How to be more productive

It's just approaching 7.30am, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the beagle is snoring after getting up, having breakfast and then deciding a post breakfast snooze was in order...

So far today, I've launched an offer, I've posted in my Facebook groups, I've written a newsletter, I've even made some money, to all intents and purposes, right now I am Casey Neistat!

If you don't know, Casey Neistat gets out of bed every morning at 4am because it's the most productive part of the day when the internet is quiet, the chances are that even if you send out 10 emails, you won't have to worry about getting replies.  At 4am, the world is a quieter, more peaceful place and a place you can be uber productive too.

There's 1 single problem with this though...

I hate mornings!!

I've come to understand I'm more of a night owl than a lark, I literally loathe mornings and rarely get out of bed before about 8am, and that's dependent on if I wake up with a migraine or not, in which case, I usually take the medication and then sleep until 9ish because it knocks me out.  It's actually rare that I'm up at half five but today was the exception.  Looby had obviously disturbed because I heard her up and about and I decided in my sleepy brain that today was the day I would embrace the morning, I would get up, I would have copious amounts of frothy coffee courtesy of Nancy the Nespresso and I would get a start on the day.

Now it's not the first time that this has happened, I have had periods in my life (usually during the lighter summer months) when I've risen early and it's always the case that by 10am I have changed the world, well my world, not the actual world, I may be many things but I'm not God!

There are other things you can do if you can't bear an early start though, a couple of years ago, after working on my laptop, always in front of the TV, I found I just wasn't being productive enough so I got a desk and I got an iMac and it's still true now that when I'm sat at my desk in front of my iMac, I feel like businesswoman of the year, "buy, buy, sell, sell" my internal monologue shouts and I often plan my best schemes to take over the world (in the nicest way possible) when I'm sitting at my desk.

I think having an area in your house where you "go to work" helps massively when you are self-employed, if you don't have one it's pretty much just sitting at the laptop whilst watching Game of Thrones and we all do that, self employed or otherwise...

It's hard to separate life and business when you are self employed or work from home and it doesn't work for everyone.  I have 2 friends, the lovely Rachel and Steph and they both work remotely, employed by companies to save desk space and work from home (it's the future) but they're both paragons of productivity, clearly for some people, they need a cubicle and a boss who'll ask for proof that they're actually not slinking off to the water cooler every six seconds.

I've been self employed now for over a decade and if it wasn't for productivity and self management I would have been homeless, starving and probably sectioned.  It's like I've build my own structure, my own targets and my own to-do list which I mostly always manage to complete.

Working alone is hard and if you're one of those people who goes through periods of not being as productive as you should be, why not get a friend who's also self employed to be your accountability partner?  It wouldn't actually work for me as I hate being told what to do, there's a reason I am the mistress of my own destiny but for some, it works and if that's you, then do it, do it now!

The truth is, to be productive for me in a perfect world, I need the early morning starts, it's probably my only time of day when my brain fires with the right pixels, quite simply I write better, I think better, I just do stuff better and so right here and now, for the next few months of lightness, I shall be sleeping with the curtains open in the hopes that Mr (or Mrs) sun wakes me up early every morning so I can achieve everything I want to this year.

Go on, wish me luck...