I am a full-time work-from-home freelancer, so in principle I have the flexibility to set my own hours. Typically, I get up around 6.30am, and after exercising, I’m ready to start my workday around 8am.

But there are never even remotely enough hours in my day. I constantly juggle endless tight deadlines, phone interviews, a daily deluge of email, and the need to record, produce and edit a weekly podcast. I generally work until about 7pm, but there are days when I sit in front of a monitor until bedtime.

Could something as simple as sliding my wake-up time back a few hours help me to take better control of my day? I decided to reset my alarm for a week – Monday to Friday – to see if Cook’s routine could make a difference.

Here’s how my week of waking up like Apple’s CEO went.

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Sunday: I went to bed at 8.30pm, which ended up being the earliest I’d go to sleep for the rest of the week.

The experiment started on Sunday night, of course. We all know what Ben Franklin had to say about sleep; I can’t lay claim to wealth or wisdom, but it’s clear that you can’t successfully get up early unless you go to bed correspondingly early.

Around dinner on Sunday, I did the sums: To get eight hours of sleep, I’d have to be in bed at 7.45pm

That was never going to happen. It reminded me of the weird hours I was forced to keep when I was a junior officer in the Air Force, working 12-hour shifts in a five-days-on, four-days-off sleep-deprivation experiment disguised as a work schedule.

But I’m an adult now, and a prime time bedtime is neither practical nor sustainable. I compromised by heading to bed at 8.30pm. It would be the earliest I’d get to sleep all week.

Monday: I felt energised and optimistic after the 3.45am wake-up and workout.

With seven hours of sleep under my belt, 3.45am came quickly. I bolted out of bed – lest I fall back asleep – and immediately embarked on my day: exercising, showering and settling down to work.

The good news was that even with a 30-minute high-intensity workout at the start of the day, I was at my desk by 5.30am, and I was able to accomplish by 9.30am what usually takes me until noon.

Barely an hour after many people have breakfast, I had already accomplished half my workday. And even though it’s really only a few hours sooner, psychologically I felt a huge boost from seeing major to-do items cleared off my Trello board so early in the day.

This felt like a great time for an email break. I usually hide from email – with so much work on my plate, I often delay dealing with messages because I’m so nervous about getting work done. But now I could comfortably take an hour to deal with email without anxiety. Major win for the 3.45am wake-up.

Monday was a great start. Though I didn’t want to get out of bed, my energy was high throughout the day, and I managed to shut down around 6pm, feeling productive and confident.

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Tuesday: I noticed that my eating habits changed, as I snacked numerous times throughout the day, as well as that waking up so early on the West Coast has its productivity perks.

Unfortunately, bedtime slipped to nearly 10pm on Monday, but I told myself it was fine – I was used to getting by on about six hours of sleep anyway.

When the alarm went off, I again leapt into action. As a creature of habit, I like keeping to a schedule, and I was eager to exercise, shower and settle down to work.

This was the day when I noticed a distressing trend in my eating habits while on the Tim Cook schedule. I am not generally much of a breakfast person – sometimes I’ll have a breakfast bar, but that’s about it. But when you get out of bed at 3.45am, lunch is eight long hours away.

On Monday and Tuesday, I had noticeable hunger pangs and took a break around 7am for breakfast. But I wasn't done. By 10am, my stomach was growling again, and I snacked some more.

It might be purely psychological – if lunch is just four or five hours after the workday starts, I can wait it out. But eight hours demands a worrying number of snack breaks.

I discovered that waking up at 3.45am on the west coast is an extraordinary advantage for folks like me who need to communicate with people in New York. Usually, when I open Outlook at 8am, it’s already 11am on the east coast, and I’m playing catch-up with emails sent to me hours earlier. I don’t like feeling a step behind, something else that typically ratchets up my anxiety during the day.

 But on Tuesday I realised that if I rescheduled my morning, I could take a break to manage email around 6am, which lets me send emails before many east coasters even show up to the office. Getting up early levels the time-zone playing field.

 Unfortunately, there was no 8.30pm (or even 10pm) bedtime for me today. Thanks to a show I’d been holding reservations for weeks, I didn’t get home until 11pm. With an energy level too low to be measured by modern science, I crashed half an hour later.

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Wednesday: I had little sleep and felt sluggish after skipping my workout.

It was not a good day.

Operating on the kind of fumes you get from four hours of sleep, I was a zombie from the moment I woke up. Unable to even bear the thought of burpees, I sat in bed for 30 minutes, checking the news and following the Twitter activity about a story I had published the day before.

I wanted to dedicate some time to email, but my inbox was empty. This is the flip side of the early-morning email advantage I discovered yesterday. It’s so early that even the spambots aren’t awake, much less anyone with something important to say to me.

And Wednesday dragged like that all day long. Since I skipped my morning exercise, my energy level stayed low, and I made even worse diet choices than the day before.

I really started to question the wisdom of my new schedule. I was remarkably unproductive all day, taking frequent social-media breaks when I should have been writing or researching. I called it a day a little on the early side, but anxiety about deadlines sent me back to work for a few hours after dinner. In the end, I didn't get to bed until about 10pm.

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Thursday: The lack of sleep affected my ability to work.

Even though my alarm continued to go off at 3.45am – three hours earlier than my usual wake-up time – I was starting to normalise the experience of getting up before the roosters.

Already used to having the extra time to work, feeling behind the eight ball from the day before, and sensing the week ending with large deadlines looming, I decided to skip my workout for the second day in a row – because I didn’t think I could spare the time.

That was the wrong decision. Cook clearly has time to go to the gym every day, and he runs one of the world’s most profitable companies. I should have been able to spare half an hour of my new-found morning time, but I was gripped by irrational work anxiety.

As I suspected might happen, my bedtime had managed to creep back to my usual time while I continued to get up at 3.45am, which is not healthy. I could feel the lack of sleep starting to affect my alertness, energy level and mood. By the early afternoon, I had a headache that affected my ability to concentrate.

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Friday: I felt energised and was back on schedule with my exercise and work routine. I tackled work projects by dividing my time into short chunks.

Despite again not getting enough sleep (I went to bed about 10pm on Thursday), I woke up full of energy, probably because I subconsciously knew I was going to sleep in over the weekend.

Looking back on the week, I realised something else I liked about settling down at my computer at 5am: It was still pitch black outside.

With sunrise not until 7.22am, I got to work for over two hours with the view out my window shrouded in darkness. Your mileage may vary, but I found that exhilarating, and it made me more productive.

For my last day, I was back on schedule: exercise, shower, work for a while, email. Then I was back to work until lunch.

In the afternoon, I worked in 25-minute, Pomodoro-like chunks on a few different projects and got to stop the workday by 6pm, knowing I’d do a little more work on the weekend to catch up.

Looking back, I realised it could be hard to replicate the habits of successful people without knowing their motives behind the activity. After the experiment, I decided to adopt a new wake-up time of 4.30am.

It seems to me the mistake a lot of people make when trying to imitate the habits of successful people is that they don’t really internalise the underlying reasoning behind the activity.

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When we hear that a CEO wakes up at 4am, or declares email bankruptcy, or never works on any single project for more than 25 minutes at a time, we often rush to try it ourselves.

If you don’t have insight into the context of why these techniques work for them, trying them for yourself can be a catastrophe.

The 3.45am wake-up works for Cook because he spends every moment of the business day in meetings, and this schedule gives him time to care for his health, address his inbox, and have uninterrupted thinking.

But you and me? We should know our own “why” before committing to a change like this.

I liked working early – and even getting a head start on the east coast – enough that I will definitely continue to do it. But not waking up at 3.45am. It’s simply not sustainable, since I still have regular evening activities and a desire to keep a little life in my work-life balance.

As soon as I was done with this experiment, I immediately transitioned into my new schedule: a 4.30am wake-up.

It’s somewhat more forgiving of going to bed at 11pm (as I will inevitably do with alarming regularity). It still gives me hours to work in the early-morning darkness, deal with email as the east coast is rolling into the office, and get a huge amount of work done by midday. Hopefully I can get my craving for midmorning snacks under control.

Thanks, Tim Cook, both for my gadgets and for a new way to approach my daily schedule.

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