It's 6am Somewhere. It's 6am Here.
My eyes are bleary. It's hard to focus. My mouth is dry. My mind is blank ... And I am supposed to be productive at this hour?
It's 6am and, oh my, how I wish I were in bed.
I have been getting up at 6 -- or even before 6 -- for a decade or more. You would think you would get used to it. I used to get up at 5 so I could go to the gym before work. Now I try and work before the kids get up, or I jump in the car and drive to the office to start my day early.
And it really sucks.
My latest iteration of early rising was to try and write a novel. This was during the pandemic when we were all at home and I didn't need to get to the office. I thought I would get up at six, write for an hour, and then have a coffee with my partner in bed and start the day. What a lovely way to start the day! Only, I hated it. My brain wasn't working at six in the morning, certainly not enough to write fiction. And so the novel never really took off. The writing was bland, all over the place. The story was pedestrain. I gave up.
And then I thought 'What if I start work, instead?' So now I get up and start my office job for an hour, and have a coffee. Strangely, this works. I can't understand it. I don't get my joy from doing work at six, so why can I do that, but I can't do the fun stuff?
It is so bizarre to me. If you had told me what would get me out of bed, working for the man, or working for myself, there would be no way I would say 'oh yes, I'll jump out of bed to work for the man'. I find it most confusing.
But maybe it isn't that hard to understand. Working for the man is all about the hours. It is about your bum in the chair. So getting up when your brain isn't working is just free hours. I'm not awake enough to feel anything. I can read some emails, get up to speed with all the chats, figure out my day, and maybe even do a little bit of work and then the hour's up.
And, by that point, I'm awake. So I'm happier, I have an hour less to do, which means I get to finish early, and I know by the time I finish I won't be thinking of being in bed anymore (which isn't true -- I am always thinking of going back to bed).
But with a personal project, there is no finish time. If I work an hour in the morning I can still work an hour at night. So that reward of '1 hour less' doesn't apply to the personal work. But '1 hour more' of bed? Yeah, that applies quite a lot.
When I write out my thoughts, it all kind of makes sense. But in my brain, I would have thought I should want to get up early to do the things that I want to do. So the next thing to do would be to get up an hour earlier so that I can work on my projects later in the day. But that never seems to happen, which is why I started getting up early in the first place.
Long story short? I can work for someone else, but I struggle to work for me. And that's a problem I need to fix.