Just do it.

A few weeks ago Steve Pavlina wrote in his blog about How to become an early riser. One of my major productivity deficit always was that I really liked sleeping long and had no will to get up early. Especially in winter months it happened often that I slept for a lot more than 8 hours and felt tired the whole day anyway. And although I tried to commit myself to stand up early the next morning it didn't work when I woke up. I then always started arguing about why I wanted to get up so early and that it would be so much better to... *snore*

From my rare highs these days I know my best work time is in the morning - if I get out of bed early enough. So I went to follow Steve's advices and got up at 5 AM every day - and go to the bed when I become tired, which is not before 10 PM, mostly.

This really works. The weekend was superb, it's so silent outside on Sunday mornings your mind just flows while working. Best of all, at 10 AM I always had done more I'd ever dreamed of being able to do the whole day. I have now also started to do my physical exercises in the morning instead of doing them in the evening after coming from work. This allows me to replace the first dozy hour of the day with some kind of a kick start.
To get over this morning arguing with myself about why I wanted to get up so early I needed to replace this arguing habit with a new habit that would finally end in a reflex-like behaviour without questioning it. Without questioning was the key for me here. Or in other words, just do it.

The unschedule

Check out the Dilbert Comic Strip from June 8th. Mega-consultant Dogbert is telling the pointy haired boss to keep a journal of everything he does during the day.
This reminded me of an idea in the book The NOW Habit from Neil Fiore called "the unschedule".

It tells you to write down only previously committed time into your calendar, including meals and sleep as well as leisure time. In other words schedule as many non-work activities as possible but do not plan work on projects in the calendar.
Afterwards, fill your calendar with the work on projects after you have at least worked on the project for half an hour - uninterrupted. The goal is that you can keep track of so called quality work during the week. Summarize these hours at the end of each week and you can see how your quality work hours increase.

I found this idea great to see how my productivity would increase using the metholody described in David Allen's "Getting Things Done". The book "The NOW Habit" is actually from 1989 but it think it's more current than most of the newer time management books telling you about the ABC priority and daily to-do list crap again.