Highly Achievable Goals

July 17th, 2010

I’m a big fan of setting myself up for success with highly achievable goals (as per my New Year’s Resolution post I wrote a while back). For this reason, I have always done very poorly in sales-oriented jobs. It is also one of the reasons I can’t stand the hyper-vapid concept of manifestation around abundance.

For a very long time, I’ve been feeling defeated around my time management skills (or complete lack thereof). Try as I might to hold myself strictly to 9-6 work hours, I never seem to get enough done and find myself working far into the evening most of the time. In fact, the only time I really ever get anything done is after 4p.m.

 

This is the actual alarm clock I own. It’s really more of an art piece now.

Mornings are virtually useless around here. I often spend vast spans of my a.m. time gazing listlessly off into the middle distance and drooling as my mind remains a peaceful oasis of inactivity. When people suggest that a meditation practice is best attended to in the morning—while your mind is still calm—I wonder, but how am I supposed to actually sit up for that long before noon?

 

My biorhythms have always been this way. If you put me in a big windowless room without stimuli and conduct experiments as to my brainwaves and such, I guarantee you will find that my brain is most (and only, really) active in the p.m. hours. When I started my own business a few years ago, I made myself a promise that I would no longer subject myself to the vicious, unnatural mercy of an alarm clock. It’s a pretty common occurrence for me to sleep until 9:30 or 10:00. When I force myself to get up earlier, I feel vaguely nauseated and markedly more irritable all day long.

Still, it wasn’t until last week that I decided once and for all to let myself off the hook for being a more productive citizen in the mornings. I was talking to any old friend who I often turn to for business advice. I explained my issue with mornings and time management. He said, why don’t you just start your day at noon then?

The truth is, for all practical purposes, that’s what I already do. But I TRY otherwise. I try to get started right away in the morning. I try, and I fail, and I feel bad about it. Over and over and over. But when my friend/business advisor gave me permission to start my day at noon, I thought, of course! It only makes sense.

For crying out loud, I work for myself. I mean, I couldn’t possibly have a cooler boss.

So this last week, I experimented with going for walks in the morning, having coffee dates, and sometimes just sitting around waking up slowly. I have to say that my new goal of starting my day by noon has been flawlessly successful so far.

(In case you’re wondering, I auto-set this post to publish at 8a.m. I am definitely still sleeping.)

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One Response to “Highly Achievable Goals”

  1. tomleeyoga says:

    Good for you Jos. My friend Liz NEVER gets out of her bed before noon. For her, that would be uncivilized.

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