So I just realized that I haven’t posted anything regarding my GTD-experiment for over a week - FAIL!

The last week was in some ways a relapse back to what I was trying to get away from. I wasn’t entirely consistent with getting up at 7am and I haven’t been completely strict with cutting down on checking my e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and stuff like that.

But compared to where I started at, I still feel that I’m making a progress towards being more productive. Suckiness, be gone.

Since I haven’t really mastered the whole early riser-thing - or cutting back on Facebooking/Twittering/etc. for that part - I guess I have to focus on these things yet another week before moving on to fully incorporating GTD and the app Things into my life.

To have something productive to do instead of the Facebooking and Twittering I’m going to schedule one hour of reading every day. I purchased something like 100 books a year ago and I haven’t even read 25% of them through and through.

I guess it’s time to get started.

I’ve been doing my little productivity experiment for almost a week now and I’m actually getting some results out of it.

I’ve been pretty much 100% consistent with getting up at 7am and I’ll probably start getting up at 6 am soon as well.

Besides becoming an early riser, I was also supposed to cut down on reading e-mail, Facebooking, Twittering and randomly browsing the web.

Most of the time I’ve been able to limit the time I’m reading and responding to e-mail, keeping track of what’s going on on Facebook, Twitter etc. and instant messaging to one hour between 12 pm and 1 pm.

Something I haven’t yet figured out though is to be 100% consistent with this. It’s dead simple to avoid these things in the morning (I tend to be a lot more motivated and get more stuff done in the morning) but during evenings I find that I become pretty easily distracted and have a tendency to fire up Facebook or MSN Messenger and just waste time.

I can’t really figure out why it is this way, but it would be awesome to track down the reason. So during this week I’m going to challenge myself to find a way to stay productive and focused during evenings as well.

Do you have any tips and pointers on how to achieve this?

All right, so this is the first day of my little productivity experiment.

The first thing I said I was going to sort out was becoming an early riser. As I said in the other blog post, there are great benefits to be gained from doing this (and if you still need to be convinced take a look at Steve Pavlina’s articles ‘How to Become an Early Riser‘ and ‘How to Become an Early Riser – Part II‘).

Even though I went to bed 4am last night (the post about the productivity experiment took much longer to finish than I anticipated) I set my alarm at 7am and I got up, even though I only had 3 hours of sleep. As you can imagine I’m really, really tired. But this basically means that I’ll fall asleep pretty early tonight which results in that it’ll be easier to get up at 7am tomorrow.

The hardest part of trying to get this sorted out is actually to get out of bed. Something I’ve tried before (and that has been quite successful) is to jump out of bed as soon as you’ve gotten woken up by the alarm and do something that physically engages your body; being it sit ups, push ups or something equivalent. The sudden activity forces your body to set itself in an active state, prepared for a long day of activities.