Last week I talked about how I schedule my morning to be productive. It’s been going well, and I have gotten a lot done in the few mornings since then. I whipped out two blog posts on Thursday, and Friday got hijacked by fixing a problem with one of my blogs. My buddy, Dr. WordPress advised that I add alt attributes to images on my blogs. It turns out that if you put a bracket character “>” in an alt attribute it may mess everything up and break a wordpress theme. It took me a while to track down the problem.
I have learned two lessons:
- I have to have everything I need for my morning habits, or it falls apart
- I have to have a nice evening before, or it falls apart
Simple habits may be easier for me to implement, but this habit is a pretty big change. I have a lot of negative momentum that tries to keep my old habit of sleeping in, hitting snooze, running late, and picking up some unhealthy muffin or egg sandwich on the way to work.
I say this because this morning I blew it and didn’t get any writing done. I woke up at 7:00, and had an entirely unproductive meeting.
Missing Fruit Makes a Mismanaged Morning
I was in LA all weekend, and I blame my problems on that.
LA itself was great, a buddy of mine opened his home to a few of our friends, and we all had a good old time for the weekend. Lots of male bonding and geeking out.
I got home late yesterday evening, and didn’t have groceries. I was missing the usual fruit that I cut up in the morning for breakfast, and I was out of coffee. Two hits to this new habit of mine.
Late, wasted evenings make a late, wasted morning
In addition to my lack of morning supplies, I stayed up late and had a couple beers to relax. I had been on the road for 8 hours, and I didn’t really have it in me to get anything done and be productive.
I fired up my computer, watched a few shows, threw down a couple beers, and in general had the alone time that I need to recharge. I was up pretty late, and 5:45 am came just a little bit too early.
It didn’t help that I was up till 2 or 3 am each night over the weekend, and up around 8 am every day. I was running on low sleep. When morning came around, I decided to not get any writing done, and sleep in till 7. It felt good, and I probably needed it.
Schedule for a productive evening
The big lesson for me is that I am gonna have to schedule my standard evening as well as my standard morning if I am gonna keep to my productive schedule. This might be a little more challenging, because my evening activities vary a whole lot more than my mornings.
I think I will need some evening habits in place to make this work though. As I work this out, I’ll be writing about it here.