Check yourself before you wreck yourself

Over at Miss Protestalot, I've been reading her series of Sunday Routine posts with special attention and vigor. I'm not much of a routine person but lately I've been thinking I should start one. After reading Emily Gould's entry, I was enlightened to the purpose of breakfast.

"This is gross and I am an ancient old person at 28, but after a long period of trial and error with breakfast that included experiments with oatmeal and kasha and eggs, I discovered that I like eating the same thing for breakfast every day and it is a bowl of Kashi GoLean cereal. It tastes like packaging materials, obviously, but the protein they put in it makes me not-hungry for several hours, and this means I can get work done without thinking about how hungry I am.

I am basically always hungry, it’s just my natural state, and often I will be working and I’ll think “but I’m hungry, I’m distracted, I’m clearly not at my best,” and this gives me license to fuck off and cook and eat some baroque snack for the next hour, and then it takes me another hour (or more) to get my head back into work mode. Better to eat the protein cereal, I have come to grudgingly realize."

If we are indeed machines that output what we intake, then I've been going about my adult life all wrong. Generally I eat one meal a day and snack in-between, relying on a combination of coffee, sugar, and ice cream to carry me along. I've lived for many years with the thought that I'm some breed of robot human, immune to the effects of protein, sugar high/lows, caffeine, carbohydrates, vitamins, and whatever else is necessary for a normal human diet. I rarely get sick, I can still pull all-nighters on a whim, and I generally don't worry about what I'm putting into my body.

Then I started thinking. I nap a lot, I show all the symptoms of sugar rush and crash, and there's probably a good correlation between when I'm awake and when I ingest coffee. I mean, how is it that caffeine effects most other human beings but not me? I can't be that special.

So in effort to find out, I've been slowly playing around with my nutritional values. I haven't bought Haribo gummies in weeks. I eat just a few Skittles and very few cookies. Now I'm testing my caffeine consumption. I'm not sure any of this is doing anything but I'm trying to play a scientist here by isolating one thing and testing it out. Of course, because I have no routine, it's hard to monitor my progress. How do I know if coffee keeps me up if I sleep at between two or six in the morning (and wake up anywhere between eight to twelve hours afterward)? A lot of my friends make wise statements about themselves like, "If I eat/do this, I'll feel it tomorrow." I have no idea how I'll feel tomorrow, not a clue. It's high time to find out.

Also, I've got this theory that the key to massive productivity might be routine. So I'm starting a morning one. Well, late afternoon or whenever I get up. So lately I've been hopping off the couch/floor and pouring out a big bowl of cereal and firing up one slice of toast. I would add an egg in there but that involves cooking. I'm trying to keep it easy and simple. During my allotted breakfast time, I will read instead of watch TV, so that I don't mistakenly fall back to sleep. In theory this meal I have traditionally eschewed will fuel me to new heights.

Full of energy and pizzazz, I'd like to game plan out my next four hours. One hour for browsing, one hour for emailing, one for pre-appointed tasks, and one hour for writing. That should start my day off right and shotgun me into super productivity. The trick is to send your mind/body into auto-pilot when you wake up so you don't even know you're accomplishing something until you've done it. I've also begun this thing where I play the same three tracks before I start writing, hoping that over time I'll have a Pavlovian response to the mini-set. It's like self hypnosis, I hope. Citizens of the world, get ready for timely email responses and writings.

I'm gonna need to stock up on cereal.