Making Mornings Work: A Simple Tip

I’m more of a morning person. I was the kid who fell asleep before everyone else at sleepovers. In college, I never was able to pull an all-nighter. I like to sleep, and I have a hard time staying up late, or at least, I have a hard time staying up late and being productive.

When I finally made the switch from nighttime writer who could barely lift her head up off the desk to morning writer, I thought I’d finally found my sweet spot.

For almost two years, I’ve been diligently getting up to write every morning before work.

Until last week.

I couldn’t crank myself out of bed for anything. Had I lost my mojo? Two things were at play here:

1) I was suffering from some neck pain that was also giving me intense migraines. This was causing lots of pain in trying to sleep. So I wasn’t getting to sleep at my normal time.

2) I didn’t have a plan. Why should I get up if I had no idea what I was going to do when I did get up? I valued sleep more.

I’m going to a chiropractor for problem #1. I realized my body did need the sleep, so I cut myself some slack.

For the second problem, I relied on advice I’d read in Heather Sellers’ CHAPTER AFTER CHAPTER. She suggests checking on your writing the night before so that you know what you’re going to work on the next day. For me this is critical. For months, I’ve had so much to do, many pressing deadlines. While I have deadlines in other areas of my life right now with much work to be done, I don’t currently have any deadlines for writing. So I floundered.

Do I have writing projects to work on? Of course. But I had to articulate them to myself so I’d have a reason to get up, instead of sleeping in.

I had to know what path I was going to take on writing new work so that I didn’t waste time on the internet.

Now that I have a plan, I have a reason to want to work on my writing in the early morning again. And I’m mostly pain-free, so that it no longer an excuse.

And I have a self-imposed writing deadline for a certain project.

It’s time to write on!