Getting to bed at a solid hour has to be one of the most underrated personal habits and personal disciplines.
Waking early has huge productivity and creativity benefits. If you can jam on your top creative work for a few hours before anyone is out of bed and hit major milestones before breakfast, your whole day's path is pre-paved golden.
This points to a mundane-but-crucial detail: you need to get to bed early enough.
This is harder than it sounds to do.
There are enjoyable social events in the evening.
And if you didn't organize your day well, you'll be producing well later in the day, with things you still want to do.
Thus, it requires a few sorts of discipline to pull off:
1. You have to execute early in the day, so you can began a winding down in the late-mid day.
2. You need to proactively organize your social calendar to have enough activities in the typical breakfast, lunch, and very-early-evening range so that you're getting all the social contact you want.
3. You need to watch that schedule and stack things early in the day.
4. The hardest is shutting down and sleeping when you're producing at a high level.
All of these have haunted me and my early-morning schedule, particularly the last one. I stayed up 90 minutes later than I wanted to because I was producing en fuego. The next day was predictably somewhat hosed, and it had follow-on downsides for even two days later. Looking back, I ought to have slept.
Some of this can be mitigated by napping, which is wonderful but takes its own kind of discipline and structuring to set up.
Both being sleep-deprived and waking up only in time to start grinding on routine work have huge downsides to creative productivity. Nailing those out takes the discipline to organize your life so you can sleep early enough.
It's one of those things which isn't sexy and so doesn't much written on it, but leads to high effectiveness. How well organized is your production and sleep schedule?