The Freedom of a Tight Schedule

Failures first, because it’s good to get them out of the way. (Or as someone you wouldn’t normally expect to be so eloquent once told me, “Get the mud on you first, so you can rinse it off later with the good news.”)

I haven’t been doing so well with my schedule. The sleep-part has been alright — not perfect, but alright; I still have a snooze-bar problem, but it rarely goes over one hour of total screwup time — but I’ve been seriously slacking on all the things I need to get done with that time.

I think the upshot is that snoozebarring is a core problem, even if it isn’t throwing me off of my precious polyphasic lifestye. When I don’t do it I’m not tired, but when I oversleep even a few minutes, I just can’t get moving to get to the stuff on my schedule. (My schedule, for the curious, specifies 1-2 things I must get done in each of several blocks of time. So for instance, Pilates every day between 5-9a.m., homework 8:30-9:30 and music practice somewhere between 9:30 - 10:30p.m., writing between midnight and 3:30 a.m, and so forth. I don’t give myself specific start and stop times, because that tends to kick off my screw-authority complex; but I have so much stuff to do that if I don’t be sure to do it in regular increments, there’s no hope.)

Aristotle said that freedom doesn’t come from “getting away with” not doing what you should be doing; freedom comes from doing the right thing. That sounded pretty revolting to me as a teenager, but now I wish I could write it on the sky, because it’s absolutely right and more people would be happier if they knew it.

It all comes back to that holy grail of childhood: Doing what you want. It sounds so easy when you’re young, but it’s a lot more complicated than you think — doing what you want to do takes a lot of attention and effort, but as anybody who’s really gotten rolling on a good routine knows, it’s totally worth it. And it is freedom. It’s a creepy, paradoxical freedom, brethren probably to the rush one gets from life-threatening danger, or the calm one can feel during an apocalyptic crisis, but there it is — there’s freedom in being on a strict schedule.

Now. If only I can remember that next time I reach for the %@$#!ng snoozebar…

-PD