Early morning thoughts

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It’s just after 5 am. Ever have one of those nights when sleep was just refusing to cooperate? Couldn’t get there…couldn’t stay there…had to give up after waking at 4:15 and just lying there for an hour.

Much to think about for sure. Exciting new ventures for SWWAN in the making. Several big developments on the personal side. And sleep is such an elusive gift anyway. Look at how little sleep many new mothers–especially single moms– have to survive on, sometimes for years. And the ability to sleep soundly often seems to deteriorate with aging–some older folks say they rarely sleep 8 hours and seem to wake often.

So heaven knows we humans can do it. But a lot of us need to develop tricks for dealing with nighttime wakefulness–and the racing thoughts that often come with it. One friend gets up and reads a not-too-intense novel til she falls asleep again. That works pretty well sometimes. If it’s after 4:30 and I’m not too physically exhausted, I usually just get up and get a head start on my work day. When you’re self-employed or otherwise deeply invested in your work, that doesn’t feel too bad.

What do you do when you can’t sleep? Does it happen often? Please share!

Sleepless night / technology creep

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Sleepless night. Toss and turn and finally give it up and get up. Sometimes I just read a novel til I get sleepy. Sometimes, like tonight/day, I am obsessed with work responsibilities and have to get on the laptop.

I keep my laptop on a rolling table in the living room next to the recliner chair. Gives me a a place to work early in the morning when I’m not ready to let Angelina the bunny out of her cage yet, or when I’m just tired of being in the office. Plus it’s great to put my feet up a little bit.

But what’s funny is, even though I got up to work, I don’t immediately start doing the project that was on my mind. I turn to my emails instead–and suddenly I’ve got all this busywork to do to clear those up. As one colleague said, then email unwittingly “becomes the thing to do.” Then I’m reminded of other things I haven’t done, I notice stray documents on the desktop, open them up and find something I’d like to do with that as well. And too often, this goes on and I remain sidetracked and don’t even get to the project I intended to work on… Oh, look, there’s a receipt that needs to be entered into QuickBooks…

Then I notice things like, gosh, the birds are singing like maniacs at 3 a.m. Isn’t that nuts? And of course I want to make a note of that on Twitter because…why? Why the compulsion to do these non-essential but sort-of-fun things? Don’t know. Is this a function of a creative mind–or just a scattered and disorganized mindset? Then I feel the need to write a blog post about it, and I wonder if this happens to any of you guys, too?

Does the fact that I can do almost anything I want while sitting at my computer make me a victim of technology creep? Or how about the fact that I take my Treo phone with me when I’m away from the computer so I’m always able to send and get email. Well, I know this happens to a few other women.

The answer is to set limits and stick to them. Here’s another post on how to cut down on technology creep–tried to comment on this post, went through the whole magilla of signing up for a TypeKey account to be able to comment, and then found the “site has not signed up for this feature.” What a waste of valuable minutes that I could have been busy doing…well, something else.

Talk about contributing to the very phenomenon you’re talking about curbing.