[danielh]

From my experience, the big advantage of waking up early to hack on a side project vs. staying up late is that I'm way more focused in the morning. If I manage to drag myself out of bed early, I don't waste the time with mindless surfing.

YMMV, but it is worth giving it a try.

[jokermatt999]

I used this in high school when I had to write reports. Instead of trying to work on them late and winding up chatting with my friends rather than working, I got up at 4:30. It wasn't fun, but I got those papers written because there was absolutely no way for me to distract myself that early. Procrastinating meant I wouldn't get that sweet, sweet 15 minutes of sleep before school. I handed in every single one of those reports on time.

That said, I don't recommend this approach for anything requiring creativity. They were mostly fact based, so creativity was less of a concern. My mood suffered because of poor sleep, but that was already an issue due to high school's early start time. Still, it's a good way to get mindless tasks done.

[bobochan]

I very rarely sleep past 5:30 but I feel the opposite way, particularly during the winter. There is something about getting up a couple of hours before sunrise that is very conducive to getting through a morning routine with the entire world running as a background process. I find myself standing in the kitchen with a half finished cup of coffee, listening to the BBC and been totally unable to recall anything that I had done for the previous 30 minutes.

[danielh]

I usually get up around 7:30, so getting up at 6:00 is somewhat special. Maybe the effect wears down once you get used to rising early.

[wccrawford]

I'm a 5:30 riser and have been for most of my life. I'm energetic in the morning, but I often find that I can't even remember if I locked the door on the way out because I was on auto-pilot. (I've actually only ever forgotten to lock it once.) I couldn't tell you anything I did in the morning unless it was out of the ordinary, like playing a video game before work.

But once the auto-pilot stuff is done, I'm wide awake and fully productive.

[bobochan]

Exactly, good to hear I'm not the only one. Fortunately nobody locks doors where we live or I'd been retracing my steps every day.

Do you ever crash around 4PM? I find that there are many days where I absolutely need a strong cup of coffee right around then, just to get me through to about 6PM when I perk back up again.

[GrooveStomp]

I suffer from this. I can rise around 6am, but around 2 or 3pm I crash hard. Staying the full day at work becomes a serious chore. I suspect this is because I haven't settled into a proper routine of doing this for more than a week straight. Unfortunately, when I've attempted this, I get incredibly unproductive in the afternoons, then I just feel like crashing when I get home, so in general my quality of life goes significantly down. Actually, I'm quite interested in reading this as I write it, because I've never explicitly anlayzed it before.

I find I'm typically happiest and most productive when I go to sleep and wake up as I wish. Normally for me this is sleep around 23h or 24h and waking up around 9h-ish. Of course, having to work an 8-hour day in the middle of my 14-15 waking hours only leaves me with 6-7 hours for commuting, cooking, eating, working on side projects, working out and spending time with my fiancee. Unfortunately, I often while away the hours working on side projects to the neglect of the rest of the things I care about. :\ When I do this, I often stay up well past midnight, so I get less sleep. My schedule winds up being something like: sleep from 2am to 7:30am, prep + commute + work + commute until about 6pm, eat and veg with fiancee until about 8pm, then work on side projects until 2am.

[wccrawford]

When I was drinking caffeine I did!

That stuff is particularly bad for me, so I'm off it totally. I definitely feel more energetic over the course of the day than I did drinking as much caffeine as I could. Or anything in-between.

[leftnode]

Yup, I wake at 330 every morning and have a good 3 hours to hack on a side project before work.