Good Morning
One of the problems I’ve always had with self-development is that most of the things I want to do I do best in the morning. I like to meditate, gym, journal and do creative writing in the morning. But the morning isn’t long enough. I’m happy getting up at 6am to fit everything in but because I start work at 9am this still doesn’t give me enough time to do all my tasks.
My usual solution is to push myself to get up at 5am. I try to convince myself that waking at 5am every day is sustainable but alas it is not. Telling myself I’m a weak piece of shit because I can’t force myself to consistently get up at 5am appears not to work. Even if I manage it for say a week, I end up feeling like shit after a few days and this seems to defeat any objective I might have. I like my sleep. 6am I can do, 5am is a sacrifice too far. Besides, the more I practice self-development the more I find the ‘grind’ is not for me. I find that I get better results by gently and consistently doing the ‘right’ things, whilst also allowing myself time to relax. Grinding tends to give me peaks and troughs which ultimately feels like a painful method of plateauing.
My other ‘go to’ solution is to push one activity out to the evening. But because I don’t like doing them in the evening this also fails after a short period of time. My gym is packed from 6 – 8 so that is off-putting to me. Training after 8pm is challenging motivationally, and means I have to eat late and get to bed late. If I try to write in the evening, I feel less creative. I like to write before the day has got to me with work and all it’s annoying, petty bureaucracy.
And then I had a wonderful idea. Since I work from home, I can pretty much keep my own hours. So now I start work at 11am and keep going into the evening. This means my self-development and side hustles get the best of me (the early morning hours, 6am – 11am) and work gets whatever is left. If I’m spent by mid-afternoon, work gets the spent me. Anyway, work normally cares more about getting it’s 8 hours per day rather than the quality of work I produce in those 8 hours. Or even if I produce any work at all. And in many ways work gets a better version of me because I have been able to indulge in the activities that are important to me.