Waiting for the Stars to Fall
Sleep deprivation is getting into me.
My Saturday routine was to get up at 4:00 AM – read, journal, meditate and write a rough draft of my weekly update.
However this weekend, I didn’t get to do any of that.
Lexi hijacked my morning routine. Am I complaining?
No, not really as I have the whole day to do all of that.
Besides, I’m sleep-deprived anyway. That means that my reading retention and comprehension is poor, so why bother?
Being rigid about the whole morning routine is not really helping me become efficient anyway. Then I told myself,
“Let me nap first, maybe then I’m in a better condition to read and write and all that”.
At that moment, I realized that I’m waiting for the “ideal condition” to get me to work/function/do something.
A lot of times, we wait for that perfect moment, that perfect reason, the ideal condition to get us to take action.
It’s a different kind of “temptation”. It strikes you in a very subtle way and is often hard to ignore because the excuse makes logical sense.
Giving in to the “temptation of laziness” once in a while is ok but giving in to it too often could turn into a habit that makes it really hard to change – especially when you develop it unconsciously…
STOP!!--Colaborate and Listen
It pays to listen to your body – not pushing it hard enough will make you lazy and complacent; push it too hard and you’re subject to burnout.
I often rely on deadlines to keep me up and stay challenged at work. It takes the boredom away. Deadlines are like a gun pointed to my head. It allows me to play this mental game of “Can I Make It?”.
Weirdly enough, stress allows me to stay on my A-game, without it, I find it hard to focus.
This week, that “stress” from deadlines never came. I’m now caught up with work and I had plenty enough time to finish all my tasks on time. And because there was no stress or tight deadlines to meet, I occasionally found myself dozing off on my desk.
Sleep deprivation has taken its toll on me. But instead of going berserk about the whole thing, I needed to change my perception to suppress it. I thought to myself:
“How can I use this to my advantage?”
“This is an opportunity for me to train myself to become efficient even when sleep-deprived. And when I get good at it, that would make me even more efficient when I’m caught up with sleep”
“This is temporary, seize the moment”
“What can I do today that does not require a lot of mental-load?”
I needed to psyche myself out from the “downward spiral”.
But I’m also aware that that can only do so much.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t take away the fact that I need to sleep. Someone pass me the Benadryl…
Proceed w/ Caution
When things go your way, don’t let excitement blind you from the challenges that are coming…
Because when we’re excited, we tend to forget the “everything else”.
We tend to hone in on that one thing that draws us away from all the other details that make up the whole picture. And I’m sure you’ve heard of:
“The devil is in the details”
Because often enough, it is those tiny details that we didn’t realize we dismissed that caused us the most pain.
Excitement makes us careless…
So why the hell am I bringing this up? A conversation with one of my supervisors at work is going to provide me the opportunity to do something I would love to do: process improvement.
A Year Ago This Week
I wrote about…
- the closure of my CAD business…
- Side note – it’s not officially closed just yet. There are some outstanding items I need to submit to CRA. I need an accountant to help me deal with it. This annoys the shit out of me because the process is not straight forward.
- then decided to become an insurance broker…
- the different names I used in my years of existence…
[read here]
*lately, I’ve been digging the music by onelifecrew even though I don’t understand any of the shit they sing about LOL
Goal Update
Personal Projects
Getting good sleep helps me come up with useful ideas to keep me moving forward with my personal side projects.
I’ve been thinking about abandoning my idea to sell “personalized” designs because it does not excite me that much anymore. But that changed today. The idea? Create a product catalog.
Health
I’m gonna try to go to bed at 8:00 PM (as a test) to help me make up for that 1-hour I’m going to lose when I need to feed Lexi.
The food I eat is all over the place as well. It’s difficult t to find the time to cook. But what makes it harder is deciding what to eat. It’s a first-world problem. Figuring out what to eat consumes a lot of my already limited mental-load.
This is one of the reasons why I eat a salad with no dressing. It’s plain and simple. No need to decide what dressing to use – just straight-up consumption.
Finance
The process of getting my brokerage license was a little bumpy. Missing documents here and there. But all of that has been provided now. I hope they can finally start processing it. That’s part of my goal by the end of this quarter.