11 and a Half Hours Equals Early Mornings

My new contract has started off with the joys of 10 days of offshore conference calls. Due to the fact that the offshore team is 11.5 hours off from my time zone, I'm having to leave the house at 6am. That's been really throwing my schedule off. I usually do most of my writing in the morning.

My usual morning routine goes something like this:

• 4:30 or 5:00am - get up and take a shower
• 5:00 to 7:30am - Read email and RSS, write up articles and work on personal coding projects.
• 7:30 - head in to work

Since this new temporary schedule cuts that an hour and a half short and I've been feeling tired and run down, I'm getting up more at 5:00 and less at 4:30, so I'm down from a solid 3 hour chunk of time in the morning to barely an hour.

While I'm getting some of the time back in the afternoons, I'm finding that I'm just not able to get in the groove and work on stuff. I'm able to do brainstorming and am fleshing out some good ideas with that time, but those hours seem to just not result in anything tangible.

Maybe I need cycles exactly. A couple of weeks focused around coming up with ideas for projects followed by time to do something about them. Or, maybe I'm just full of crap and will waste all of that time instead.