The best tip: challenge your basic assumptions about sleep and experiment to find what works for you. I've found that hitting the general 1.5 hour sleep cycle

The best tip: challenge your basic assumptions about sleep and experiment to find what works for you. I've found that hitting the general 1.5 hour sleep cycle pattern works for me (i.e. the amount of sleep you get is a multiple of 1.5) much better than anything else in terms of actually getting up and feeling well rested. It is extremely difficult for me to get up and go to bed at the same time every day (not to mention unnecessarily inconvenient), but if I can get exactly 6 hours of sleep every night (or 7.5 if I'm feeling particularly tired), I can wake up easily at any time and feel well rested.