Afternoon Person

I have the week alone, as kid and husband are away for business. My schedule is my own. I am working on two very big projects this week: one, remodeling our back hall, which requires very little serious thought, and the other, finishing my book, which requires hours of intense focus. 

It turns out that I am not a morning person. (Which I knew.)  

But I'm not a night person, either. (Which I thought I was, since I knew I wasn't a morning person.) 

I used to think I was a night person cursed with a deep need for a minimum of 8-1/2 hours of sleep a night. (Just a few nights of 7 hours of sleep and I experience personality changes and what looks an awful lot like depressive thinking.) 

But after a few days of only myself to worry about and nobody else to cook for, it turns out that I'm an afternoon person. I can turn on that intense concentration and focus beginning around 4 pm. And I can work until about 9:30pm, after which I need a break and I'm starting to feel like maybe I would like to start thinking about bed time. Knock off the heavy focus around then, goof around online a bit, unwind with tea and book, and get to bed by 10 or 10:30 or so.  I cannot, as many of my night owl friends can, work well past 10 pm with any usefulness.

This explains part of why I've found it almost impossible to write while kid is home. I can't focus deeply when I am worried I'm about to be interrupted or before the late afternoon. The late afternoon and early evening hours are the prime hours for meal prep, interaction with family, kid's bedtime, etc. 

Realizing this also relieves me of some of the guilt over "but I should be able to write while kid is home with me!" It means that maybe it's ok if I only do writing when I'm completely alone at home.  The tricky thing is, these opportunities do not happen very often at all.  But kid is getting older, and will be traveling more with husband for business as the years go on, so it should gradually improve.  Having kid travel with husband or to visit family and friends is certainly nicer than me paying big bucks to go away to a writer's retreat or a rental cabin somewhere to write. Cheaper, too. 

 

 

PS: Perhaps what I'm describing is actually a classic "night person" pattern, but all the self-described night owl I know describe working until the wee hours of the morning, somthing I cannot do. So I'm calling this an "afternoon person" pattern.