5am: Day 1

Matt

I stayed up to watch the Super Bowl with my wife last night. After that, I had trouble falling asleep because my body was basically saying, “Dude, what are you doing? It’s not even midnight yet.”

5am arrived sooner than I would have liked.

Thankfully, my wife — who is awesome — had set the daylight alarm clock to go off at 5am, so when my tablet started playing music at me, the room was already bright.

My gym clothes were already laid out, so I got changed, ate a yogurt, and got to the gym a bit before 5:30. I worked out for an hour and was home by 6:30. After showering and eating a banana, I had my coffee ready to go by 7am — my regular wake up time.

I generally start work at 8am, so with an hour to play with, I decided to fire up Medibang Paint and create some art. It only took 30 seconds of staring at the blank canvas to understand that my brain is not quite ready for kicking ass this early, so instead of shooting for “art”, I just played around with the different brushes that the program offers, just to see what kinds of things they do.

The end result is basically a toddler’s fever dream:

I hope this isn't the one thing I do that survives the ages.
I hope this isn’t the one thing I do that survives the ages.

I feel good. I’m tired from not getting enough sleep, but I think that will work itself out over the next few days. I love that I’ve already exercised today. I’m going to need extra coffee, and I need to eat more food, but I’m glad I tried this.

Trying Something Crazy

Matt

My wife recently read a book called “The 5am Miracle,” which she summed up as, “You can get a lot done if you get up really early.” Obvious, right? Sometimes we need to read a book about something obvious before we give it a shot. Does anyone else do this?

The book doesn’t use 5am as the magical wakey time that works for everyone — the idea is simply to do some stuff in the morning before your obligations kick in. This week, I’m thinking I’ll just go all-in and set my alarm for 5.

Currently, my average day goes something like this:

  • 7am: Wake up
  • 8am: Begin work day
  • 4:30pm: End work day; begin sitting on couch, possible nap
  • 6pm: Maybe go work on something for a bit, like writing or drawing
  • 7:30pm: Begin TV or video games, maybe.
  • 9pm: Decide not to go to the gym; tomorrow night?
  • 11:30: Get ready for bed; stare at tablet or phone
  • 12 or 1am: Fall asleep

This week, I’m aiming to get up at 5am and go straight to the gym. Once I’m home and showered, I’ll have time to write for a bit before I start working. Depending on how long I work out and write, I may shift my work day back a bit, or maybe just find another thing to do in the morning.

But man, 5am sounds brutal right now. We’ll see how well it works and if I can stick to it. I’ll write about the experience next week.

Not Getting Things Done

Matt

Raise your hand if you’ve done something like this.

You have an idea — a story, a melody, a character, a color — that takes up residence in your imagination and starts redecorating the place. You love this idea; it is, perhaps, your greatest idea. Now you just need to find a way to introduce the idea to the world, so you take a seat at your desk and…

Start making lists. This idea is so good, you absolutely must execute it properly — perfectly, even. You write down all the areas of your craft you are weak in and start finding books and websites to teach you to improve those skills. Days go by. Weeks. Months. For every hour you spend working on The Idea, you spend ten hours in study, learning about different techniques.

One day, you decide to take a look at your progress… only to realize that you haven’t made as much progress as you thought.

That’s where I am with my current The Idea. I started writing a comic, and somehow fell into an infinite rabbit hole of drawing tutorials, theoretical analysis of the craft of comics, and dozens of hours spent drawing shitty hands in the hope of one day drawing less-shitty hands. Learning has been awesome, and I can’t say that I regret anything I’ve read about the process of creating comics in the last several months, but I’ve focused so much on Making The Idea Perfect that I’ve neglected The Idea itself.

I’m sure my anxiety plays into this. In the era before medication, I would get so bogged down in “learning” that I would eventually despair of ever having the skills I wanted and give up. It was the standard fear of rejection, multiplied by a billion. At least with medication, I’m better able to see the anxiety in play and take steps to minimize its impact on my work.

Mental illness aside, I’ve had perfectionist tendencies for as long as I can remember. I often find myself struggling to call something “Done”, instead finding fault after fault and lamenting how much I’ll hate it in two years if I don’t get everything just right. It’s not accompanied by the panicky feeling of anxiety, just irritation at myself for not being better.

(Aside: I could probably write a series of posts on how the “gifted kid” label has affected my self-perception and ability to share my stuff with people.)

So! I’m saying this publicly in the hope that it will stick: I am rebalancing my priorities when it comes to making stuff. I am going to start spending more time working on The Idea, even if it sucks for a time and requires massive rewrites, and less time studying up on abstract concepts related to the idea. Learning is good, and has done a lot for my confidence, but no amount of learning is going to cause my stories to get written. That requires picking up my pen and getting to work.