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I’m not an early riser, and I never have been, even when I worked in a hospital and it was important that I was. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but even in the years when I had a full-time job that required my presence at 9am, I rarely managed it.
Don’t get me wrong, I always got there before my first patients arrived at 9.30, and usually with plenty of time to spare to set up and get a coffee and so on. But if a meeting started at 9 or, heaven forbid, 8.30? I struggled. Usually I’d appear somewhere between 4 and 9 minutes late, always showered and having had breakfast, but now sweating profusely from the hectic dash from the tube station. I’d sit down, mumble something about trains, or buses, or tubes, and try to avoid catching anyone’s disapproving gaze until they forgot what time I’d got there.
Not that I wasn't lying about the hellish nature of my journey. Usually there had been some sort of delay. But what I seemed either incapable or unwilling to consider was that these delays happened literally every single day, and therefore I really ought to stop considering them to be delays. No matter how much I tried to kid myself, they weren’t outliers, freak events on a journey that was otherwise as smooth as glass. They were routine. Part of my day. Even I should’ve been able to accept that a 35 minute journey that takes an hour every time is actually a 60 minute journey that you once, on one absurdly optimistic day in June 1993, worked out ought to take just under 40. If it’s true that the definition of madness is doing the same thing you’ve always done and expecting different results, then perhaps I ought to have been checking myself into the hospital as a patient rather than a member of staff, and into an entirely different department.
So, when I left that job (and yes, I was late on my last day too, and would probably have been late for my leaving party had I not told everyone I would be back two years later so didn’t need one) to become a (drumroll please) full time writer, it was no massive shock to find I still struggled to get out of bed in the morning and to my desk, even though I’d shaved more than 59 minutes off my one hour commute. It wasn’t that I was finding any excuse to stay in bed, more that I wasn’t putting any effort into finding an excuse not to. The problem was that ‘Just one more minute’ so easily became, ‘Well it’s nearly 8 now, so I’ll get up on the hour… oops… missed it, it’s 8.06 so maybe 8.15?’ and that then turned into 8.30, then 9, and so on. It was like throwing darts at a board and telling myself I’d only get up if I scored a bullseye. There are days I’m surprised I got up at all.
It couldn’t go on. After too many days of not getting to my desk until 11 (mainly because I started applying the same dartboard principal to when I should sit down to work. ‘I’ll start at 10. No. It’s 10.06? OK. I’ll start at 10.30. Etc.’), and then finding I hardly managed to get anything done, I started to reluctantly face the truth. I may not be a morning person but, whether I like it or not (and to be honest I don’t), I am a morning writer. My best hours are between 7 and 10am (though recently I’ve discovered I get a second wind sometime around 5pm, and I can stretch both these windows using the ‘Pomodoro’ technique). But as for writing after midnight, as many do? Forget it. It sounds fun, sitting in a darkened room with a glass of whisky scribbling furiously with the stub of pencil, ideally in Paris or perhaps Berlin, but it’s just not me. Much as I might wish otherwise, I’m someone who picks the pen up when the sun comes up, not puts it down.
I have theories about this. I’ve written elsewhere about the need to free your mind when writing, and that while editing needs to come from an analytical, considered place, the best writing happens when you switch all that off and just write. And so, unlike my old job — when I used to test children’s hearing, a task for which most parents expected me to be awake as the bare minimum — the fact that I’m still kind of half asleep as I write actually helps.
Which is why I’m annoyed with myself at the moment. Having trained myself to wake up early (and no, I’m not telling you what time because although it is early for me, I suspect for many of you it would be classed as ‘a lie-in I can only dream of’) I seem to have now developed a new habit.
It started with Wordle. Remember when we were all playing that? ‘I’ll get out of bed when the clock hits a nice round number’ turned into ‘As soon as I’ve figured out this five letter word I’ll go and make coffee’. It took a few minutes. Can’t hurt, right? But then Wordle quickly escalated to Wordle then Framed, then I added first Heardle, then Countryle to the mix. So now my morning routine was wake up, Wordle, Heardle, Countryle and Framed. After that I just had to post my ‘Good morning xo’ tweet (yes, I do this from bed, the photos I include are usually from the previous day), then add the same photo to my Instagram story. Check texts, then check emails. THEN get up (having first checked if anyone has liked my photo yet, and also seeing whether any of my friends who also did World, Heardle, Framed and Countryle have sent their results.)
It was taking hours. It felt like I was doing a job before even getting out of bed. Whether because I was aware this was a slippery slope, or because my friends lost interest, after a few months I cut out Heardle (which I wasn’t very good at anyway), Framed and Countryle, shaving a good fifteen to twenty minutes off my waking routine. I clung to Wordle for a while longer, but then that went too. Although I replaced that with Quordle, I’d honed my starter words and could usually polish that off pretty quickly. My mornings became positively streamlined.
But then Elon Musk bought Twitter, Instagram sprouted Threads, and someone sent me a Bluesky code. Around the same time a friend introduced me to Connections, which I love but is sometimes pretty bloody hard and requires a lot of thinking. So now, as well as the emails and messages I had to check and sometimes reply to, I was copying my ‘Good morning xo’ photo from Twitter, over to Instagram, then Threads, then Bluesky. Add first Quordle and then Connections to that, checking DMs everywhere, scanning trending topics to see what was happening in the world and finally just making sure I was up-to-date with Facebook. By the time I was out of bed and downstairs my dogs had just about given up on being fed that day and it was pretty much time for lunch.
The other week thing escalated further. I downloaded a card game to my phone, and I’ve been finding it more and more addictive. You play against other people, and I’m pretty good at it. It has no natural endpoint, unlike Wordle, say. And it’s chock full of adverts (I swear if I see one more advert for that game in which you have to save the King by moving little symbols I will SCREAM). My addiction has now got to the point where I’m playing it for at least half-an-hour, on top of the other things I do between my alarm going off and making my coffee. So basically I’m spending a good percentage of every day watching shitty adverts for games I will never play.
Today, though, has been the final straw. Not because I spent a particularly long time playing the games and reading the tweets and so on — just the five or six hours as usual — but because I had something of a revelation. I used to spend this time reading. Reading books, I mean, not tweets, or emails, or Instagram captions. As a child I’d wake up and reach for the novel by my bed, not my phone. And though one could argue that they’re both just different ways of relaxing, I’m not sure I find my new way of relaxing all that… well, relaxing. And now that reading books is, arguably, part of my job, I asked myself if I wouldn’t maybe be happier going back to that?
I began to imagine it. I could wake up and start ‘work’ straight away! How great is that? Not many other people can work from bed, and the other professions in which it’s possible feel pretty much closed to me now, though I’m ruling nothing out. After a decent few pages I could go downstairs, awake and inspired, make coffee, have breakfast, feed the dogs, then get to my desk, earlier than usual and raring to go. Perfect!
It sounds idyllic, but feels impossible. Why, though? Am I really that addicted to my phone, to the games in particular, that the thought of giving them up seems only marginally easier than kicking a particularly stubborn heroin addiction? I think maybe I am, and though I don’t feel bad about it (they’re designed to be addictive after all), I do want it to change.
So, I’ve taken steps. I deleted the games from my phone. And tonight, when I go to bed, I’m going to make sure my book is on my bedside table, but my phone is not. I’ll still post my morning photos, because I enjoy the discipline of taking them and choosing them, and people tell me they enjoy them, but they might appear a little later. I might do Connections still, again because I enjoy it, but I’ll do it with my coffee, and not in bed. It feels brave, and it shouldn’t, which just proves that it’s something I definitely need to do.
We’ll see how it goes…
Thanks Sarah! I’ll let you know 😁
This is so reassuring that Real Writers struggle with this stuff too. Thank you so much for giving me a chuckle and a very useful reminder that this stuff is hard for everyone!