This probably happens to you as well once in a while - you wake up from a fairly good sleep, you eat breakfast, you drink a cup of coffee or tea, you sit in front of your computer, and you go through the tasks you have to focus on for that day. Then, for some weird reason, you start working on one of those tasks and you just don't feel like stopping. Your hands move faster, you are more focused than before, and you feel like you can get a lot of things done.
That is what I call a productive mood, or a proficiency mood. It's when, on random days, you get an extra boost of focus, and you're able to do one or two things faster and better than you would normally do them.
For example, I have days in which I wake up and my hands are just warm enough, but not too warm, and typing is just really easy, sometimes averaging at around 115 words per minute. Ideas flow through my mind almost non-stop, and I can put words on paper really easily.
Sometimes the same thing happens but with another activity, let's say 3D modelling. I just wake up with several ideas for different models, already knowing how I should build them and where they'll go, and it takes very little effort to spend a few hours just focusing on that particular activity.
Those type of moods appear once in a while, without any reason whatsoever.
It is at such a time that it's a good idea to change your entire schedule and to make it fit your productivity mood, because you need to learn how to take advantage of those moments.
If one day you wake up in the mood to write, and you can do it easily, without struggling to find ideas, and without fighting with your keyboard to write without making mistakes, then that's an opportunity. When that happens to me, I try to make room in my schedule for as much writing as I can.
The reason for that is quite simple - if I write when I'm in one of those moods, I can finish up to 4 or 5 articles in just a few hours, depending on the topics I choose to write about and how long the articles are gonna be. That obviously helps me get a week's worth of work in a single day, which means I'm gonna have more time for other things in the following days.
Not only that, but when I'm in one of those writing moods the articles I write are usually a bit better than what I normally write. I can focus a lot more, I enjoy the process a lot and I get a lot of pleasure out of writing the best things that I can at that moment, which results in fairly decent articles.
I'm giving writing as an example because it's the main activity I do at the present moment. I had days in which I woke up with a mood for coding, and that helped me finish projects that I was stuck with for weeks. Same thing for 3D modelling, graphic design, and a lot of other things.
Productivity moods happen at random and it's good to take advantage of them. The idea that you should stick to your schedule is a good one, if not sticking to it means wasting your time doing nothing productive. However, when you're in one of those productive moods, altering your schedule a bit to give yourself a little bit of room to focus on one activity more than anything else can result in a lot of good work being done.
I feel like this needs to be said, and reminded to others, because the idea that you should stick to your schedule no matter what is being promoted so much that it can hurt instead of helping. A schedule is great. I use one right now. But sometimes changing it, or ignoring it, in order to focus on one main activity that you feel like you could spend hours on during certain days is a great idea.