I go working in my sleep
Over mountains of pain
To the river so mean

I must be looking for something
Something sacred I lost
But the river is wide
And its so hard to cross

I must finish the chapter I’m currently working on, before I go to sleep, otherwise I will probably not have it finished before lunch tomorrow. Even if I sleep until lunch (I wish I slept that well lately), it would be worth it to not procrastinate by going to bed first.

Now how to stay awake and alert, that is the question. Caffeine has a half-life of three to four hours in a normal person (many more in pregnant females or females on oral contraceptives, apparently). The point being, at night, caffeine is not an option. At least not until the last night or two, when one can pull an all-nighter. So I’m trying Berocca. I hope Vitamin B will give me some energy, and it isn’t a psychoactive stimulant. In fact, any placebo effect would do. Something that will help me stay awake, but not actually have any effect when I do eventually go to bed. If only I actually believed in it, there might have been some homoeopathic remedies that could have helped.

The other thing that could help, is the right choice in music. This is tricky though, and I don’t have enough experience. It depends on what I need to do. Certain work I can do quite well on Infected Mushroom, I’ll try that now. Earlier this evening, I did some work on Jacques Loussier Plays Bach, and then some Michael Bublé. Before that, I even experimented with Cold for the hell of it (I don’t know them very well yet), but that likely only works for very specific tasks/chapters/sections.

Too late to get advice for tonight, but maybe for the upcoming week then: what music would you recommend? What do you like working on? (When doing what kinds of work?) I’ve heard some people work on heavy metal… Oh, and hey, if you know of good Jazz for the Jazz n00b, let me know. I know I like Oscar Peterson, amongst others.

I think I’ll try Infected Mushroom for the rest of this chapter. If it doesn’t work, I’ll revisit my extensive classical music collection. (Yes, the good old The Gathering and Classical Mushroom. I don’t have any of their later stuff.)

ps. Maybe I should revisit my tagging strategy. Thirteen tags seems quite overkill, no?