I'm going to make The Grand Attempt at a new bedtime: 3 AM. I've got 3 minutes... but I want to take a shower tonight. Still, last night I took a nap after work and went to bed at 5:30, so this should be an improvement.
On the other end, I moved myself from waking up at 1 PM to waking at noon, to get in an hour or so of reading every morning. And I'm going to move that back to 11 AM. Slowly slowly. This way when I do a day shift, it should be easier to get more than 3 hours of sleep. I made a promise to myself, when school ended, to never get less than 5 hours of sleep. (Once school ended and I wasn't doing the 3 hour sleeps anymore, and was less stressed, magically I got sick much less often. Hmmm! Plus too little sleep guarantees a big headache.)
I mostly kept that for a long time, but now as a manager I have to work at least one day shift (since everyone else has to do at least one night shift... seems fair, plus it's good to see the store in daylight once in awhile!)
The bad thing is... I can so easily function on 3 hours of sleep, that's why I do it over and over. Getting old hasn't hurt this a bit (except the sick part, and the fact that the headaches have worsened over time.) I even read of some sciencey research that said (if I remember right) that night people function better on less sleep than day people do. But when you first wake up it's still horrible.
The other goal is that, when I get home at night, I split those 4 hours before bed into:
2 hours: cook, eat, dishes, read internets
2 hours: write
I haven't gotten to the writing part yet either. One thing at a time. The other hard thing will be to stop writing at 3 AM and go to bed, if the writing's going well. We'll see we'll see...
Besides the health thing, this is all part of trying to maintain my personal goals while working full-time and being a manager again. I stopped being a manager 8 or so years ago because I would come home mentally exhausted, and then it's hard to write. This time around I'm hoping to maintain some sort of balance. Because it's summer I can walk home from work, and that helps me leave behind the Work Thoughts and start the Writing Thoughts. I've noticed that halfway into my walk my brain starts to shift gears, and I leave work behind. But I'm too wussy to walk in cold or inclement weather.
The other thing that's helped is that my initial First Love Excitement Infatuation! with the job wore off about a month ago (still enjoy the job, just not all Crushing) which makes it easier to leave it behind. And I also got a couple big projects done, so I feel Organized and Caught Up. (Like 6 weeks of manager schedules. Now I can just do one schedule a week.)
Better go. Sleeeeps!
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