The most productive time of day

The dogs woke me up well before the sun this morning, and once I let them out, I crawled back into bed to doze for a little while.  (Is there anything so luxurious as that half hour in the gloaming, curled in the warmth and the quiet?)  Without distractions, my sleep-fresh brain spun out the answers to 4 of 5 nagging plot snags I've been dealing with, plus offered a good solid skeleton for a new book. 

All in about twenty minutes.  Still not sure about one plot point, but it's very small, so it doesn't matter.

This is why I personally should never, ever get on the internet or check email or turn on television news before I do my pages for the day.  I once wrote an entire book on spec by setting the alarm at 5:30 so I could write on it before my boys woke up for school.  Then I'd cook their breakfast, send them off, and go to work on the book that was under deadline.

Not everyone likes early morning.  My mother says it makes her sick to her stomach to be awake before the sun, and stays up very late at night. So do my children.  Have you ever experimented with your most productive times? Do you know when your brain is most alert?

Comments

[Julie]

I'm with your mom, and I've never heard anyone quite put it that way, but it's a perfect description. I always feel nauseous when I get up very early, and I'm the worst night owl you'll probably ever encounter.

I often get my best writing done late, late at night, but I've trained myself over the past year to do it in the afternoon.

BUT...the early morning, when my mind is drifting, half awake and half asleep, yep, that's the time when my subconscious works the hardest on my stories. It happened this week, and I wrote my WIP's final chapter, which has been a long time coming.

[hb]

I too feel sick in the morning when I force it. Sometimes I wake up early on my own and that's a great feeling. But here I am commenting at 2:15am and I had to pry the fabric out of my hands :)

[Yvonne Lindsay]

I always seem to be most productive between 11am and about 3pm. Probably because by 3pm I need to be in the car and off to pick kids up from school. I tend to spend between 9am and 11am checking email, blogging, checking writing related websites and scanning the newspaper online. Before I started writing 'full time' I used to write in the evening and could easily work from about 8.30/9.00pm until about 1am but the early starts to get to work on time soon started to play havoc with my health.

I know I could be more productive with the time I now have available to me, I just need to be a heck of a lot more disciplined! I tried the early morning writing once many years ago but found I needed to be in bed by 8.30/9.00pm to even be able to function at 4.30/5.00am and my pages always needed alot of work.

[Barbara]

No other morning people around here? The bias in society is toward morning people, but I don't actually know very many of them.