Rolling into the day…

…to help ease off the accelerator.

Today is Thursday. I haven’t quite found a good, consistent schedule for Thursdays yet. Due to certain commitments, my work day on Thursday has to end a bit earlier than it does on other days of the week. I’ve been working with this constraint to try and establish a schedule that doesn’t feel too rushed and harried, similar to what I’ve been able to do, at least to some extent, for the other days of the week. My schedule for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday seems to be working pretty well right now. Thursday is still a work in progress.

(I haven’t written one of these asides in a while. I ‘m finding my thought process to be much more scattered than it usually is this early in the day. I spent the first 15 minutes of this writing session trying to get the color of the line separating the comments from the content on the post page just right. This is exactly what I’m trying to avoid doing with this blog! That experiment, which resulted in me just removing the line, is contributing to the difficulty I am having gathering my thoughts for this post right now.)

One thing I did notice is that giving myself even 15-20 minutes after waking up to slowly roll into the day has gone a long way toward getting the day started off on the right foot. This morning I jumped out of bed, fed the dog, put on her leash and headed right outside. By doing this, I felt like the starter’s pistol was fired to jump me out of bed, first thing, and that the sprint started immediately after that. What I’m also discovering is that once the sprint starts, it’s difficult for me to slow it down again.

I hadn’t realized this until this morning, as toward the end of last year, I started allowing myself time to ease into the day. Rather than fire the imaginary starter’s pistol to jump myself out of bed and start the countdown timer to see how little time it would take me to get settled at my desk, I took a more gradual approach. Looking at my schedule and realizing that I was fortunate enough to have the time in it to do this went a long way toward allowing myself to ease off on the accelerator in the early morning hours.