Anyone who's spoken to me recently (or has me on their IM list) is probably aware that on most nights I'm up slaving away to the wee hours of the morning on my AIESEC project (I still haven't really explained that, have I?).
I've come to the realisation that between the hours of 10pm and 2am (when the bulk of the "work" is done at night), I achieve very little. There's a couple of reasons for this:
- I'm chatting to people on MSN/Google Talk/AIM/ICQ/whatever
- I'm constantly switching to GMail and Mail.app to see if I have new mail (I'm tempted to remove the "Get Mail" button from the toolbar to stop this behaviour!)
- My body is screaming "Go to sleep you freakin' idiot!!!"
- Did I mention FaceBook?
I'm also sick of constantly feeling tired, sleeping in and not being able to think clearly until after 10am.
At the suggestion of a friend, I woke up early (yes, 6am is early for me) yesterday and managed to get a huge chunk of good, clear work done. Plenty of writing and brainstorming, and by the time my housemates had woken up, I was pretty happy with what I had achieved. I repeated it today, and while not so effective, it's something I'm going to try to continue. (That, and staying off IM and FaceBook, and shutting down email unless I need to actually check it.)
Let's hope I can be far more effective this way!
heya, another one I found was to only connect to the net when you actually need something…
Hey John,
Nice to hear from you! It’s strange how great ubiquitous and fast internet access sounds at first, but in reality can just be the cause of so much procrastination. I’ll definitely have to try turning off the wireless.
Hope things are well in Bahrain.
Jem
I can relate to almost everything in this post. This does work!
The only problem is that you have to remember to go to sleep early and resist the temptation to sleep in “a bit longer” after you wake up in the morning.
It’s just a matter of being disciplined about it.