Holee shiat, I am almost at the one week mark. Honestly? It hasn’t felt like a week. And as mentioned in my Day 5 post, it hasn’t felt like more than a week either. It has just been. That’s it. Been.

The extra free time has so far been really nice. My job consists of me sitting down at my computer and drawing cartoon smut for people (and clean art on occasion), and though I would consider myself a decent artist and I do enjoy it, I don’t LOVE it. My passion is in writing. So, like with any job, even if you like what you do (and a lot of people can’t say even that), when you know you’re supposed to be working but there’s other more fun stuff you could be doing, it’s hard as hell to get your ass in the seat and rack up those hours. And with the way I had been sleeping previously, I was really kicking myself for slacking off.

What I would do was wake up at whatever time I naturally woke. If I woke up, even after a normal 6-8 hours and I was still tired? Fuck it, I went back to sleep! This lead to me being overtired. And when I’m overtired, I don’t want to do jack OR shit. I did have a schedule though. I needed one. I have ADD and if I don’t set at least some vague daily plan, I’d just sit and read Cracked.com all day or something. And even with the schedule, I found myself more often reading articles, magazines, or books instead of doing work.

When I had a job outside of my home, of course I had a schedule. I actually have not been a true shift worker for over four years, even though the position was a “shift” type. My last two jobs have been overnights, which started at the same time every day, and ended AROUND the same time every day. I had structure.

Then I lost my most recent job, and had to turn to pumping out more commissioned artwork to supplement my husband’s income. It really is notoriously difficult to get a job these days, and though I did apply to places for the first month, I admit I did not look very hard. I looked at my joblessness as a sort of blessing in disguise. Now I had the time to actually see if I COULD make a decent income with art. Turns out I can, but it’s less than I was making working for the man. Guess what? I don’t care :V

But with such freedom comes responsibility. If I showed up late for work or slacked off during, nobody was going to complain. I wouldn’t get written up, or lectured, or fired. But the person who suffered was me. Because I told myself that if I slacked off,  I could make up for it by doing more, by extending my hours. BBut that was a very hard thing to make myself do. I was very undisciplined, and if I had been sitting in front of my computer for twelve straight hours with only about five hours of work done, I just wanted to GTFO.

So for my first step in self discipline, I got myself an organizational program to manage my schedule, commission transactions, and tasks needed doing. I am at the point now where I rely on this program, and if I had to do without it for more than a few days, I think I’d go nuts. The program helped me only to an extent at first. It was an effective means to see what I had to do, set start and due dates, and figure out how many hours I would need to complete the task.

My next issue came when I got distracted by stuff when I was supposed to be working. IM’s from friends, web pages, etc. Shit man, I could take a five minute glance at a link, and turn it into three hours following other links and reading shit. Or anything really. There was a lot of stuff on my computer, like games for instance, which were totally unrelated to working.

Solution? I made a second account on my computer for work, with absolutely nothing installed except precisely what I needed to work on art. This helped a lot, but being me, I could still find things to distract me that weren’t on the computer. I love to read, and if I was in the middle of a book, I would frequently want to stop drawing and read. Solution? Audiobooks. If I ever feel the urge to read while I’m drawing, I put on an audio book. I’ve listened to a lot of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, and Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”, but my absolute favorite are the Harry Potter audio books, read by Stephen Fry. The reason for this is because I’ve read the physical books so many times I’ve practically memorized them, and also listened to the audio books about three or four times each. If I happen to “zone out” while working, I don’t miss anything I didn’t already know about. But most of the time I’m content just listening to music while I work.

I probably could have gotten by in this fashion, but I was still dreading work, yearning to play, and finding every excuse to get up and walk away for a few hours. The reason why became clear to me as I was reading a productivity article for people who work at home.

MY COMPUTER WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM.

Well now, you might not think that’s such a big deal. I’m in the living room right now typing this. I don’t have kids running around, and the only distraction was the husband when he was home. But I was mixing my work space with my leisure space. Within arms reach were books, my kindle, my Nintendo DS. I did not have to get out of my chair to become distracted by these objects. But the worst part was, my only chair was in front of my computer. We don’t have a couch, and our living room is set up very… unconventional. So if I wanted to sit anywhere, it HAD to be in front of my computer. And if I was in front of my computer, I had the guilt from not working on my commissions sitting on my shoulders during what should have been leisure time. And vice versa.

So I moved my computer from the living room into one of the spare bedrooms, which is where I kept all my traditional art supplies anyway. If we hadn’t had a spare bedroom, I would have erected a fucking barricade and MADE a room. Living room was once again a leisure zone. But now my problem was that my only computer with all the fun stuff on it was in my work space. The husband has his own computers, but out of general principal and lack of point, we don’t use each others machines.

So I got a netbook. We already had one, initially purchased for me to do my writing on during thunderstorms, but the husband started taking it to school because it was smaller than the TabletPC, and so it gradually became his. Thus we acquired another one. It can’t run the more graphically intense games that I had been playing, but I found that I didn’t really have time to play them anyway. I scheduled my work hours to match my husband’s, and this worked for a while. I’d finish up just as he was getting home in the morning (he works night shift also), then we’d eat and watch an episode of whatever show we happened to be watching at the time.

As an aside, and slightly off topic, but… we don’t have cable TV. We have Netflix and uh.. other means… of getting the full series of a show, and watching an episode a day while eating dinner, til we’re done, then move on to something else. I haven’t seen a TV commercial in years, except for those rare times I’m at someone else’s house. I couldn’t fucking be happier. And programmed TV is one of those things that will suck out your soul if you don’t know how to walk away.

Ok, back to productivity. I didn’t have time to play games. We worked, ate, watched an episode, then puttered around for a couple hours and went to bed.

I’ve already mentioned how undisciplined I am. During the week days, our schedules changed, because he only works weekends, and goes to school a few days during the week. So of course on the days where he didn’t have to get up for work, we’d stay awake longer. Get up later. End up in “normal” waking hours. Then along comes the weekend, and he has to adjust his schedule back to weekend work time, and I, like the lazy sack of shit I was, stayed up for 24 hours, and thus was tired and didn’t want to work, AND THEN because I was tired for having stayed up that long, slept for twelve. Being tired left me much more easily distracted.

All right, I swear I’m getting to the point of this now. If you’ve read my “Polyphasic Experiment” journals, you already know how I learned about it and gained interest and decided to try it RIGHT FUCKING THEN because that’s how I roll.

Right off the bat, I had a schedule. And it was one that was pretty hard to fuck up. A half hour nap every four hours? Hell yeah I can do that! And look, I have three hours between each nap to do shit. SIX BLOCKS of THREE HOURS. Technically three and a half, but the half hour after my nap is buffer time in case I oversleep a little or get a bit distracted. But I suddenly had 18 to 21 hours to do stuff. I only had six hours of commission work each day, plus another two or three hours for personal art, which I had been shirking because I didn’t really have time, and would rather have been doing something else.

Ok, that’s three blocks filled. Three blocks left. Three blocks which I would have normally spent sleeping like a bag of rocks. Shit, I could schedule anywhere from one hour to a whole three hour block for working on my novels. Ok, done. Two blocks left. Well, there’s a few other things I’ve been meaning to get done, a couple things that probably wouldn’t take more than an hour a day each. Another block filled. Oh look, three hours just sitting there empty. I can do whatever I like then.

And the best part about this is that four hour cycles are easy. Nap, work for three hours. Nap. Work for three hours. Nap. Do something else for a three hours. Nap. Work for three hours. And since there’s no real division of days where you would normally stop to sleep for a bunch of hours, you can really schedule your chunks any way you like to keep you engaged. Nap. Work for three hours. Nap. PLAY A GAME FOR THREE HOURS! Nap. Work for three more hours.

My previous work schedule went as follows:
Wake up. Eat. Half-hour to hour for business related stuff (checking and answering email, etc). Commissions for four hours. Hour break (how I longed for it). Commissions for two hours. Personal art for two hours. Done. Two to four hours of leisure, one to one and a half of which is spent creating food and watching tv. Then sleep until work time again.

By the time I had finished the second round of commissions, I did not want to bother with any personal art. I’d go HO-SHIT I’m done my commissions for the day AND personal art isn’t as important or as fun as this BOOK or this GAME or this ARTICLE I WANT TO READ ON CRACKED.

But now? Now I have time for all of it and more. I’ve got plans for things I want to learn to do, to add to my artistic repertoire, and to better myself. And all it requires is roughly a week of sleep deprivation :P

Things include:
-learning to build fursuits(which requires learning to sew. haha. Yes, I am a furry. Deal with it :V
-learning another language
-learning to play the electric guitar I got for my birthday in 2009. I feel bad for buying it and letting it sit in my closet.
-other things that I’m sure will come up at some point.

I think the experiment so far has been a success, so of course I am going to keep going this way for as long as I’m able. I’d recommend trying to anybody who has a schedule flexible enough to accommodate for naps at weird times. But of course, it really is not for everyone. There’s apparently a very low success rate of adaptation, even on the variant schedules with a small block of actual sleep time.

Yep, I’ll still be doing my Day 6 and 7 updates, but after that, I’ll stick to just writing about becoming AWESOME.