I thought again today about one of my weaknesses. I do not work well in a lack of regularity. To be most productive, I need a consistent hour to rise in the morning, and a consistent hour to go to bed at night. For years and years I got up at a regular time every morning. Since I haven’t had a “job” which required me to work for someone else, and thus rise early, my consistent early rising has been a source of somewhat mocking awe from my family. Here I am, a man “torturing” myself by getting up early, even though nobody makes me. But I long knew that a lack of consistency would mean an utter dearth of productivity, so I held myself to it with a rigid discipline. I find getting up at a set time, and doing work in a set order, helps focus the mind. As a person who finds his thoughts taking off in every direction, I need all the help focusing that I can get.
Strange as it might sound, one of the greatest changes in my life when I left home to take care of my grandfather was the destruction of my schedule, the regularity in my life. Over a decade of habit–nay, nearly iron-clad consistency–was wiped out in an instant. The only way my life could have been turned more upside down was if I had stopped my regular exercise routine and started lazing around the house getting fat on junk food. Then the reversal of my life would have been complete. As it was, the loss of my regular schedule meant my productivity evaporated as well.
True, the loss of productive work was not due solely to no longer getting up sharp and early. There was also the matter of spending nearly every waking minute caring for my grandfather. But that fact masked the reality of how much my schedule helped me be productive. As my grandfather’s needs have changed my free time has come back, in a small measure. In spite of that, I have found it frustratingly difficult to regain the productivity I once had. Most of all, I find it difficult to concentrate and focus on what is at hand. My mornings start in a meandering way, and then the rest of the day is downhill from there. Actually, I have always found the day to pretty much be downhill from the morning, but when you start out poorly in the morning, it feels like there is no chance of recovery.
I realized that if I wanted my old mornings back, I would have to pick up the alarm clock. Now that Grandpa was no longer interrupting my nights rest it was feasible, and in fact necessary if I was going to get my mornings in order. I had to rise early, with diligence. There was no other way, not for me.
It is odd, in a way, returning to that past life. For three years an alarm clock has been absent from my life–the thing which up until that point had been the most controlling feature of my life. Five days a week I went to bed with those glowing digits staring back at me, warning of next morning’s early rise. I would wake up throughout the night and give a quick glance at the digital display–a deeply ingrained habit to check how soon my doom would come. I hated that alarm clock, but at the same time it was the thing that kept me going. When I dropped that old habit, it was as if I fell into a different world–a world where one was not measuring the hours until they had to get up, but rather a world where one tried to sleep as much as possible to recover from the bad nights. (Which, in my case still was not very late–8:30 AM being a herculean effort at sleeping in, 7:00 – 8:00 AM being a more typical hour of rising). The mooring for my morning had been pulled up, and every day seemed to start without focus. Getting that focus back feels good, getting the alarm back feels familiar in that unpleasant way. And a part of me wonders if this can really continue. After having been forced to give up the routine of an alarm, a part of me wonders if I really have what it takes to go back. But I think I do.
Another thing I realized today is that I need my timer. It is my crutch for writing. When I sit at the computer to write I have a tendency to distract myself. When supposed to be writing it is easy to daydream instead, and then you want to look this thing up, or research that thing, or hey, just check your e-mail and see if anyone has posted on their blog. But any interruption ruins the writing concentration, and heaven help you if you actually get something that really preoccupies your attention. Writing time is quickly shot, being wasted away in dribbles here and there. Setting a timer on myself gives me a certain degree of regularity, and also an opportunity to manipulate myself (sad, but true). When I am sitting at the computer, writing, and a thought comes to me that I want to investigate I can tell myself, “No, just wait, you only have another 25 minutes until you can take a break. Just wait 25 minutes and then you can follow up that thoughts.” And sometimes, if I make myself stay writing for those 25 minutes, then I become wrapped up in the work and that distracting idea no longer seems so important. While not 100% effective, this helps at lot to keep my nose at the grindstone.
For nearly three years I didn’t use a timer to keep my at my writing because every few minutes I had to jump up to go help Grandpa with something. The timer was, in that situation, useless. If I write for 5 minutes and then must leave for ten minutes to take care of some Grandpa crises, to come back and write another 10 minutes, to leave for another 5 minutes–the timer is no longer any marker of how long I have been writing, I certainly can’t get completely wrapped up in my writing and all around it became pointless. It turned into a measure of how little writing I was accomplishing. But now Grandpa needs me much less often (being couch-bound has that effect) and now it is actually possible that I can sit and write for a prolonged period of time. And, as I was today pondering my constant wandering off from my appointed tasks I realized that it was time to re-introduce that timer. That old fiend is back.
I need regularity in my life. Some people live like carefree birds and yet manage to get all sorts of things done. I don’t understand it. For me, if I have the regular schedule I can be like a faith productive workhorse. Without it, I am scrabbling to make the day come together.
{ 1 comment }
I wrote a visual basic script to harass me every two hours for a similar purpose.
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