Finding that extra hour
JANUARY 20TH, 2016 — POST 016
I haven’t written this early in the morning for years. I once tried to do the whole “early to bed, early to rise” thing but I couldn’t sustain it longer than a week. Actually, thinking back I don’t think I did more that two consecutive days. As much as I tell myself “Oh, I could get up early if I wanted to”, I’m definitely not a morning person. I’ve gotten my mornings to be a series of commands a basic machine can carry out. I run a script each morning that goes
if (stubble) {shave-shower-dressed-coffee-breakfast-CaseyNeistat-dishes-brushTeeth-shoes-out} else {shower-dressed-coffee-breakfast-CaseyNeistat-dishes-brushTeeth-shoes-out}
(it’s way too early to think about the funniest way to write code).
I know I’m still a whiny teenager at heart to whom the thought of anywhere but bed at any hour before the clock is in double digits is the daily cruelty of The Man. But it’s this part of me that makes me a marathon night person. If I can get to 2AM, I won’t feel a thing until 7 or 8 if I choose to stay up. So then, why get up early when I know I can stay up late? Simple:
Sunlight keeps me accountable
Short of a handful of nights during my thesis year and maybe one or two rewrite sessions, any time I’ve stayed up it’s been to play games, to watch The Sopranos, to wait up for an Apple or Google Keynote. It’s almost always been to fuck around. I feel completely comfortable during the expanses of night when I’m only aware of how wasteful I’m being with my time if I choose to look at a clock.
But there’s no denying the sun ticking over. People like to talk about a “ticking clock” when it comes to narratives, specifically film. Often it’s a literal clock counting down in the film’s climactic scene, with the most common example being that of a ticking time bomb. These raise the stakes by forcing the characters to act now and as such raise the audiences engagement in knowing how little time remains. They (generally) function by feeding off our death anxiety: that eventually the clock will be up for all of us. The sun is the daily ticking clock that plays off this exact anxiety in me.
Writing daily on Medium for over two weeks now has been on the whole good for managing this anxiety. It has given me a guarantee of creative output everyday. If you’ve been reading along, there is an obvious downside to this: I’m in the middle of a rewrite on a screenplay. So as much as writing on Medium has helped me, I am invariably relegating the majority of the writing to when I just arrive home from work. Honestly, this is the possibly the least productive hour of the day. Pivotting out of the design and video production work I do daily into writing, with out so much as a blink away from a screen, looks mostly like me saying I need to write and instead browsing through r/screenwriting and r/mechanicalkeyboards. This flabby hour is usually followed by cooking and eating, and then a shower, so the closing section of my day is too often becoming polluted with writing a post. Surely, I’m generally able to be done by 8:30, but staying loose enough to be able to flip straight into often manacling process of rewriting is just proving too hard.
I recognise that I probably can’t condense or trim the flabby hour between getting home and cooking. My body physically and mentally is screaming for some short period of transition. Even if I was more smart about it and used this time to exercise, I still wouldn’t be turning that flabby hour into writing time. So that’s why I’m up early to write now. And look, without any other bullshit, I’ve written my words in just over half an hour. For me, I know I need to find this extra hour not simply because of the usefulness of this time for work. But rather, to maintain defined chunks of my day in which the task is singular. The problem with the final part of each day is that I’m demanding two things from myself: a published Medium post and meaningful script work. If I can succeed in pulling the Medium work into guarded time each morning, I might finally become that morning person my teenage heart can only scoff at.
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