe i should have trained my circadian rhythm a bit more into this [Music] a cup of tea has been acquired so i'm still working on this nonfiction on these non-fiction articles i think they're sort of at like the 80 mark so i've written the words but they still need to be tightened up a bit i've been writing quite slowly and trying to do a like a thorough job of this so currently in terms of like a word count we're sitting at 1900 words but i need to pair that back a little bit and then hopefully moving over to my short story that i'm currently working on so we need to we need to get to that it is currently 7 13 a.m and these articles i think they're actually done i'm gonna leave it a little while to proofread it just so i can make sure that um i'm happy with them i think it's good to give your work a little bit of a break before you come back to it and just make sure that everything's good and you're happy with it otherwise i think it's all done so these three articles in totality which are all going to be submitted at the same time in the same doc total at 1 841 words i'm gonna get to the short story now [Music] it is currently 8 40 a.m i'm so hungry i think i'm realizing that because i'm eating so early it just means that by the time it's my normal breakfast time i'm starving [Music] voiceover christy here i was so tired in this clip that i forgot to plug in my microphone basically what i'm saying here is that because i've like run two days in a row which i don't normally do my muscles are quite sore and so i'm gonna take a break for a day and just do some yoga instead that's basically the gist of everything i'm wishing about here uh as you were back to the video onto some yoga shoulder blades left to right step it all the way through lower to your left knee on an inhale sweep the arms up and overhead hello guys it is thursday it's about 4 40 a.m i am not gonna lie to you i feel like i've hit a bit of a wall today i got up at 4am quickly got ready did the world's quickest makeup because today maybe at about 8 30 i have a video i have to get filmed so one of the biggest challenges with doing this challenge for me is the fact that i'm juggling it around my usual work which is mostly like content production stuff and another challenge that i have is the fact that i live in a one-bedroom apartment with my partner who also works from home a lot and so when he has meetings here loud trucks and the sounds of the morning um when he has meetings i obviously can't film because that makes it impossible so we try to juggle each other's schedules a bit and here's a lot of meetings today so i'm going to get up and film something really quickly at about maybe 8 30 a.m before well before he starts and um because i was worried i'd get buckled down doing this um i quickly put on makeup so i wouldn't get distracted with this and then completely forget and then be running behind i used to do this when i woke up at 5am every day i'd get up i'd have breakfast i'd like organize everything and then i'd quickly put on makeup because otherwise i would just dawdle and forget and run out of time and i know it's important for me to get the boring stuff out the way so i can concentrate on the stuff i actually care about yeah i went to i got into bed at like 9 30 last night so i am actually going to sleep at an appropriate time now because i just felt wrecked really basically the plan is now to work for the next three and a half hours and then quickly film that video i need to film go for my run i still want to go for a run and then my brain's not working what was my plan i go to bed early again cause i am really feeling this today [Music] [Music] [Music] it is now 8 am and i am ready to call it a day on writing for today because it sounds ridiculous doesn't it at 8am i'm gonna stop working for the day when you know normally i would never have started working anywhere close to this i've just been sitting here eating strawberry clouds we bought a like mega pack of strawberry clouds last time we're at officeworks so today has definitely been the least successful day my word count hasn't really moved since yesterday i mean i had moments where i felt like i was making a lot of headway but because i'm still in the very early stages of this short story that i'm working on not moving very quickly i was i was doing a little bit of research today and i was mostly just like plotting out like key themes i wanted to explore and little notes about the characters and stuff so in terms of actual headway on the word count of the story i haven't gotten very far so that kind of felt a little bit frustrating because i worked for a long time but i wasn't as productive as i could have been because i'm tired and also the early stages of the story means that like everything works a bit more slowly i need to go now and do my other work for the day it is currently 9 12 on thursday night and i am basically getting ready for bed but i'm realizing that my great hamasha my downfall the thing that's sort of making it not really a realistic challenge is how much work i had to do outside of the writing at 4 am i tried to do this on a week where i didn't have heaps and heaps of work to do but as it turns out a whole bunch of last-minute stuff has snuck up on me including the fact that i'm trying to edit this video that you're watching to go up this sunday on top of launching the trevor trip japan trip this week and doing a whole bunch of stuff for patreon and so kind of accidentally i made this challenge a lot harder for myself than it needed to be just because my workload kind of snuck up on me i kind of find it hilarious how tired i am in some of these clips so i'm sorry if i seem a bit flat i'm not very good at it seeming upbeat when i don't feel it so anyway i'm gonna go to sleep pretty soon i'm basically just reading at the moment so that's me doing part of the haruki murakami thing haven't listened to any jazz yet interestingly enough i'm gonna go to sleep and tomorrow is the last day of our challenge it is friday what time is it today 4 23 am which i believe is the best time we've made so far for me to be sitting at my desk with my breakfast ready to go it definitely feels easier today which is in a way a little bit upsetting because it's the very last day like i feel like i've made my circadian rhythm catch up just a little bit okay let's begin the very last day of starting writing work at 4 am [Music] 6 30 6 40 a.m actually we have a document sitting at 2606 words for this short story which feels both good and not great at the same time the reason why i was hoping for more words than that is because when i opened this document on wednesday god was only like a couple days ago it already had some words in it i think i already started this with maybe 800 words in that document so yeah a lot of these 2 600 words have been just notes and like bits of info dumping and stuff that isn't really usable it's kind of hard to compare it to a normal week where i'd be working on project teacup and i get a certain amount of words done so basically what i'm saying is scientifically we didn't really have a control to see how successful this week was in terms of like output and productivity [Music] we are all done it is 10 a.m so this document ended up at 3210 words it's pretty good i have at least made some headway in my writing you'd bloody hope so because i've spent like what is it like five or six hours a day writing every day and not all of those hours have been productive because for some of them i've just been really tired look it's 10 a.m and the writing component of this challenge is all done i'm going to do the very last run of this week so out of five days i've run four of them and i did yoga on the wednesday in the middle i remember when i was like oh i'm gonna do a 5k run at the end of the week it's not happening see how i feel again i'm cognizant of not injuring myself i'm getting muscle soreness i'm going to take it relatively easy but also try to maybe do 4k we'll see how we got my this challenge i'm so glad that i did it like it was it was a lot of fun to actually do a challenge video this isn't the type of thing i've ever filmed before yeah wow what a week that was really difficult i managed to finish three articles three small articles and i did actually submit them i managed to also do thousands of words of preliminary work on my short story and research a lot of the like early work i needed to do for that so it was a really productive week i had so many more hours for writing work this week than i normally do i ended up having really long work days this week like i obviously got up at 4am worked for like five or six hours every day like i was supposed to but aside from thursday because i finished it earlier on thursday and then spent another good five hours or so doing youtube work or doing admin stuff or dealing with the things that happened this week ended up sort of being not really a fair challenge just because of the logistics of my job and my work and what i have to do but i did get up early i did get up at 4 a.m every day i did get a whole bunch of writing done and i did also exercise every single day which i'm very very proud of the things i have learned from this challenge number one i still hate getting up early the second thing i learned was about running i have not been a physically fit person for a very very long time i've only recently started going to the gym and getting into running before that i did a lot of walking i used to walk to work but in terms of actually going to the gym and jogging and doing this stuff that's only really been this past year this is gonna sound really silly but i did not realize what a difference it makes exercising on a full stomach compared to an empty stomach because like up until this point every time i've gone to the gym it's been first thing when i wake up it's been like before breakfast running at this time after having eaten breakfast and digested some food i actually had so much more energy which now that i think about it should have been really obvious but now i realize that this whole time i've been jogging on hard mode what's the third thing i've learned there really should be a third thing i don't like getting up early you should eat something before you exercise maybe don't try to write for six hours every single day when you have a significant number of other work commitments because you will overwork yourself um i didn't really film a lot of the other work i did outside of my writing work mostly because i don't really want to advocate for overwork it was a very big week for me that wasn't supposed to be the way it went but it just honestly is what happened i'm going to spend the weekend sleeping and resting and recovering from this challenge i don't really know how hiki murakami does this but it's because he goes to sleep at 9 00 pm every night and he's used to it and his circadian rhythm and the sun rising at the time it does and i understand why it's a form of mesmerism for him i can see a lot of people getting a lot of value out of that i'm not very good at routine like i'm sort of like an all over the place kind of person so i don't think it would ever work for me but i feel like i learned a lot from it and i'm very happy i did this challenge if you guys liked this video if you want to see more challenges or writing challenges please do let me know thank you so very much for watching this video and also an enormous thank you to everyone over on patreon for supporting the videos that i make take care everyone and i will see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Christy Anne Jones

Views: 242,959

Keywords: christy anne jones, aileaux, I tried Haruki Murakami's 4AM writing routine, My 5AM writing (& morning) routine, 4am routine, early morning routine, Haruki Murakami, productive earling morning routine, writing routine, productivity, productive morning routine, 5am productive morning routine, how to write, haruki murakami review, norwegian wood, trying haruki murakami writing routine for a week, productive writing routine, calm early morning routine, mindful morning routine, 4am, 5am

Id: B6IjHHRdJ_k

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2022