Corner of Bourbon & Division

I got home from work last night, and the week of much less sleep than usual combined with no down time at all caught up with me. I tried to take a nap around 18:00, only to wake up this morning at 04:00 which is when I have to get up for work anyway. That meant I accidentally left poor tcaptain in the lurch, as we were supposed to have a writing jam at 20:00. Bad Phnee, no biscuit. :P

Still, I was exhausted after the last few weeks of lots of extra driving, lots of extra errands, and a whole lot less sleep (due to the aforementioned driving and errands, among other things), so getting one night of nearly 10 hours of sleep seems to have done me some good. And yes, I realise that not everyone has the luxury of getting enough sleep, and a lot of people have trouble sleeping/insomnia, but I'm trying not to feel guilty about getting those few extra hours in.

I was amused by elanya's comment in a recent post about having a day that seemed full but also involved a lot of sitting on the sofa doing not much (by which I suspect she meant "doing quiet things on the sofa" rather than nothing at all).

I seem to have the opposite problem. I suspect my days look very empty to anyone who glances at my schedule. A workday typically looks like "Get up, eat, go to work, go home, eat, go to bed." I broke it down in more detail in my unschedule the other day, so I now know exactly where that time ends up going, but I sometimes wonder if people don't think I'm exaggerating when I say I'm busy and can't find the time to get everything done, no matter how hard I try. Or else that I'm generally kind of useless and/or incompetent. :P

It must seem as though, whenever I leave Montreal to go to my job in Ottawa, I'm leaving on a mini-vacation, since I don't have to clean the house or help with Bean or run any of the household errands. I get 5 or so days of time in which I have absolutely no responsibilities, right?

Anyway, since that's not the case, I've been working on ways to make myself more efficient, to make use of the time I do have at my disposal. I've been having problems with finding myself too rushed in the mornings these days, when I have to be at work for 05:30. I am unwilling to get up any earlier than 04:00, because I find that hour brutal enough as it is, so I'm trying to implement a few time-saving measures into my morning routine. It's proving a little difficult, though. Here's what I've come up with on my own:

1- Pack my lunch the night before. The trouble with this is that I often have frozen meals, which I can't pack ahead of time, lest they thaw. The rest of my stuff can't go in the freezer. So I can partially pack the night before, but not entirely.

2- Prep my coffee the night before so all I have to do is turn on the coffee maker in the morning. This might work, provided my landlady stops putting my coffee maker away in the cupboard every day.

3- Shower the night before. I should just nut up and do this, even though I find it all kinds of awkward because the shower is right next to the landlords' bedroom on the third floor (my bedroom is on the ground floor). I can do this if I am willing to get dressed again in the bathroom before going back to my room. I'm just squeamish.

4- Set out my clothes for work the night before. I keep meaning to do this and I just forget because it's not a habit yet. I'll have to work harder on remembering this.


So, friends, what do you do in the morning so as not to feel totally rushed? Any tips or tricks for me?