It is 5am and I am awake and writing in a blog that I haven’t written in for 2 weeks. Why, you might ask? I suppose it would be easy enough to say that it’s because I haven’t been up at 5am! But after probing a little deeper, the truth is that I have been thinking of things to write and just haven’t had the time to sit down and write them. Now that I have cut my night’s sleep short a couple of hours, however, it should be no problem to do that now. Is that a good thing? Ask me this afternoon.

Actually, the fact that I am up and writing is a great example of something that has been on my mind lately: productivity. Specifically, I have been thinking about how to continue to be productive while busy. Okay, busy doesn’t really cut it. How about being productive while hurtling through the universe at 1,000 miles per hour on a giant spinning ball. Oh wait, we are all doing that. Okay then, maybe my particular fascination with the abstract concept of accomplishing things that I want (or heaven forbid, need) comes from the fact that I have 3 boys at home aged 11, 3, and 3 months. If any of you out there have kids, I’m sure you know what I mean. Kids are wonderful and I love mine like nothing else in the world, but they do have a way of sucking time out of you… I believe the current rate is three hours for every minute their eyes are open.

Needless to say, in order to compete with this time vacuum you have to be prepared. Getting organized is the first step. You need to know what your priorities are and they need to be laid out in a reasonable plan. When you wake up in the morning it is very helpful to know when you will have the opportunity to get things done and what you are actually going to work on during those periods. And that brings me to my true reason for sitting down and putting virtual pen to virtual paper: wake up, get out of bed, start your day off right. I know it sounds simple (I could use stupid, but it’s my website and I don’t feel like insulting myself this early in the morning), but to me this is perhaps the most critical time of the whole day. Laziness in the morning has a way of sinking you before you are even coherent enough to swim. If you get behind in the morning, then you will be playing catch-up all day long and you likely will never win. If you start the day off right, however, you will have a very good chance of accomplishing the things you set out for yourself that day, and that is key, because when it comes to playing trumpet — or doing just about anything worth doing in life — it is the little steps that you take each day that will get you to where you want to be. It is up to you to determine what starting the day off “right” entails. It doesn’t even have to mean getting up early; it just has to mean getting up well. Now, as for me? It’s coffee time! After that, I’ll get to work on all the day has to offer.