Trying to show up on time and stick to a schedule

 I have finally figured out the reason why I'm always late, aside from the obvious ADD time-blindness. 

The reason why I am always late is because I am obsessed with my personal projects and self-improvement, but I never get enough time for either, so I push the boundaries (i.e. it's 8 AM so I should probably drive home and get breakfast, oh, but I have time for one more mile! I'll just shower faster!). And the reason why I never get enough time for them is because I cannot stick to a schedule's start times or end times -- the middle is fairly easy to stick to. 

For me, starting work by 9 AM is a herculean effort. But, I can usually stick to a schedule once I've started. I can work for 8 hours and take lunch at noon, do a walk at 3:00 PM, and work in 50-minute focused chunks with 10-minute breaks pretty easily. And, since my brain is normally pretty fried, I can usually clock off after 8 hours without too much difficulty. And, why can't I start work by 9 AM in the first place? You got it -- time blindness. 

Additionally, I struggle with context switching. Once I've started something, it's very difficult for me to stop. I engage in revenge staying up late, in which I feel like I didn't accomplish enough throughout the day, so I force myself to stay up later in order to accomplish what I should have. But, then things happen like today: I wake up late, weigh myself and get frustrated, do a 15-minute leg workout and a 5-mile run even though to get to work by 9 I should've skipped or something, and then show up at 10 AM to work instead of 9 AM. Does the software engineering industry care? No, as long as I stay until 6 and get all my work accomplished, but I do. Because as much as I love my job, I just lost an hour of personal work! If I can't control my time, I can't achieve my dreams. Or, I might eventually achieve them, but in a more erratic, sporadic, and inconsistent manner such that they will not be maintainable. 

But if I don't do this "revenge staying up late", I might end up like summer 2019. While this was one of the happiest times in my life, due to learning how to be myself, have fun at various theme parks/carnivals/water parks/regular parks, and be stable, my workouts were short, and I hardly wrote anything because I forced myself to stop working and get ready for bed at like 8:45 or 9:00 PM every night. Summer 2020 was much better, but I still didn't have good time management skills. I just had unlimited free time due to not having a job, and even then, my self-studies were not as rigorous as they should have been. 

So: the core issue is not effectively sticking to start times or end times, whether professionally or personally. This is caused by time blindness. The crux of the issue, then, is to wake up and go to sleep at the same time every day. Go to sleep by 9, and wake up at 5, at least in the summer. The challenge is figuring out how to hijack my brain so I can actually accomplish this, and push forward towards achieving my dreams. 

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