Someone came to me earlier this week with 3 flight options for me to travel and said “you can go on Saturday morning at 7.15am flight and have a more decent weekend”. I don’t think this chick realises that a 7.15am flight means you need to be at the airport at 5.15am if not earlier. How can that be even remotely decent? And since when did I worry about losing weekend time? I would rather take a really late night flight the night before than try and save weekend time and fly at an ungodly time the next day and make everyone’s life around me miserable….after all these years she clearly has not figured me out. I know I’m mysterious but my morning mishaps I thought was legendary.

If looks could kill, I think she would have been dead meat by now cos diva is happy to take flights late nights, midnight or even at 3am but to sleep and wake up at 5am….everyone knows I don’t do that for love or for money. Some people may argue that its better to sleep through the night, wake up early….for my body clock, it means if my alarm goes off before 6am, you can write off any intelligent contribution for the day plus be subjected to my moodiness which trust me is not something anyone, including Psychopaths, Argentinean call girls or even annoying and pestering finance advisors should be subjected to….i get lethal and its not pleasant!

I recall times when my ex-boss Stuart Cameron (who I reckon is one of the most far sighted and intelligent people I have met in a long time) telling us to follow our body clocks and make the most of our productive time. I remember achieving wonders during that period of my life because I followed my body clock. Which means that I did all my creative thinking, strategising, planning and writing near 10pm. The next day, although I walked into the office late, I was a ball of energy and did more work than 5 people put together with a plan in place that I had brilliantly came up with and brainstormed with him the night before. Thankfully, he was one of these amazing people who ran his own business so was always available on the phone to discuss anything brilliant that his team came up with whether it was over a drink, while he was on the beach or on the road. He respected and recognised that people were more productive and sharp at certain times of the day and made himself available to his team….mornings naturally didn’t feature high when it came to moi but our chief designer woke up at 5am and hit the ground running at 140kmph. We were intellectually stimulated all day feeding off each others energies at different times of the day and hence I became a great believer in quality time and apposed to quantity… Somehow I lost this philosophy along the way!

Looking at the other side of the coin, my mentor Elena, who runs a successful PR company in California sent a bit of info on how sleeping allows us to refuel and restore our bodies and how we should not deprive ourselves of needed sleep time. She talks about how Time management expert Kathryn McKinnon provides us with a strategy to make sleep work for us during the workday in her best-selling book entitled Triple Your Time Today: 10 Proven Time Management Strategies to Help you Create and Save More Time!

Kathryn introduced Elena to the possibilities that lie within this concept in an answer to a question that Elena posed to her on LinkedIn. She said the following:
“We have, on average, 20,000 thoughts each day. Unfortunately, about 80% of those thoughts are negative. That means you spend a lot of time thinking unproductively. It’s your negative thinking that gets in the way of accomplishing what you want to do because these thoughts create doubt and fear, which then create hesitation and inaction. That means it takes you longer to accomplish your goals–in short, it takes more time.”

“If you . . . let your mind go to work for you, your mind will spend that time, while you’re sleeping, finding a way to deliver a solution to your problem. Triple Your Time Today gives step by step instructions on how to utilize this powerful strategy. A combination of focusing on the positive things that have happened during the day just before “lights out,” suspending judgment on the ideas that surface upon waking, and journaling are the keys to success – they tap into the well of creativity that each of us possesses.”

Elena began to implement this with positive results, and noticed that she is sleeping better at night. I am so going to try this as long as I don’t find myself waking up anytime before 6am. Now that would be tragic and very undiva like!

Lesson: Follow your body clock, believe in respecting your productive time and don’t kill yourself trying to make things work during your down time just to please other people or to fulfill the need to be at your desk for the sake of it.