It's 3:45 in the morning as I start this hub.  Since I've gotten up at 2:30, I've addressed an email from a woman who wants to write for my blog, found some public domain images for a Second Life project, edited and uploaded them, set up Google's web optimization system, found an affiliate theme for my Wordpress blogs, and studied a half-week's worth of my e-commerce training course.  And in a short while I'll be done with this hub.  Extraordinary? Not really.  But if you knew the effect my bill-paying job still has on my motivation and creativity when I come home, you might see it as an improvement.  I sure do!

If you're a motivated enough person, you can write a ton of monetized blog posts, or learn everything you need to run a successful e-business and apply it while your offline bills pile up.  For the rest of us, there's the eternal question of how to balance time, mental energy and opportunity for all the daily tasks we have.

For most of my life, I've sneered at Benjamin Franklin's "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise."  I've written some great stories late at night and managed to get them published the day after. 

Well, that's about it, really.  The rest of staying up late for me after work involved a lot of leisure activities undertaken in the hopes I could get my second wind and crank out a web page, review or scripting project.  Unfortunately, that second wind never came about 90% of the time, and if you asked me what I've accomplished so far in my life, I've probably earned a fifth of what a house owner with a family has.  The resulting life has been occasionally rewarding, but it gets less and less fun doing grunt work as I near my 40s with no financial safety net.

So this is why I've decided to give Mr. Franklin's famed advice a second try.  In the past few weeks, I've been able to truncate an otherwise unproductive day and wake up with enough mental energy for the tasks I want to do, not someone else's, for about four hours.  No one else gets the most focused part of my day.  There are no interruptions and it's quieter than usual. 

Now that I'm on this track, I'm encouraged more often to call it an early night, so this productive change is self-encouraging.  I've had to restrict time out with friends to daylight hours, but they understand it's go time: when I've finally knuckled down and completed my web marketing course, and fixed my sites, and established a revenue amount I know I can, the free personal time will come.

I'm off for a cup of coffee.  All my online goals are met for the day and all I've got left is five hours at my lame job.

And it's only 5:18 AM. :)