I’m afraid I’ve been a little busy in the last couple of weeks trying to make more time for myself. Funny, huh? My scheme was to wake up at 7am every morning and get to uni at 8am (or close to). Eight or nine hours “working” and then I’d be able to go to the gym or go running at five, leaving the late evening for cooking, cleaning, reading, writing, typesetting, or whatever.
Well, did it work? A couple of weeks went pretty well, but this week messed up somehow. Instead of leaving home at 7:30 after a quick shower and eats, I, well, didn’t. And I’m not sure exactly why, but suddenly it’s the end of the week and I’m going to have to start all over next week.
The advantage of the current arrangement is that I’ve been leaving uni at fairly consistent times, so if I don’t get in early enough, I simply don’t do much work that day. Which is bad, obviously, but it means that I’m aware of my transgression directly, which allows me to act on what caused the problem.
If my life is a dynamic, periodic system, disturbances cause error, and this error is perceived by me as irregularities in my schedule. I can compensate for this fairly easily if I’m aware of them, and so I’m hoping that a strict leaving work time will force the feedback loop I’m living in (acting on my awareness of my schedule is the feedback) to be stable. That is, errors such as spending too much time doing not work will be cancelled out because I realise them.
It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of variable sleep cycles (we don’t naturally have a 24 hour sleeping cycle — monophasically — unless at least four hours are spent asleep at the same time each night; see Stampi’s book “Why We Nap”, somewhere) and I find that I will generally be happy to go with the flow, since I’ve no strict times every day at which I need to work.
I don’t know if what I’ve written makes any sense, but I’m supposed to be writing regularly to practise fleshing out thoughts at short notice coherently. I’d like to expound on this topic in more detail in the future. I’m particularly intrigued by our repetitive behaviour (or perhaps more disorganised schedules) and the analogy that can be made with control systems. I do feel like constant feedback with the brain (revisiting yesterday’s writings, yesterday’s work, …) helps me, at least, be more directed in what I’m trying to do. I’d like to say “self-aware”, but that might sound too pretentious. That’s the sort of term I mean, but on a more subconscious level.
Ah, it all just rambling.