How to Wake Up and Instantly Achieve Something Everyday

While I agree this is article is pretty fluffy, don't just discount the idea. Don't knock it until you try it...<p>Most people waste a lot time in the morning building up enough courage (or guilt) to start their real work. They check email, read blogs, chat around the water cooler...whatever. All that stuff can wait until you actually need a break. Personally, when I jump right in and start writing code, it has a huge impact on my productivity for the day.

Cliffsnotes: The secret to doing something instantly when you wake up is doing it...instantly...when you wake up. Hardly groundbreaking.

My goal is to wake up, rather than smashing my poor little alarm clock into pieces when it goes off. I achieve that goal most of the time, a fact my employer is quite grateful for.<p>Agreed about the lack of substance here. This is a fluff piece.

Written by a morning person. However, research shows that night owls get more things done.<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5208608/Night-owls-can-work-longer-than-early-birds-scientists-find.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5208608/Night-o...</a>

Almost 100% fluff, though I feel like it could be a decent idea in practice. I can see the value in the self-esteem boost and the feeling of accomplishment early, since the rest of the day may have no such feelings.<p>Instead of achieving the most important goal of every day before putting on some clothes, perhaps a small, bite-sized task before anything else would be more practical. I can't see myself achieving my important goals for every day before eating anything, as most of those goals take hours, and I like breakfast.<p>Personally, I'd like to try this with a goal I've been consistently failing on: reading a bit and writing out my thoughts on what I have read. Small, fulfilling, and something I will wake up, excited to do.

My big task for the last 3 weeks has been to rewrite and merge the credit card charging engine in three separate codebases at work.<p>This is a pretty huge task - multiple migrations, special one-time pushes of data from database 1 to 2, scores of test suites, rewriting and merging models, etc.<p>My secret:<p>* wake up<p>* cook three eggs for breakfast<p>* walk the dogs 1 mile around the reservoir<p>* drive 1.9 miles to work<p>* work for 10 hours<p>I think that steps 1-4 don't really hamper my ability to do step 5.

My 5 year old daughter wakes up instantly at about 6:15AM. And her first achievement every morning is to get her dad out of bed with a smile. :)

This sounds like a good way to ruin your sleep thinking about the goal you want to do in the morning. Anyone else feel that way?

Buried in the middle of the copy is the dirty little secret:<p>"This needs to be done the night before."<p>I've been doing this part for years and it has really made a difference. It only takes 15 to 30 minutes, but I review hard copy every night just before lights out. I always know the first thing I'll be working on the next day.<p>I don't go to OP's extreme by doing the first thing before anything else. But maybe I should. I could easily get this first hour of work in before anything else. I may give this a try next week to see how much difference it makes overall. Stay tuned...