I generally wake up early in the morning to catch up on work and also finish a bit of reading. Over the past 4 months I noticed a dangerous pattern emerging - I would wake up (if I could at all) and then chew a bit of mails. While the mails were being downloaded I'd end up going through the Google Reader feed or, steal a glance at micro-blogs. And, before I knew it, a good 30-45 minutes went past. That ended up eating into various other tasks/chores of the morning.

Not now though.

Which is why I think that there should be an online petition to ensure that John Poelstra posts a single helpful blog a week. This guy is so amazingly spot-on with his observations and life hacks that one could just read his posts and feel upbeat. This is a strong recommendation to follow his blog.

Anyways, for the past month or so I had a system whereby I write down a couple of ToDo/ToComplete tasks on my phone the previous night right before I go to sleep. The intended agenda of this system is to ensure that:

• I have a plan of work for the next day
• I know that the tasks are atomic and their completion is measurable
• I can see visible results of the tasks being completed

Guess what ? The first couple of days were a bit of a painful affair in figuring out what to accomplish within the early morning hours. But once there was rhythm it was fairly easy to get into the habit. The incentive at the end of the time window - seeing that I've made progress.

You can read John talking about it here.

The first steps towards getting the groove back were exhilarating and liberating. Gone was the sourness of knowing that I was getting distracted and work was being impacted. This was good enough to make me ambitious to try and see if I can now improve the velocity of getting work done. Accepting the fact that I was being a lazy ass and then trying out the simplest of steps to attempt to address the issue helped a lot. Getting a routine and adding self-discipline to it was a good insight. There are a couple of more problems I could solve with that combination.