First off I need to get up at a reasonable hour. I used to get up at dark:thirty to great the day and face the commute or open shop. The last couple of years though, I have been a huge slacker when it comes to getting up in the AM. Getting up when I need too for appointments and the like is not a problem, it’s not that I am a sloth or something, I just havent felt the NEED to be up and running that early.

I tried setting a routine schedule a while back but that didn’t work out to well. This time I think I will start with just getting up and having a basic start time for stuff that needs to get done. Oh, that reminds me, I need to figure out what that is. What do I NEED to get done. This is a large contribution to the funk-factor as of late. That, and the huge lack of restful sleep.

It has been a long time since I could sleep well. The current residents in the complex seem to be much less respectful of others peace and quiet and in general. It’s not unusual for me to be woken up up 10 or more times between midnight and four in the morning. For some reason people have no clue that there voices are loud. I really don’t want to hear peoples cell phone conversations at three in the morning! Take it inside please! Oh, and the door slamming is getting ridiculous. Car doors, apartment doors, stomping up the stairs and down the walkways, driving in at two or three in the morning with your car stereo blasting, seriously, didn’t your parents teach you any manners? I feel like I have become the cranky old fart screaming “Get off my lawn, ya damn kids!”

Between the neighborhood punks vandalizing stuff, idiot drivers, people without basic common sense, a grasp of courtesy, or the apparent ability to rub a couple of brain cells together to get a spark, I am ready for a change.

There is so much I want to get done, I just cant seem to pull it together to make any of it happen.

Getting off the arse:

• Start getting up at 05:30
• First on the To Do list is go for a walk
• Be ready to rock by 08:00

Now that I am up and moving at a good hour, its time to actually get some stuff done. When I have work to do here around the complex I don’t like starting it before 10:00. Residents are still getting out as late as 09:30 so 10:00 is a safe bet almost every day. Much of the stuff on my list has been on hold due to the weather. Now that it is clearing up I can get back to the list.

Along with the work here at the complex I have my own projects I am trying to get going. One of the difficulties has been making the time to get my projects moving forward and making time for the day job as it were. Now I need to get the ball rolling.

Rolling the ball:

• Between 08:00 and 10:00 and go down to the office and work
  • blog(s)
  • paper(s)
  • book(s)
  • business plan(s)
  • media
  • social media
• From 10:00 to 16:00 Tuesday through Friday do the “day job”
• Mondays are work on my own project days
  (the gardeners are on property)
• After 16:00 things are open

The other part of this is to bring my focus in tight. As a person who is constantly thinking and organizing in my head, it is a difficult to do. This is one of the reasons I do very well in projects that have a lot of diversity and complexity, I can see the over-all and how each smaller part relates to the whole. The difficulty with this is that it can be hard to work on the smallest segments. It can also make it difficult to describe the entire project to some one else when it is in the early stages.

As an exercise I need to limit my projects which means I need to shut some down and back burner several others. I need to limit myself to two projects that are already underway; Grave Mistake and FlyBoyJon everything else needs to get shelved for now. Genealogy and archive projects are shut down for now, including two related book projects and a blog. My screenplay and other book projects are also on the back-burner.

Let’s see how it goes.