Implementing a daily schedule

As summer was winding down, and I was planning to ramp up my freelancing and my work on my novel as soon as the kids I nanny for when back to school, I started thinking about my daily schedule come fall.  I used a daily schedule long ago, perhaps a year or two into my freelancing career, when I was freelancing full-time and had just brought my horse Panama to Denver.  I needed a way to balance my barn time with my work time, and so I created a daily schedule.

On working 9 to 5

The other day I read this excellent article, Why the 9-to-5 Day Is So Tough on Creative Workers.  And really, it's not just about creative workers, but all "knowledge" workers -- anyone who uses their brain in their job, as opposed to their body.

Basically, the article talks about the rhythms people go through during the day, and points out that a person's regular sleep schedule is actually more important than how much they sleep.  The first few hours after a person typically wakes up are when cognition is at its worst, which is why people tend to feel like they have a hard time getting going on work in the morning.  I know a lot of writers (myself included) who say they have to "warm up" with easy tasks such as checking and responding to email first thing in the morning.  Some even allow themselves a little time on Facebook or blogs.  It sounds like this might not be as much "warming up" as just waiting for one's brain to start functioning at higher levels.

Back to normal

Yesterday was technically the kids' first day back to school, but they only had a half day, so I actually ended up working about the same day that I did all summer.  Today, therefore, is my first day back to my normal school-year schedule: I don't work until I pick the kids up from school at 3pm.

Time off

This is the last week of my summer schedule, and to complicate things, I had to put my old kitty, Cleo, to sleep over the weekend.  She had been struggling for the better part of the past year with some kind of progressive paralysis, and she was finally getting to the point where she could no longer eat.  I tried syringe feeding her for a few weeks, but even that -- which she liked at first -- became problematic when her immune system could no longer keep up with her body's demands, such as an infection in her mouth from a broken tooth.

I don't want to write the entire story more than once, so you can read about Cleo's final illness and passing over on Cleo's old blog, the one I created for her back when she had fatty liver disease.

Counting down

At long last, the end of the summer -- and the return of normality, routine, and free time -- is in sight: The kids go back to school on August 25th, which means I have only two more weeks of summer.

And actually, less than that now.  I have eight more days of my summer schedule, to be precise.  And what's left of my summer should be relatively easy, since I have a rare (of late) easy weekend coming up.