Roy Tang

I posted the other day about trying to get back into the habit of early morning walks. Unfortunately, I failed to continue that habit the very next day (hopefully I’m able to succeed on upcoming days). The main reason I failed is that I was unable to sleep early on the preceeding night. My sleep cycle is horribly irregular, given my flexible working hours. I tend to be easily tempted to take naps at odd hours.

13 Mar 2019 5:56amClose

Not that there’s anything wrong with naps mind you. But it’s probably better if my naps were predictable, like say, a quick nap after lunch (when I’m likely to be sleepy anyway), instead of the irregular schedule I have now which messes up my sleep cycle.

The common advice for fixing a sleep cycle is to have a regular time of the day when you go to bed and sleep, so that your body gets used to sleeping at this time. This has proven… difficult for me.

I think I really need to find the discipline to establish a regular routine, with scheduled naps throughout the day if needed. Routines have a few benefits:

• it makes it easier to establish new habits if they’re incorporated into a routine. I noticed this with my Duolingo lessons, the past few weeks I’ve always been doing them right after breakfast, still sitting at the table. I bring my iPad with me during breakfast for reading the news, so it’s easy to transition into the Duolingo app. Doing it a regular time and so early day makes it a lot less likely that I break the streak.
• it reduces the amount of decisions you need to make during the day, and can also reduce procrastination. For example, if I allocated certain hours of the day to be “productive hours” and some hours to be “gaming hours” and so on, I don’t have to make that decision during the day. And I can’t procrastinate on being productive, since I know the rest of my time is already allocated
• having a regular rhythm makes it easier to get through difficult days

The main downside of a routine like this is… it’s boring! I dislike heavily regimented schedules that are predictably always the same. I mean, that may even be one of the reasons why I’m not working full-time anymore. I’ll need to think about this some more. A kind of hybrid approach where some time blocks are more flexible might be more feasible for me, or maybe a varying schedule depending on the day. We’ll see. But for sure I have to do something!