If you want extraordinary results, you'll have to put in extraordinary effort. No one becomes a 100m sprint world record holder by sitting on a couch. No successful entrepreneur became rich by working 24hours a week.
So, how do you become a successful self-made person? Well, during the daytime, there are a lot of distractions. There are business and personal meetings. You have a phone in your pocket that screams for your attention. There are e-mails, colleagues, social media, birds ticking on the window, a crying baby, and so on and so forth. Unless you say no to everything else and lock yourself up in a room, you might have a perfect working day.
There are two moments when you can get extra work done. That's very, very early in the morning. Six in the morning is a good start. But for top-peak extraordinary behaviour, the grind should start around 04.00. Because if you wake up at 06.00, first of all, a lot of people are already waking up. Secondly, you can have only one or two hours of work before most other people wake up. At four in the morning, you'll have at least a couple of hours totally free of distraction.
The other option is my preferred route. After everyone else is asleep or hitting the bar, you can get a lot done. This is obviously not for the morning people, but I am a night owl anyway. Often, at the end of the day, I get creative inspiration. I have time to do research; I have time to finish my to-do list of digital things, work on websites, design, create, etc.
For example, I just finished editing a video for Thais Tafelen at 01.30 and I started writing this note. Currently it's 02.00 and I agree this is a bit too late to start writing. I'd like to aim to work from 22.00 to around 01.00 so I can still enjoy evenings with Ollie and Mandy, but at the same time still have three solid hours to work. Now, it's just a bit too late to write.