In high school, you usually wake up anywhere from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. five days out of the week. It’s exhausting, but you adapt.

Many people think that this early-rising habit can be carried over to college, but they fail when they realize that they can make a schedule that allows them to sleep in. This is very tempting, but it is not always the best thing to do.

It is most likely that for the rest of your life, you will be waking up sometime before 9 a.m. every day. Although this is not always the case, most full-time jobs begin at 9 a.m. and end at 5 p.m.

Part of attending college is to prepare yourself for the real world of work, so adjusting to waking up at the crack of dawn will be very rewarding when you need to do it in the future. The best schedule to set up if you want to be more prepared for the work world is to schedule your first class at 9 in the morning and have your last class at 5 p.m.

Work reasons not convincing enough? Well, let’s look at the potential benefits of rising early while in school.

Everyone is always trying to get that perfect schedule. You know, the one where your classes start at 2:30 p.m. The plan is that they sleep in, sit around being lazy until about 2 p.m., and then they’re in class until anywhere from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Everyone also complains about not having enough time to get all their work done. If they took a peek at their routine and their habits, they might realize that what they are doing is terribly inefficient. It’s very hard for many to wake up and start their day by studying, especially when they screw around for hours in the morning. The problem is easy to see: their classes start too late. However, the solution may be much more difficult to face.

Starting classes around 9 or 10 a.m. is very helpful, even though it doesn’t sound in any way appealing. The benefits become obvious once you realize that you’re done with your day early in the afternoon and have 6 to 8 more hours to take a nap, study, work out, etc. Just make sure you use all the extra time well.

Have classes in the middle of the day? Rising early is still very useful. If you work out, you can hit the gym early in the morning. Waiting in line in the evening with everyone else sucks. What’s great about this is that the gym is usually pretty empty, since you’re on the grind while everyone’s still fast asleep.

I’ll admit that I’m not the earliest of birds. Sleep is the greatest thing since sliced bread. However, you can sacrifice an extra hour of sleep if you can wake up earlier and get things done. After all, being more productive during the day makes crawling into bed at the end of the day that much more satisfying.