During my long studying experience and my short professionnal one, I could clearly sense than getting up too early, especially before sunrise, would just kill my productivity for the whole day.

I also observed that being involved with indoors sitting and brain-centered activities all day was nor pleasant neither productive over long time slots. I had the feeling that slicing those time slots with outdoors body-involving and standing work would help be more productive in both activities.

I have the feeling that scheduling activities in accordance with periods of the day, benefitting of fresh concentration in the morning, heat of the sun at the beginning of the afternoon, quietness of the early night, etc could be a powerful way to be me more productive and feel more at the right place at the right time when doing things. The same reasoning applies to weeks, moon revolutions, seasons, or even periods of life.

The scheduling of Doing Nothing is also very important.

Here are some more specific insights on this research.

Sometimes, when dealing with many short tasks to perform, I had the feeling of not being productive for several days in a row. Practically, I worked as much as other days, but many short tasks are not quite as rewarding as a long one.

In addition, these high-frequency short-term short tasks can block the way to low-frequency longer long-term tasks. I can, for instance, easily get stuck into e-mail for three hours, and never progress on reading some of the self-sufficiency books I need to read before designing my food-producing balcony.

To adress these two issues, I decided to establish a new morning ritual. While sipping my morning tea on FoAM's comfortable couch, I take out my notebook, and write down Four Objectives I absolutely have to achieve today. The phrase I use to define these is:

“I will be happy at the end of the day if I have…“

I try to balance these Four Objectives using the following criteria:

• Short-Term Deadline vs. Long-Term Deadline
• Short Activity versus Long Activity
• Brain-Centered Activity versus Body-Involving Activity
• Outdoor Activity versus Indoor Activity

I tried with three objectives, which were too little - and therefore encouraging procrastination with Unpleasant Objectives. I miss one objective almost everytime I try to schedule five of them. So four seems to be the right amount.

I tried this technique since the beginning of December, and felt globally much more productive since.

Answer the following questions:

• Was this day comfortable ?
• What made this day comfortable ?
• Can I generalize this observation and incorporate it in some kind of daily routine ?
• What made this day uncomfortable ?
• How to avoid it ?
• Can I generalize this observation and incorporate it in some kind of daily routine ?