Thursday, December 30, 2010

Daily Report: Shift

I'm unhappy with my new schedule: work coming at the end of the day. I can tell I'm unhappy because my body is slowly but surely pushing me towards my normal circadian schedule: work coming at the beginning of the day. Well, it isn't so much that I prefer to have work come at the beginning of the day: it is that my body prefers to do stuff not related to work after I'm done working, not before.

To be succinct, when I finish work at 3 a.m., sleep is the last thing on my mind. I want to read, I want to clean, I want to cook, I want to do stuff. Even at 6:30 a.m. when I finally pull the covers up over my head... it is done more out of a perfunctory need to "stick to a schedule" than any kind of fatigue on my part.

When I used to work nights in New York City, my waking hours were from 8 p.m. to noontime. That was fantastic because nothing is better than free mornings in Manhattan. I have essentially had the same hours ever since... viz Eastern Standard Time; I just moved to the other side of the world.

So, I'm going to go for it: Go back to my old hours. It will be good for me too, because I know (based on the last 15 years) that I'll get substantially more beneficial and productive things done after putting in a day's work (especially with the sun coming up and the birds chirping and the dew dripping and Peer Gynt wafting through the air) than what I do now, dragging out of bed as the sun goes down, thinking, "Yeah, I could do _____, but I've got to be working in ___ hours... so screw it."

Granted, I'm going to miss dinners and cocktail hours and other assorted afternoon/evening activities, but I'll get mornings back in return. Oh: And my lovely wife and I will be back on the same sleep schedule too. For a while now it has been kind of rubbish: I start working right as Epril wakes up, I go to sleep after work, and then and Epril goes to sleep right as I wake up. So with the new schedule we'll get that back in synch.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Get a 457 visa and come to Australia.
Low unemployment, great climate, strong economy and dollar, close to Phils and we speak English of sorts.

Jil Wrinkle said...

That's an interesting thought. I've never been to Australia, and obviously Sydney is heartbreakingly expensive... but one thing for certain: I've never met an Australian I didn't like.