I am not a morning person. Especially now that the sun doesn't rise until, like, noon or something (stupid sun), the only thing that gets me out of bed in the dark is the promise of a quick caffeine fix. If it weren’t for my love of coffee, or 'black gold' as Steve calls it, I would 100% freaking hate-abhor-despise* mornings.

My sophomore year of college, I wound up with a peculiar exam schedule. I had a bunch of papers due the first day of exam week, and then only one test on the last day. This basically meant that I had one whole week to do as I pleased. I mean, of course I was supposed to use that week to study, but who could possibly study for a single test for an entire week. Not me, anyway.

Knowing that this would probably be the only week of my adult life in which I would be beholden to no one with zero appointments, commitments or obligations – no one to see and no where to be, in other words – I decided to do whatever the heck moved me.

My schedule immediately flipped to my heading to the painting studio in the early evening. I stayed there until three in the morning, then I went back to my dorm room and surfed the infantile World Wide Web until I heard birds chirping. As the sky began its fade from black to dawn, I slipped under the covers and slumbered until three in the afternoon. Then I got something to eat and headed back to the painting studio in the early evening. Wash, rinse and repeat for seven glorious, fleeting and one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-relived, up-all-night, sleep-all-day days.

Years later, I am a functioning member of society and I’ve donned the shackles of a nine-to-five schedule (nine to six, in actuality), which obviously means I can no longer make my body magnificently happy by staying up all night and sleeping until three in the afternoon. For years, I muddled along in this morning haze, abusing the snooze and spending every last moment I could in bed before Father Time would force me to get up and running out the door.

Within the past year, I approached something approximating adulthood and realized the scattered, frantic, not-a-morning-person way of handling my mornings was no longer even close to fun or helpful. So I began getting up at 6 a.m. on most days (when force of will would allow) and working out, eating breakfast (breakfast? I had never heard of breakfast before the year 2007) and generally laying around for two hours in the morning instead of snoozing and fleeing.

Today I realized that I have got some insane work deadlines going on, and a ship-shape routine is required to prevent slipping into mental disarray and insanity and going by way of Britney with the partying and jail – oh wait, jail was Paris – but you know what I mean. The downward spiral. The bottom line is that I need a self-management routine in order to maintain solid control over my world so that I can function at the highest levels of efficiency and satisfaction.

As I began creating my morning and evening routines and calculating sleep needs and bedtime and all that, I did a little research on how to become a better morning person, and I stumbled across this article in the Seattle Times . Upon reading the sentence, “Before you decide to jigger with your internal clock, ask yourself if you really need to become a morning person,” I thought, “Oh my God. What am I trying to do to myself??”

And so I’ve suddenly moved a bunch of previously-known-as morning tasks to my nighttime routine, and you know what? Now I will get to sleep a whole hour later. Breakfast? I’ll eat a piece of cheese in the car. Working out? Nighttime. These excuses as to why I can’t work out at night no longer apply: “I’m hungry and I need dinner. I just ate dinner and I’m too full. I’m too tired from a long day.” Suck it up, Sunshine! You want to sleep in, then you damn well better hit the gym at some point in the evening.

I suddenly feel so free to realize that my days no longer consist of getting up, going to work, going home, eating dinner and going to bed. Because now I can stay up a little later and I’ll feel like I have a bit more evening time to enjoy now that I’m ditching this morning crap.

I’m going to say it loud and proud: Mornings suck! And that’s okay. Because now, my days come with more Nighttime Juicy Goodness™.

*Hate-abhor-despise means 'strongly dislike' or in the parlance of our times, 'really really really really really hate'.