I’m not quite sure when it started but I can remember staying up all hours of the night as early as high school. Of course back then the scapegoat was always too much work and not enough time. My mornings and afternoons were full of academic training while my evenings often found me in practice or in the midst of an actual athletic competition. The difficulty with any New England prep school is that none of them are really near each other (with a few exceptions). While my friends took short cross-town trips to their games, our teams were subjected to travel of up to three hours at times. Yes, it was great preparation for my college football days but in the end I guess you can call that the beginning of my current dilemma.

Now I realize dilemma is kind of a strong use of the word in this context. In fact, some may view what I am doing at this very moment as a wise use of my time. Personally, I’ve always lived by the mantra, “there is plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead”. The problem with this overstated mission is that there isn’t plenty of time to catch up on rest in the rest of the week. Let me explain… You see, it’s currently 2:30am and I have just finished what I am calling phase one of my first web project, the Mjordan report. That’s right, I finally did it. After hours of confusion, countless conversations with “in the know” techies (shout out to Ron Sims a.k.a. “Black Man in China”, Chris Padilla and Tom Abboud) and abbreviated lunches to read books on web basics, my site is now up for all to see.

Getting back to my night owl tendencies, I would have to say that I usually feel more productive in the wee hours of the night. This begs the question, why? Well for one I think that I have inherited a truly independent spirit from my parents. Granted this quality can easily be confused with procrastination depending on how I decide to employ it. But all in all I feel confident that I am productive beyond 1:00am because I just like to work by myself. I tend to be self-driven, a challenger of normalcy and a timekeeper for that imaginary deadline. I’m the reporter who rushes into the editor’s office right before the paper’s print button is pushed (or in this day and age, the send button).

You might ask why I don’t knock out everything on my “to-do list” every night of the week. After all that would make me a more productive person. Well besides the fact that it would be extremely unhealthy, I would have to say that my shared life no longer permits my somewhat selfish tendencies on a regular basis. In a relationship that is working toward marriage, my personal lists have to play the back to a more important task. That is, there can be nothing more important than building on the productivity of two people in love and willing to share the rest of their lives with one another. So once in a while I will sacrifice a blog entry to watch a movie or listen to the details of a difficult day. In the end though I believe in balance and that rhythm will come, understandably, with time.