For me the most important thing is to start working on something first thing in the morning before I start poking around on the Internet. If I spend an hour checking up on Twitter, HN, Reddit, or whatever it totally kills my productivity for the day. If I can spend just 20-30 minutes working on work before I catch up on the day's news I have a much better time focusing on my work throughout the rest of the day.
This exactly the same for me. Just out of muscle memory, my reptilian brain starts typing Reddit or Hacker News into the URL field in my browser when I'm not paying attention. If I start my day wandering down the hacker news/reddit rabbit hole, I never really get out.
So when I wake up in the morning, literally before I do anything else on my computer, I turn on Self Control (http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/), which blocks sites that kill my productivity.
I've recently adopted org-mode for emacs, and it has helped immensely. Task #1 everyday: Turn on Self Control for a few hours. The last task everyday: Close all windows and make sure org-mode is greeting me when I wake up with Task #1 for the day.
We really are the same. I keep a journal in org-mode and in my .emacs I have cron-like periodic function that switches to my journal in the middle of the night so that it's the first thing I see when I unlock my computer in the morning. Something like:
That's an awesome idea. Anything that pares down the number of decisions I have to make to jumpstart my day...
I only picked up emacs about a month ago, investing heavily in customizing it. It has seriously helped so much with my focus since it takes out all the distractions/opportunities for context switching.
