Scheduling works for me. Not a TODO list. I schedule what I shall be doing tomorrow and as soon as that's done, I get out of office. This motivates me to start work early in the morning, just to feel relaxed after finishing my work for the day by 11:00, for example.
That somehow never works for me. Partially because when writing code you cant always knw how long wil it take (issues come up all the time. debugging can take a while especially if it's a big project and there is a lot of code written by a lot of different people)
You bring up a great point that I think the article left out—scheduling the tasks ahead of time before the day you have to do them can help tremendously. For me, that is motivation in and of itself that I can just start the next day with it already planned.
