Complex Numbers

Cycles

What time of day are you most motivated? Least motivated? For me, I’m most motivated and productive in the morning, and least in the mid afternoon around 2pm. What do you do to renew your motivation in those slumps?

As someone who finds motivation elusive at the best of times, I'm not sure how to respond to this one. But I'll give it a shot.

The idea that we're better off doing certain things at different times of day has some evidence for it. Here's an example:

https://www.outsideonline.com/2278086/timing-everything-and-everything-timing

If you consciously pay attention to timing, you can dramatically improve your performance, and you can dramatically improve yourself.

(This is probably the first and last time I'll ever link to Outside magazine. I mean... "Outside." Shudder.)

I was reading that because I did start to wonder - and therefore, I Googled - what's the best time of day to do a workout. According to that article, from what I gather from it anyway, the answer is: it depends on what you're trying to do.

It would make sense, then, if the same logic applied to other types of activity, including the relative inactivity of, say, sitting down to write something.

My work used to involve a lot of sitting around at the computer - much as my hobbies do now. Back then, when I was shoehorned into a roughly 8-to-5 schedule, I did notice a trend: I could get work done at anytime, including the many hours of overtime I pulled, but almost every day, around 3-4 pm, I'd get tired. Like, pass-out-in-a-coma tired. This wasn't the same kind of inertia that always clogged my mornings (because I'm not a morning person and I never did get a taste for coffee), but rather a shutdown, almost like my narcoleptic friend. But where she couldn't stay awake no matter how much she wanted to, I could usually force my eyes to remain open - but I wasn't worth a damn when I did.

On the other hand, if I was able, somehow, to nap around that time, I'd get a period of great energy going around 5-7pm - you know, about the time most office grunts like me had already gotten off of work.

But, I've found, I do my best work around midnight - and this is true even now; it's why I get these entries in around 12-1 am (I'm in the same time zone as WDC).

Because of that, I found it difficult to get to sleep then, and consequently, had trouble waking up between 7-8 am - and the cycle continued.

One of the things I promised myself upon retirement was that I'd sleep when I was tired - barring, of course, important events. This led to my current biphasic sleep cycle - which, probably not coincidentally, has me falling asleep for an hour or two in the late afternoon.

Even then, it varies. Sometimes I'm up until 4am. Sometimes I'm asleep by 2. Rarely, my afternoon nap turns into a four-hour snoozefest. But one constant is that I feel most creative and productive, writing-wise, in the hours immediately around midnight.

And my workouts? Noon-ish, usually. Probably not ideal according to that despicable link above, but that's about when I go, "You know, I probably should go ahead and get my gym time in before I get tired this afternoon."

I'll tell you what, though - it's been a few years since I could unfetter myself from the shackles of an office job, and I still revel in the luxury of being able to (most days) get up whenever the fuck I feel like it. And it is a luxury, I know - but when I'm up, I'm up. No snooze buttons, no missing alarms, no dragging ass into the shower... just up and showered and dressed and ready to do day stuff.

Just another of the great things about being me, I guess.