blog where mark goes all dolly parton on you

This time last week I had made a pledge to myself. Faced with the need to knuckle down and make real progress with all those lovely final year assignments, I decided that I was going to try and go 9 – 5 all week, working beaverishly to get some of this mountain of work done.

Long term readers of the blog (hello indeed to both of you) will recall me asking how people had got the strength of mind to get their work done in these situations. First thing I learnt from the exercise?

1) I cannot work at home.

Seriously, there are just too many distractions. Be it flicking around Teletext, eating bowls of cereal, taking overlong showers or organising the DVD collection first by genre and then alphabetically (yeah, I know, true story), I’m unable to resist the continuous distractions my flat offers.

So the idea for last week was thus: wake up early, get into Uni for 9 o’clock. Work like bitch until 5pm, breaking only for lunch and to occasionally catch up with pretty coursemates.

And what a wonderful praise-worthy success it turned out to be. If, by ‘success’, you meant to say ‘abject failure’. And by ‘wonderful’, you in fact meant ‘horrific’. And by ‘praise-worthy’ you actually meant ‘bottom jolting’.

It started off with a good, strong intention. It’s a Sunday night, it’s 11 o’clock, I’m fairly tired. I’ll just swallow a couple of these herbal sleeping tablet things I brought and go to bed in an hour. Which I did do. It turns out sleep was not as forthcoming as I’d hoped though.

4am. That’s when I got to sleep. Four hours of struggling to get to sleep, trying every method in the book with no success.

Even worse, this was the case for the next three nights. Horrifically, 2 and a half hours was the least amount of time it took me to get to sleep over those four nights. Thursday night was better. After a heavy night out, we got in at half three in the morning, and I was asleep within 20 minutes.

This is not a healthy situation to be in is it? The only way for me to get a good nights sleep is to drink like a fish beforehand.

So as you might have guessed, the 9 – 5 plan didn’t really work out. I’m trying the same thing again this week anyway. Banging my head against the wall until I’m sprawled out unconscious on my floor has not yet been ruled out as a falling sleeping method.