failure?
so ok, i admit it.
i slept later than 8:30 this morning.
4th day of lent.
sigh.
saturday mornings are just too enticing, particularly when you don’t go to sleep until 2:30 or 3, you only got 5 hours of sleep the night before, and you have gone out for 7 evenings in a row.
it doesn’t seem like a sin at all, really, apart from the fact that i had explicitly stated intentions to the contrary.
ho hum.
and thus the true challenge of this task reveals itself – it’s not about When i get up, it’s about whether i get up when i Say i’ll get up, or whether i let myself change my mind as convenient.
in my defense, i Did wake up at 8:30.
rather suddenly, actually.
i woke up, was convinced by the grog that i didn’t actually have to get out of Bed right at 8:30, particularly on a weekend… and then i dozed off a little bit until close to 9. i woke up again, and this time i had a much more serious talk with myself. i actually made myself think about my plans for the day and make some decisions about what i wanted to do first. i decided that i had too many other things on my plate to go to the panel on “rights and property in a digital era” at the informatics goes global conference that’s going down this weekend, even though i knew that it would probably be quite interesting. i realized that the thing that was most stressing me out was the piles and piles of paper that need to be sorted at my office, so i decided to just dedicate a several hour chunk of the day to that. i could walk downtown, go to the office, sort paper, play online, and feel great about the day.
that sounded nice.
it also didn’t seem like it needed to happen Right away, so i let myself enjoy lying in bed a bit longer.
that was dangerous, but for whatever reason, i feel no guilt.
despite what josh might say in my comments (and i appreciate the cheering! :), sleep is NOT boring.
i love sleep.
and apart from sleep, i love lying in bed in the morning and letting the day sink in, watching the way my dreams and reality mingle.
it makes me feel good-like, and i’m not trying to beat it out of me, just manage it a bit more.
in some sense, one could argue that i woke up at 9 (which isn’t That far off, really), evaluated my day, and decided that the first thing i would do is take a 2 hour nap.
naps aren’t against the rules.
in fact, i was a little snippy at myself for not fitting one in yesterday.
so that could make sense.
the truth, however, is that i still should have actually gotten up, walked around, and started doing things, in order to be completely true to the spirit of my goal. the point of getting up at 8:30 is not to deprive myself of sleep, it’s to shift my day up a few hours in the hope that the newly uncovered first few hours will be more productive than the last few often are. I Can be very productive in the hours wherein night becomes morning, but lately i have been more often social in those hours, which doesn’t help my work patterns. so if i get up earlier, make myself tired earlier, and go to bed earlier, maybe i will be able to more efficiently allocate my waking hours, which would be good, given those piles of paper at work and the impending deadlines for my capstone.
we’ll see.
since this morning i felt like i succeeded in being more intentional about planning my schedule for the day than i sometimes am, and since i Did need the sleep, i’m going to cut myself a little slack.
but i should up my standards going into the first full week.
so that’s on the record, now.
the rest of the story is kind of funny, really.
and it may make you question whether i deserve the aforementioned slack-cutting.
but i’m going to put it in another post.
this is getting long and if i break it into two shorter posts, i might just trick you into reading them both…
muhahaha