Time and Type

As a disclaimer, let me just say that in the past and whenever required, I am out the door in minutes, prompt as any early bird. I've done this during shoots with call times at daybreak as an editor, and with weddings I'd worked on as a makeup artist.

But I am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am slow to move in the morning, and that it takes a ludicrous amount of preening and preparation to get me out the door. And no, it's not even the kind of vain primping one would expect from someone who worked in a magazine for many years. Let me explain...

At seven a.m., I am awake—but not up. There's that 30 to 45-minute 'defrost' when I turn off the AC and linger in bed and wait to come to my senses. And then there's that quick fix-up in the kitchen, dealing with dishes left the night before and tidying up around (so there's never any major cleaning on weekends, which are generally reserved for Tech-free R&R with my fiancé, whom I'm still trying to convince to go Tech-free on weekends as I write this).

And then there's the languid time I spend in the bathroom, usually with a magazine I'd recently bought. This week it's this month's Allure with Blake Lively on the cover. I continue to read throughout breakfast and finally am awake, alert, or panicked enough to get in the shower.

Dressing up is actually the easy part. Every night I more or less have a pulse of what I would like to wear the next day. And if I don't, over the past year I've been able to streamline my clothing and edit out pieces so it's quite a breeze these days to get dressed. Plus, it helps that I'm still on vacation (sort of) and my clothes are neatly stashed—and therefore "streamlined"—in two suitcases.

Makeup is an on-and-off thing for me (like John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston). Since beauty and grooming are pretty much ingrained in my lifestyle and career of choice, I am inclined to wear either a lot of it—concealer, powder, blush, mascara and all—or absolutely none, depending on the occasion or my mode of transport for the day. Lately, I've been veering more and more towards 'none.' (Makeup, sweat, and trains don't go together.)

In an ideal world, at seven a.m., I would be darting from the bed to the desk, armed with fresh thoughts and ideas for the day's writing and editing tasks. But I find that any bravado I feel early in the morning is diffused by the 'defrost.'

But all is not lost in my slowpoke-ness, for lack of a better word. I know friends and former colleagues who don't normally see the sunrise, but are quick to burn the midnight oil. These people write books, run magazines, manage households, and I would like to think I am cut from the same cloth, time and schedule in equilibrium.

A friend shared this link to an article in The New York Times, about how Russell Shorto, an American writer based in Amsterdam, was initially baffled by the 52 percent income tax rate required of residents there, and later on, how he warmed up and actually started liking the whole idea. The article chronicles the shift in reaction and opinion and towards the latter part, explains how Europeans and Americans manage their time differently, albeit the former, more efficiently. To quote:

"I used to think the commodious, built-in, paid vacations that Europeans enjoy translated into societies where nobody wants to work and everyone is waiting for the next holiday. That is not the case here. I’ve found that Dutch people take both their work and their time off seriously. Indeed, the two go together. I almost never get a work-related e-mail message from a Dutch person on the weekend, while e-mail from American editors, publicists and the like trickle in at any time. The fact that the Dutch work only during work hours does not seem to make them less productive, but more. I’m constantly struck by how calm and fresh the people I work with regularly seem to be."

Big Ben photo by Chris Hines, http://www.cs-guy.com