I’ve noticed a laziness creeping into my blogging routine over the summer, which has led to frustration, lowered productivity, and longer work hours.

At the same time, I’ve been aware that I needed to ramp up some of my own personal projects, both from a financial point of view as well as to broaden the subject areas that I write about.

I’m a morning person, in as much that, if I can peel myself out of bed and do something useful in the first hour or so, then I’m generally fairly well set up for the rest of the day.

If I don’t, things tend to go wrong no matter how hard I try. That’s not being defeatist; it’s just a fact.

I spent the weekend thinking about how I could change that, and also decided to go and read some of the posts over at StevePavlina.com. I think in a lot of things we’re quite on the same wavelength, and he doesn’t try to obfuscate a lack of knowledge with big, fancy words the way some self-professed “experts” do.

Anyway, I was most interested in articles such as How to Become an Early Riser, How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off, and a lot of his Productivity articles.

Based partly on what I’d read, things I already knew but had let slide, I came up with the following ten points that are most important to me at the moment:

1. Get up early:
   

   Absolutely essential. I’d taken to either waking “naturally” and then drifting, sometimes until around 8am, instead of setting my alarm for 6am and getting up as soon as it went off.

   Consequently, I felt sluggish, was often frustrated with myself for losing time, and started work late and in a bad frame of mind.

   This morning I was bolt upright as soon as the alarm starting beeping, up, dressed, and downstairs by 6.05am. Brilliant!

2. Avoid distractions:
   

   I find that if I am motivated and have purpose in my work, I’m much less easily distracted. I wasn’t put off by noise in the street, the postman, or any similar irritations.

3. Don’t multitask:
   

   I had told myself that multitasking was a fine attribute, and indeed, in certain circumstances (when one task is menial, for example) it can be. However, for brain-intensive and/or creative working, it’s not. This leads on to…

4. Stick with one subject for as long as possible:
   

   I had started to flit backwards and forwards between subjects. This works sometimes, particularly if the next point is to be fulfilled. However, flitting around for the sake of it, when there’s plenty of material on one subject to write about, seems counterproductive.

   Today, I created chunks of time devoted to the different blogs I write for. Only towards the end of the day, when the pressure of other targets had eased, did I relax into alternating the writing of articles for two or three different blogs.

5. Just write:
   

   Research and reading are great, but at the end of the day, I’m a writer.

   I used to find myself spending so long reading articles, going through Google Reader looking for leads, and seeking out press releases, that I’d be exhausted before I’d even written anything.

   Chunking into subjects helped, as it meant that I could focus on research on just one subject (but still able to siphon off related articles for other blogs if they came up) for maybe 30-40 minutes, then write a decent block of articles, with plenty of mental energy.

6. Keep an ideas list:
   

   I’d already created a Google Notepad for ideas for articles. I’m still working on it. I need to remember to write down any ideas — even fragments — as soon as they occur to me, so that I don’t lose potentially valuable information that could be worked into future posts.

7. Banish email, social networking sites, and games:
   

   Don’t talk to me about the curse of email and Facebook!

   Yes, I checked email pretty much every time it went “Bing”, and usually it was something that could have waited.

   It’s not always easy to ignore, as some important things do come in via email, but today the timings worked very well indeed. Let’s hope it continues that way.

   I also put a “Not Available” on Skype, which is not as harsh as “Do Not Disturb” but gets the point across. At least, no-one Skyped me this morning.

8. Drink plenty of water:
   

   Keep forgetting to do it, stupid boy. Today I had the bottle of water sitting right in front of my monitor. It’s definitely helped, particularly as I’ve cut down the caffeine recently, too.

9. Exercise at least once a day:
   

   Our new dog takes care of this for me. Come rain or shine, I’m out every morning walking him in the woods. It’s a great head clearer at the start of the day.

10. Tell others what you’re doing:
    

    As of today, I’m going to be summarising all the posts I’ve written on various blogs. That way, we can all see publicly what sort of day I’ve had. Not that I expect to be beaten up about it, but it’s another incentive to write more than five posts a day!

So there you go. Day One of new regime down, plenty more to go.

These aren’t earth-shattering tips by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re working for me. Sometimes things have to be relearned so we can move forward to bigger and better things.