Counterintuitive but true —
Do you know that feeling where you can't fall asleep and it's really aggravating?
I've found that has zero correlation with next-day's success.
Laying down in bed, unable to sleep for whatever reason — this means I've already decided, ok, I'm done for the day. The inability to fall asleep, imperative as it seems at the time, is totally irrelevant and doesn't matter. Apparently lying there in bed is good enough for resting/recharging; the next goes well.
The flipside is that going to bed later than my scheduled times correlates really well with the next day going more poorly than normal.
I keep numbers on how many good cycles of work I get in on a day, how well my habits go, and what I accomplish.
"Laying there but can't sleep" doesn't matter, and the objectively right call based on my values is to just keep laying there until sleep (eventually) comes.
Unless strong inspiration strikes and I'm ready to do something particularly useful, getting up and doing something is the wrong decision.
This is counterintuitive. It feels like a disaster when laying there unable to sleep. Whereas, getting up and reading or doing light work or screwing around online is at least mildly pleasant.
But numbers don't lie.
I don't know if this holds for everyone; I'm surprised it's true for me. But after just forcing myself to lay down and rest if the schedule calls for it, I find the next day goes well. Staying up late means I need to either push my wake-time back (bad...) or get up on lower-than-normal-sleep to the alarm (also bad).
Again, I can't emphasize enough how counterintuitive this result was for me to realize. Being unable to fall asleep feels really, really, really bad.
But it's totally irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. So now, assuming my will is strong enough, I'll just lie there and try not to have too much of a bad time, maybe meditating, knowing that life will continue to march on in normal and effective fashion the next day.