Greeting Ra – Update

7:24

After the better part of a month, I might actually have the hang of waking up when my alarm goes off. I’ve started the last phase of my trial by setting my alarm for 5:55 a.m. and getting out of bed before my daily wake-up call.  The sequence has become fairly fixed: wake-up, shower, write. It’s not all smooth sailing though; I can be a tenaciously stubborn sonuvabitch.

I still don’t get to sleep early enough most of the time. Sometimes I get caught up reading blags on the interwebs, sometimes people talking through paper thin walls keep me up. Suffice it to say, my planned bedtime of 10:30 doesn’t happen on a frequent basis. That would be fine if I didn’t get tired around then, but I do. As a result, I have on more than one occasion gone back to bed after going through the sequence above for a quick nap before heading into work. Once or twice I failed to write.

A Great Success?

In my original post, I said that “doing something more with my time is the whole point of this exercise”. To get a little more specific, I wanted to change the structure of my daily routine, in a sustainable way, to yield a block of concentrated time for pursuing my own interests. Sounds dry, I know.

If you strictly adhere to the criteria for success indicated at the start of the experiment, then I’ve failed because I didn’t completely fulfill them: I haven’t gotten up and written every day. I say bollocks to that.

Having a clear definition of success and metrics to track your progress create motiviation and help you plan small, doable next steps. In the end though, metrics don’t count for shit, results do. My screenplay isn’t done yet, but (including discarded parts) I’ve written about a page a day. When my alarm goes off in the morning, I don’t feel the same visceral urge to get immediately back in bed. If I do go back to sleep at some point, it’s because I’ve weighed it as an option.

That’s a huge change from 24 days ago. I’ll take it.

Author: Rev.

A man seeking to make himself in his own image.