So a few months back, Top Management suggested that we try seriously revamping the way our day is structured for the first time in decades. I had mentioned several times over the years that I seem to work best late at night. She pointed out that now that our kids are all old enough that none of them—not even The Brawn—gets up at the crack of dawn anymore. And even if he does get up hours before any of the others, now being a (GOOD LORD) 12-year-old, he can obviously take of himself just fine.
So I tried it. After watching an hour or so of television together, she heads off to bed and I head down to my office in the basement to work.
And work I do. I guess I had thought I might be a bit more productive, but a bad night's work now is generally more productive than a really good day's work used to be, and there have been nights where I've gotten three or four times as much work done in one late-night shift as I used to accomplish in three or four decent days. It's a bit crazy.
It was only after we'd been on this new schedule for a few weeks that it occurred to me that virtually every paper or story I wrote in high school or college, I wrote late at night. I always chalked it up to procrastination, and I'm sure there was plenty of that mixed in there too. But mainly I think it's that the writing part of my brain only really truly comes alive after midnight.
So it's been great. There are downsides, obviously, including the fact that I think I'm always at least a bit sleep-deprived, but since the primary symptoms of that are fatigue, irritability, mood changes and difficulty focusing and remembering, who can tell the difference?
At least I thought that was the main downside. Until tonight. When I discovered that the real problem with working crazy productively at 2:47 in the AM is that you might suddenly get an insanely itchy itch right in the middle of the back where you can't reach it and despite there being 7 other people in the house there's no one to scratch it for you.
Oh, the humanity.
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