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One of the most popular episodes of the original Twilight Zone series is “Time Enough at Last.” Burgess Meredith plays Henry Bemis, a bank teller with thick glasses who is obsessed with reading.

One day during his lunch break, he goes to the bank vault to read.  Suddenly there is a violent explosion, which knocks him out. He later wakes up to find that an atomic bomb has destroyed the world. He was protected from the blast by the bank vault, and now he is the only person left on earth.

Henry wanders the ruined city in despair and comes to the town library, where he finds all the books still intact. He suddenly realizes that he has all the time in the world to read and no one to bother him. In one of the greatest plot twists in television history, he reaches down for a book and drops his glasses, shattering the lenses. 

Henry Bemis had all the time in the world but lost the one tool he needed to make use of it.

Most writers have the opposite problem. We have all the tools and technology we could ever want, but not enough time. So there we remain, stuck in our own twilight zone of missed deadlines and unfinished projects.

What’s the solution? How do we escape this parallel dimension where we always seem to be short of time?

Perhaps the creator of the Twilight Zone himself, Rod Serling, can give us some guidance here. As the producer, narrator, and writer of 92 of the 156 episodes, Serling knew a thing or two about productivity. He gave us a peek behind the curtain of his success when he said, “I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.”

Could it be that simple? Maybe it is. When you look at the habits and rituals of some of the world’s most successful people, writers or otherwise, most of them have one thing in common: they do their best creative work early in the day.

So give it a shot. Try getting up fifteen minutes earlier for a week and doing some writing. Then if it’s successful, add another fifteen minutes next week. Pretty soon, you’ll love this newfound sense of productivity and wonder why you ever stayed stuck in the region known as … the Twilight Zone.