My friend Michael wrote a blog post (As an aside, I’m so excited to be writing blog posts linking to friends blog posts again) listing a few specific things you can do to improve your life. It’s a list worth reading just to consider even if you don’t put every suggestion into play. The first one is the thing that really jumped out at me.

Don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.

The oft controversial Tim Ferris suggests something similar in his 4-Hour Workweek, recommending to avoid checking email in the mornings and evenings.

While different specifics, the goal here is the same. Spend the last part of the day and the beginning of the next with the people and environment you’ve chosen to surround yourself with, rather than on the whim of whatever is happening in the rest of the world. I’d be lying if I said I’ve never laid awake at night caught in the refresh loop on my iphone checking email, twitter, tumblr, a few news sites, email, twitter.. etc. Or that I’ve never woken up in the morning and grabbed by phone to see what time it is, and upon leaning it’s 3 hours earlier that I needed to wake up notices I had some new email and some new replies on twitter and then spent the next hour awake in bed on my phone. In fact, I do that several times a week.

Now seems like as good a time as any to give this a shot.