The morning is a better time to write. My hands do not hesitate like they do at night, after 80% of my energy has been depleted. My stream of consciousness flows less sinuously, and empties effortlessly onto this ocean of paper. This transcription process is cathartic. The coffee makes me brash.
Morning writing gives structure to my day. Waking up is essentially like calling Math.random() on your day. Without structure, it will quickly devolve into anarchy. Rebounding is difficult. Randomness can be good, but best saved for controlled environments, especially when you’re intentionally trying to bash things together to see what kind of reactions you get. Otherwise, it helps to have daily functions in your day that reduce entropy. While the universe ticks and progresses towards total destruction, the human class is made special by the fact that we aim to reverse entropy. Routines are a great way to accomplish this.
The only routines I have thus far are:
- Wake up between 8-8:30am
- Brew up a small cup of coffee
- (Now hopefully restored) Write a couple pages on the first thing that comes to mind
- Head to the office (co-working space) and do some work until about 3-3:30pm.
- Break for lunch
- Crash from lunch. Sometimes this one is deadly serious, and can take me out of the game for a couple hours. (I wrote this post in the morning, but am now typing it up and publishing it after my lunch. This seems to be a good, mindless activity to do while digesting.)
- Attempt to give work one final go. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.
- Commute back home.
- The rest of the day is a ~well-earned “do whatever you want”, at which point I’ll either take a long walk to cool off, play some PS4, cook, Netflix, and, if I’m excited enough, do a little more work.
I used to view commuting as a waste of time, but, working from home, I felt I had too many hours that I needed to fill. And it wasn’t realistic that I would fill it all productively. So it was easy to fall into “worst self” behavior. I had an important insight somewhere along the way that I would be wise to fill my day with as many activities as possible. Free, empty, and self-time is good, but too much free empty self-time is no good at all.
Commuting, including getting ready to leave in the morning, is a great way to fill up 2 hours of your day, relatively productively. I’ll listen to podcasts on the way, which is good “life training”, in accordance with my “go to school” mentality.
Also, in a shocking turn of events, I went to the gym the other day for the first time in a really long time. There was nothing else to do so I said eff it. It was really hard getting myself to go. But now, due for a second time, I’m not so troubled by it. Sure, I’ll go to the gym again. No big deal.
Starting is the hardest part. It just starts rolling after the initial push.