Waking up at 5am to code

Kanban itself isn't key, but rather I think the key is having a plan.

Kanban is a process where you divide your work into stories, and place them on a visual board. You pull stories across the board into different columns as the story progresses. Typical columns are "ready to pull" (first column, this story is ready to begin work), "in progress", "in test", "complete". The idea is to focus on getting cards across the entire board, and having few cards in flight at a time. This is generally believed to increase productivity by avoiding the urge to multitask too much. It can also reveal bottlenecks in your team's process and generally is good at visualizing how your team gets things done. Which can be eye opening.

Since I'm all by myself, my kanban board is really just a fancy todo list. I am using http://www.agilezen.com for my board. Trello is a more well known app along these lines, but purists disagree that Trello truly accomplishes Kanban because it's missing a few key Kanban concepts (whether that really matters is up for debate).

The caffeine is a vicious cycle (I've been there.) When you're short on sleep, you need it to get through the day, but the side effect is you end up staying up later than you need to. Also, if you want to get to sleep, avoid screens (TV, computer) for the last hour or two before bedtime and you'll find it's a lot easier (E-ink readers like the Kindle are great for this.) It's hard to switch gears from the stimulation of TV or a game and go to sleep unless you're already overtired.

A lot of this also depends on age, I suspect... I used to be a 1AM-type person in my 20s but as I've grown older, I find I naturally wake up at 7 AM or so anyway. By 11pm or so, I'm geting pretty useless. My sense is this happens to lots of folks as they get into their mid-30s, even if they don't have kids.

I wake up at 4:30 to read for a bit and some days squeeze in 30-40min of development work. After getting ready I head out for walking between 6:30-9am (depending on the day) then head to work. This gives me room to do a little project work in the evenings.

Glad to see more early risers!

Morning hours are often more productive because there's fewer distractions - the rest of the household is asleep, the phone doesn't ring, and there isn't much on TV. Not to mention that if you've gotten up two hours early to do something, you're probably going to be doing it. (I used to have to get to work at 7:30 in the morning but still found that going to the gym before was the only consistent way to ensure it happened.)

All of that aside, the bigger problem is that other things pop up during the course of the day to steal your energy and time. If you have something scheduled at the beginning of the day, they can't eat away at it. If you schedule it anywhere later in the day, it becomes the "stub" for whatever else happened that day.

One of the pieces of advice they give folks who want to save more money is to "pay themselves first" - save some money from your paycheck _before_ allocating to other things you want to spend on, especially anything discretionary. This is the opposite of what we normally do, which is "save" whatever is left over after our spending. I think folks who set up a morning routine for work or gym are basically paying themselves first in terms of time commitment.

5am sounds a little extreme.

I just arrive at work a half hour before I "should" be there. That's when I do a little code kata or read HN. Then I grab a coffee and it's work time. After work I go to the gym and coming home from that I find I have enough energy to put in another hour or two on my side projects.

However, having kids might change that and make 5am more sensible... you might at least get an hour before they're up and you have to get them ready for school.