8am Experiment

So I decided to perform an experiment this past week and try to wake up earlier. As many of you know, I tend to get into work rather late and that’s just me. People know not to schedule early meetings if they want me to attend. I was originally planning to complete a demo setup last weekend. What started out as a weekend where I was planning to stay home and work, turned out to be a Naruto Shippuden marathon. I had stopped watching Naruto during the filler arc where he was protecting that girl with the giant bomb inside her. It was really boring. Who knew immediately after that would become so exciting. I won’t be spoiling much here since that’s not the purpose of this post, but the last 20 or so episodes of Naruto Shippuden have just been fantastic. Did I mention I watched ~25 episodes of Naruto last weekend?

So what was supposed to be completed on Friday, became what was supposed to be completed on Sunday, became I needed to get into work early on Monday to finish the setup. I had estimated it to take between 1-4hrs to complete and was really hoping it was closer to the lower estimate. I decided to set my alarm at 8am and get into work by 9am, giving myself 2-3 extra hours than what I’d normally have.

My alarm goes off at 8am. I didn’t get out of bed till 8:30am, but I managed to get into work shortly after 9am. Good news is I completed the demo setup pretty quickly. I did hit into issues, but the dev I was working with was able to help quickly debug what was going wrong. That was Monday.

Another motivation for getting up earlier is that we have scrum meetings at 9:30am, which I haven’t been attending. My lead says it’s okay that I miss them, as long as I provide him with the latest status updates. I just feel so bad for not attending.

I set my alarm to go off at 8:30am for the remainder of the week, and the experiment failed horribly. I would wake up between 9:30am and 12pm, hitting the snooze button many times in between. Sometimes I don’t even remember hitting the snooze button. I remember specifically one time seeing 10am on my clock and wondering why the alarm hasn’t gone off yet. Of course a minute later, the alarm goes off for who knows how many times already. I guess it also didn’t help that I was still going to bed around 3-4am.

I also reaffirmed my dislike for drip coffee. Apparently work now has both Starbucks and Seattle’s Best drip coffee, but both taste really bad in my opinion. Maybe I didn’t add enough sugar. Drip coffee also tends to make my stomach queasy for the rest of the day. I do like lattes and mochas though. I wonder why.

I’ll probably resume my normal schedule from next week onwards. Maybe I’ll give this another try sometime later.

You should probably stop reading here as the rest is just the rambling of a crazy dream I had.

I had a really random dream this morning (in between my alarm clock going off). The dream started with my cousin coming into our cabin (some outdoorsy place we were staying) wearing that weird body suit with wheels on your arms and legs. I don’t really know what the sport is called, but I remember my cousin telling us that he just got back from contour body skating. I forget what happens in between, but the next thing I know it’s night time and my brother is sleep-talking, telling me to go return his snowboard gear. It doesn’t even make sense, but apparently I returned his snowboard gear in the middle of the night and he got really pissed at me the next morning, because apparently those weren’t rentals and were actually his. Of course the rental people won’t budge and won’t return his stuff. We come up with the scheme of renting the same gear again and just not return it. Somehow that worked, but the boss decided to pay us a visit. He came in a black limo and pulled up to our cabin. Not quite sure why or how I ended up in the limo, but the limo was flying and we were in it. The boss also turned out to be some evil pig in a business suit and he was hopping mad that we aren’t returning his rentals. I tried to explain that these were originally ours and we were just taking back what belonged to us. He got so angry that he grew 2 extra eyes on his forehead (4 eyes total). This got really creepy. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! My alarm clock goes off. Interesting how much dreaming goes on in just 9 minutes.