If I'm a morning person, why do I hate waking up?

[chipotle]

So this week I was going through one of my recurring battles to try to wake up earlier. It’s difficult when the deadline is entirely self-imposed, I think, and I didn’t set my alarm clock that early to start with (8:30). The quandry, as I’ve written about before, is that I tend to be more productive in the morning—

—well, at least on specific things. Mostly, rote things. Answering email. Playing editor. Working on web sites. Responding to job postings. (I can find and select jobs at any point in the day, but I’m more likely to be able write a good cover letter and resume-tweak in the morning.)

If I’ve gotten going, I can keep going in the afternoon on a project, even a rote one. If I start a project in the afternoon (or return to a multi-day one then)… well, if it’s a creative project, I can usually get going on it then. If it’s too mindless, I tend to drift.

By the evening, unless a project’s really swept me away, I’m pretty much out of it. After dinner I’m not likely to do anything but be on FurryMUCK. Or sometimes write navel-gazing journal entries like this one, although I’ve noticed if I let myself cross the midnight line—which happened about ten minutes ago—mental processes get really slow.

At any rate, today I remembered that I’d written about this for “Shadowgazing,” a proto-journal that I was trying back in ‘98. It wasn’t successful, I think because I was trying to approach it as a column, and just couldn’t remotely hack it back then. (This is perversely encouraging—as undisciplined as I am now, in retrospect I was worse then!) It was written on one of the very—I mean very—few days I got up in time to watch the sunrise. It talks about just what I talked about above, although in the context of full-time employment, a typical lament about not being in the mood for anything more creative than game-playing when I got home from work. (As I wrote about last year, this got even worse for me on Silicon Valley hours.)

Says the 1998 version of me:

By getting up this early, I’m trying to give myself enough time to write. Not much time—when all is said and done, less than another hour per day. The idea is that, after my alarm clock goes off at six, I’ll make a concerted effort to be out of bed by quarter after. If I can get used to this schedule, maybe I’ll risk pushing it back another half-hour.

If I may say: Ha! Fat lot of good that did me. And you know, I wouldn’t even mind refighting this battle annually if I actually managed to get even six months out of it.

I suppose what worries me about this currently is that I’ve got to beat myself into juggling the personal projects I have now before I think about taking on any others. Ideas bouncing about my head at times range from the small to the non-trivial to the what the hell are you thinking size, and the latter in particular requires a little more self-confidence than I have—and that uncertainty is based entirely on my performance with these little projects.

If I have things running on Claw & Quill in even a lurching fashion by year’s end, get my website revamped, maybe even (gasp) get a freelance client again even if I don’t manage to get a job, maybe I’ll think more seriously about the truly insane ideas.

I suppose this is a three-quarters-year resolution.

(N.B.: you’ll notice it took me forty minutes to get here from the point I wrote that it was ten after midnight. I did say the mental processes got slow.)

Comments

[tilton.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. I'm not a morning person, not at all. And yet, I've always wanted to be one. There is something about the morning that makes me all tingly and happy and full of expectation.

The problem is that I'm never actually awake to experience any of that. Once in a while I'll drag myself out of bed early enough to see the dewy dawn, and if I have enough coffee it will even seem pretty special. But more often than not, I'll wake up at 8:30 and drag my sorry, bleary self out of a state of blissful sleep in slow, agonizing steps.

And a couple of times a year, I'll make a real effort to start getting up early. I even managed to do this for an entire school year recently, when I went to Boston to study bookbinding. I had to be up at 5:30 every morning, and somehow I managed it. It wasn't easy. But when I'm at a job where most people show up at ten-ish, I instantly fall back into my old patterns -- up late into the night, up late in the morning. I haven't been awake before 8 o'clock in months.

Yeah. It's rough. Maybe someday those of us who want to be morning people will find some magical way to fulfull our wishes.

[mordrul.livejournal.com]

Try having my job, installation tech for DirecTV.

On Mondays we have our tech meeting and equipment loadout. Gotta be at the warehouse at 0600 hours, which means getting up anywhere between 4:30 and 5:30, depending on whether I remember to shower the night before, and whether I feel like eating mildly healthier breakfast than McSleeze. The other 5 days of the week I gotta get up at 7 am, so I can get my truck loaded and an ETA to my first job of the day to my supervisor. And this is if I remember to print out my map directions the night before. Then throw in the fact that sometime I'll be assigned to two AM jobs somewhere an hour or more from home, so I may end up getting up at 6 - 6:30. Sunday is my one and only day of the week that I get to sleep in, which I always do. There's something very warm and fuzzy about getting up at lunchtime.

And I am NOT a morning person. As far as I'm concerned, 0600 is for going to bed, not getting up. But while I've worked many a 2nd- and 3rd-shift job, and been very happy with them (especially security), none of them pay anywhere near as well as this job. Just gotta make sacrifices, I guess.

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

*hug*

Working on my own bd habits too...

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

Working on my own BAD habits, too, I mean. Including the getting-up-in-time for what I want to do.