From you have I been absent in the Spring. Last week was tough. This week has been tough. I’m doing something wrong.

I have been making a couple of routine changes, i.e., changes to my routine. For one thing, I moved my “big” PC to the office in Stellenbosch, in an attempt to reduce the number of hours I work at home. Moved my home office around. Started preparing for Pomodoro (but very slowly). But Tuesday night was a zero-sleep night, and last night Jean and I put in 6.5 hours to finish up the paper for the 2am deadline. I underestimated the work required and there were still a couple of loose ends by the time the deadline rolled around. We’ll have to see what the reviewers say.

I am sorely tempted to introduce some “rules”: no work after 20:00, in bed by 21:00, at the office at 6:00. However, I’m afraid that if the rules fail, they will do so catastrophically, in the sense that I won’t have the self-discipline to stick to them and, once broken, they will simply fall away. Somewhere, sometime I read that one feature that separate successful people from the rest is not that the fail less, but that they have tenacity: they get up again and again and tackle their objective. Well, it is sounds trite and trivial now, but from my own experience, I know that it is easy for me to abandon a good (or bad) plan because, once it has failed, the excuse that “it doesn’t really matter any more” comes easily and quickly.

Whenever I fail to achieve sleep (i.e., another all-night work session), I become slightly manic. I guess I should watch out, not for bipolar, but for this to become a habit. One mental deviation from the norm I wish I had a little more of though, is a “split” personality. Well, correction: I may have that to some extent (we all do, I suppose), but instead of one lazy and one strict persona, I have two lazies! Or more! I have many split personalities, but frankly they are all pretty much the same.