For those of you who knew that the headline for today’s post is from an episode of Seinfeld - kudos to you. I owe you a cookie. Now, can you tell me which episode? Well, that’s not really the point of this post. The point is the importance of the alarm clock.
Whenever I am on a shoot, it’s hard for me to sleep the night before the very first day. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I can’t stop thinking about all the creative decisions that must be made. Maybe I keep turning everything over in my mind, hoping I didn’t leave anything out; hoping that all the pre-production planning will go off without a hitch. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to oversleep and make a bad impression. Whatever the reason, I usually wake up before the alarm goes off on the morning of the first day. However, don’t rely on the internal biological clock to get you up. In fact, don’t rely on your alarm clock. Set a back up alarm. If you’re really OCD, set a back up for the back up. You’ll never know when you’ll need it.
My wife and I had a little boy back on December 12. During the last weekend of January I was called out on a shoot in North Carolina. I was gone about four days. That shoot marked the first time I would be away from my little boy and would mark the first night of uninterrupted sleep in over a month. On the first night in the hotel (before the first day of shooting) I set the alarm on my cell phone and went to sleep. The next thing I know, I roll over to check the clock - it was 7:15 am. Call time was at 7:30. I had set my cell phone to wake me, but had kept the thing on vibrate. I failed to set the back up alarm.
Just this past week I was on a four-day shoot downtown. Call times each morning were at 8:00. After the first day of shooting I remembered to set both my bedside alarm clock and my cell phone alarm. This time the decision paid off. Around 3:45 am a horrible storm swept through Birmingham, knocking out power to my house. That backup alarm saved me from missing call time.
I’m sure the subject of this post goes without saying, as many of you already set alarms. But it’s been on my mind and so I leave it out there on the world wide web for your consumption.
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