Overwhelming Good

It’s been a heck of a while since I’ve been on a schedule like this.  I think the last time was actually my junior year of high school, when I had to be at school every morning at 6:30am so I could snag a good parking spot before going to orchestra rehearsal at 7.  And for those of you who know me well, this is definitely out far from ordinary.  Throughout college, I’ve often been known as the one who is awake at bizarre or otherwordly hours.  During my junior year of college, I was a head “Community Assistant” for several residence halls.  There were two head CAs in my area, myself and Rachel.  Rachel would get up at 5 or 6am every day; between the two of us, we’d have 24-hour coverage.  If an incident went down at 4am, I’d be awake to deal with it, then I’d hand over the information to Rachel when she got up, and she’d handle the administrative follow-up through the morning while I slept.  My sleep schedule would fluctuate rapidly across all hours of the day and night.  This week, however, I’ve found myself sleeping from 9 or 10pm until 5 or 6am.

Why the sudden and drastic change?

I think it’s because of the law of unintended consequences.  You see, at Probity we decided last week to try something new to keep each other productive and accountable.  We decided that, in addition to our weekly Saturday a.m.  meetings, we would do a “stand-up” meeting (something out of the Agile Web Development community) where we would each give a brief status update.  Each member, each day prior to the meeting, come up with three to five tasks to do that day.  Each of us would give a status update (complete or incomplete and why) on our tasks from the previous day, and then would list our tasks for the upcoming day, as well as any potential barriers foreseen.  We do a fifteen-minute conference call for all of this, and if a member doesn’t call in on time, or hasn’t come up with their tasks or updated us on why they are incomplete, then consequences ensue, as Neal has discussed in one of his blog posts (although the rules are slightly updated now).  This wasn’t so bad, until we decided on the time for our daily meetings:  7:30 am.

Every day.  Without exception.  7:30am meeting.  Now, this caused a funny thing to happen.  My sleep schedule when we started this included me going to sleep at about 4:30am or 5:00am.  Less than ideal, I know, but it is what it is.  My natural solution to this was, of course, to stay up until the end of our meetings.  A.k.a. go to bed at 8:00am.  I’d sleep after the meeting.  Our “five things” daily stand-up effort started off pretty well.  No problems, and being the competitive person I am, I made sure never to miss the meeting or miss updating my tasks.

But I am devious.  I found a way to procrastinate.  Although I could get my tasks done during the evening (the time that I normally work), in my ceaseless effort to do things at the last-minute, I decided to sleep instead.  I could put off my tasks to the mere hours before our 7:30am meeting!  So that’s what I did.  My infinite capacity for procrastination allowed me to make myself fall asleep at 9pm so that I could get up at 5am to complete my tasks.

Now here’s where it gets serendipitous.  I started enjoying doing work in the morning.  It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten up this early regularly, but the memory surfaced that I actually enjoyed being productive through the sunrise.  I felt good about what I was doing.  And what’s more, is even after our meetings finished around 8:00am, I was still feeling productive.  So I’d keep on working.  I’d keep getting things done, knocking out my tasks for the day in the morning.

And I’m on a regular sleep schedule.

In the morning.

Maybe you don’t know me that well, so you might not be as shocked as some others to hear how strange this is for me.

Paul David.

The mornings.

Doing work.

Sleeping regularly.

Weird windfalls.

…Weird.

A productivity measure led to procrastination which led to productivity.  Go figure.