The trick is to outwit your morning self. Your night before self is coherent, rational, and aware. Your morning self is devious, sneaky, sleep deprived and willing to tell you anything it has to to get five or ten more minutes in bed. Night before self knows how important it is that you get up in good time tomorrow, it knows you've already been late for work twice this week and that if you do it again you may as well just walk up and slap your boss in the face instead. But not morning self, morning self will tell you that nothing is more important than feeling well rested, that you don't actually need that much time to get ready anyway, and that no one will probably even notice if you show up a few minutes late. These are lies.
Thus, to outsmart morning self, night before self must anticipate these arguments and irrational behaviour and plan for them. For instance, set your alarm with enough time ahead of when you actually need to get up for you to press snooze once or twice; this will fool morning self into thinking it's getting its way, extra sleep, but you still get up with enough time to get ready. Speaking of enough time, whatever you need to do in the morning, allow twice as much time to do it in as it would take you normally, anticipating that your sleepy morning self moves so slowly you could build up a traffic jam of impatient sloth's behind you. Finally, night before self should do as much preparation for morning self as possible; as in choose what you're going to wear the next day and lay it out, put a bowl, spoon, and the box of cereal out on the counter, and if you're taking a lunch the following day, pack it the night before and leave it in an obvious spot, like in front of the front door where you'll trip on it on your way out. This step, though it is often resented by night before self, is very important because it is the equivalent of you being your own butler, handing you things as you go and reminding you of what you need. Failure to do this step results in mishaps like you leaving the house in the morning wearing a crazy, mismatched ensemble with no underwear or socks, or in you forgetting your lunch, umbrella, or anything else you need because your drowsy morning self forgets things or can't be bothered.
So, the key to getting up and getting going in the morning is to remember that it is a battle involving guerrilla warfare between night before self and morning self. I have given you some strategies to employ in this battle, now go forth and conquer, good luck!
Well blogging, we meet at last. I’ve had mixed feelings about the practice of blogging since I first heard of it and thought “Really? That’s the name you’re sticking with?” But it has finally reached a point where I think, well why not? Now I’ve never kept a blog, and I don’t actually know that much about them despite being part of “that generation” that should apparently have a manual of some sort in their brain for all basic computer programs and functions, in which case I don’t know if there’s some sort of formula to blog posts or some kind of blog management etiquette, but I’m sure I’ll figure things out. I only mention it so that if there are accidentally 20 posts in a row of the same thing or something you’ll be forewarned of the experimentation and learning period in progress.
So, the theoretical point of this blog is to be somewhere for me to post things that I write. And I do mean ‘things’ because I tend to write short snippets of fiction, though sometimes there are short stories and such too. I suspect most of my posts will come from an intriguing book I have which is called ‘642 Things To Write About’. It’s simply a collection of short (anywhere from a couple of sentences to just a word) starter phrases designed to get you thinking and writing. For instance, “The greatness of sandwiches” or, “Go to a café and closely watch two people interact. Then write a scene about to people in a café” or “Create an imaginary friend (human or not)” (I have high hopes for a hedgehog being involved in this one), and so forth. As you can see, they’re diverse, so posts on here could be pretty random. Just the way we like it I say. I imagine there will also be some first-person posts from me, who can say? But when things come from “the book” I’ll use the prompt as the post heading and then my writing about it as the body of the post (I say confidently, like I’ve already mastered my heading/post functions).
I’m not sure yet how often I will post something because I’m not sure yet how this blog and I will feel about one another, but I will try to post with reasonable frequency because, really, it’s just stagnating and taking up space in the ether otherwise. That being said, welcome to my blog invisible people!
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