This is rewritten from my answer at stackexchange – I’m updating and rewritting it here because I think people might be interested, and because I’d like to keep more of my content under one (virtual) roof.

A couple of years ago, I was trying to get the hang of early rising – because I felt that I got a lot more done on those days when I got out of bed early.

unfortunately I didn’t really have anyone to be accountable to (My job is work based not clock based – sometimes very long hours but it definitely doesn’t work on the Victorian system).

So I advertised on Gumtree (I think Craiglist is the equivalent in the US) with the headline “Are you competitive and want to wake up early” The rules we had were these.

We each must email each other before 7.10am in the morning, every day except Sunday. If one of us is late, or misses an email due sleeping in, they get a ‘late point’. At the end of the month, the person with the most late points gives £10 to a charity chosen by the other, and the scores are reset.

We carried on this for about a year (I was winning) before we decided to stop it and move onto other things, but it was a really really good way of setting up competition. At various points we evolved into sending over to-do lists and so on…

What I’m looking to do in the future, particularly at *some point* when I need a project to learn the twitter api I’ll build the funcationality into a twitterbot that can keep score (i.e you’d tweet the bot one to tell it that you want to be involved in the 6am league, and then tweet it every morning before 6am, at the end of the month it would tweet everyone with their scores…) But if anyone would like to take that coding off my hands they are welcome to. 🙂

By the way, if you liked this post, you might like my similar one on changing my mind.