"My perceived abundance of time and rest"

I'll start the story with the end. I started getting up 4 hours earlier most days, and found life so much more... agreeable. I discovered benefits and results I went on to call 'My perceived abundance of time and rest'. The value of the story might be sharing how I made the discovery, and why I was looking in the first place. It might resonate with certain types of people. I will try and describe my dissatisfaction as a teenager that persisted through to being ~40. I resented going to work 9-5 Monday to Friday. It left me exhausted and I felt I never had time or energy to do my own thing. The very concept of working to live annoyed me. I am a creative person and I couldn't understand why the world couldn't leave me alone to play. As a teenager I told my dad I wished I was a Dolphin. That was the life for me. Play, eat and sleep. I must have read something about Dolphins having larger brains than us. Call me idle, lazy, unambitious, I didn't think i was. I had enthusiasm for the things I wanted to do, but felt aggrieved my time was being taken from me. The balance felt off and what I really wanted was an allowance I could sign up for (universal basic income?). Not much, the bare minimum to feed, shelter and clothe me. This was probably never going to happen. One day many years later, a song fragment caught in my head. It felt relevant. It was a snippet of music* from a Hyundai advert that germinated the seed of an idea in my mind.

*Annette Funicello - Lucky, Lucky, Lucky Me
"Lucky, lucky, lucky me!"
"I'm a lucky son of a gun."
"I work eight hours, and sleep eight hours."
"That leaves eight hours for fun."

8 hours work. 8 hours sleep. 8 hours of fun. The last two lines of that song dinged and made me see a pie chart in my head of an average week day. It was suggesting I was doing 1/3 working, 1/3 sleeping, and 1/3 having fun???

my problem was i wasn't getting the 8 hours of fun.

..or i was but i didn't have the energy to use them. Maybe time wasn't the scarce resource, maybe energy was.

They say start your day. We say at 08:00 i start my day. That wasn't happening at all. I was getting up, getting showered, eating breakfast, then giving work my best time. When work was difficult or stressful, I would call home via the local pub and have a couple of pints, then that was it. Energy was gone and the day was over. I would manage to watch an hour of Netflix then get ready to do it all again. I was even resenting having a beer because I knew it was at the expense of anything useful. It felt like I was only getting 1 or two of my 8 hours of fun. It felt like I was never productive or able to do my own projects or hobbies.

Eventually an idea came to me.

What if I moved my hours to before work?

So I tried it and liked it. It's far from perfect but it mostly works great for me. I came to realise I had been living my life backwards.

It's not clever or original to suggest starting your day early gives you more time. What I tried and liked was a priority flip. Every day I would start my day and look forward to it. I would have 2-3 hours to myself everyday. Every day was my day, first and foremost. Work still got their work done, and my body still had the same amount of rest. I just went to work in the second half of my day rather than the first.

It just felt right. And that's all it was really. A change in priority. Lifting my tired evenings and dropping them at the beginning to become energised mornings. By 7-8am I was ready for work. The day had already been productive and my things I wanted to do had been done. I no longer resented work and I enjoyed a pint after work again.

That was how I got a perceived abundance of time. But what about rest? That's the beauty of it. Everything was done on my own want and whim. The old routine was to get up tired and dread work. I would wish for more sleep or a day off. I found when you wake up with 4 hours to play with there is nothing to fear. If I wanted I could perform a little internal evaluation each morning. Have I had enough sleep? Am I rested? If the answer was no, there was another 4 hours in the bank. It felt like the time pressures had been removed. I guess because they had.

It does present problems. There isn't an overflow if work demands increase and you need to work late. You will be operating on an empty tank, or borrowing from tomorrow’s reservoir. You do operate on your own time zone so partners, spouses and families will find it odd. It's perfect if you live on your own. There is no one for you to disturb and visa versa. Using your energy peak for yourself, and starting your working day further down the curve might not be practical. It might be unethical for brain surgeons or air-plane pilots.

My main issue was with weekends. I would see my girlfriend on a friday night and want to go to bed just as she was starting her evening. My body clock was tuned in so annoyingly I would get up at 04:30am the following Saturday. I couldn't make my body understand that on weekend time, we didn't need to front-load our hours of fun. Sometimes I would manage to stay in bed, and sometimes I would still flag in the evening even if I did. I guess my solution to this was to do it in bursts. If I felt the old feelings of being stuck on a merry-go-round, i'd drop in an early start or as many as I felt I needed to feel back in control.

That takes us up to the start of the story. I guess before I go, i’ll say my favourite part might have been discovering that everyday can start with a choice...

...do I want to stay in bed?

It does feel good.