As a writer, and as a human being, I am not a morning person.

Mornings for me have always been eerie, sickly, befuddling continents, shifting at about 10am into a new geography involving the tender preparation and cautious, careful consumption of earl grey tea.

People who get up in the morning are often people I admire, people I aspire to be more like. My grandfather, ex army, several hundred years old, gets up at the crack of dawn and marches through fields and villages, cities and towns, other dimensional realms etc returning in time for two pieces of charcoal covered in honey, and tea. My routine inherited only the tea. It seems to me that if only I could manage the getting up early part of the routine, I might also live to be a hundred, marching through fields and villages and getting my photograph in the local newspaper for riding a Harley Davidson motorbike at the age of ninety-one (seriously, check this out).

Among my peers, too, I am surrounded. Rita Walsh, Standing There producer (also my boss) gets up half an hour after she goes to bed, runs the Melbourne marathon because she "might as well give it a go”, and never forgets anything, with the notable exception of how long she has paid for parking. When we worked together in an office, years ago, I would turn up to work, stumble through the day and marvel at Rita’s machine-like efficiency. She was like Industrial Era Europe - all shiny pistons and fast-moving conveyor belts. At about three in the afternoon, however, Rits would drop like a marionette and I would emerge, hero-like, from a thick fog, finally ready to conquer all the things Rita hadn’t already done. This usually meant it was my job to get Rita a coffee, put the phones on voicemail, and go home.

The problem is though, Rita has adapted. Like a sea creature growing legs and striding up the shore towards a future splitting the atom and having opposable thumbs and so forth, Rita now works until quite late at night. I, on the other hand, remain back in the dark ages.

So this morning, we began Operation Make Lorin More Productive on Monday Mornings. It’s not a name we’ve run past our marketing and communications manager yet, but you get the idea. I need to write to schedule now. That means not at midnight.

I was outside, vertical, walking to a meeting with Rita, at seven thirty this morning. Things actually happen at that time. The sun hits a different part of your face. Old ladies - the same ones who would put doilies out when a guest was coming - stand outside in their front gardens frowning as they hose the geraniums, squinting at you in their puffy high-fire-danger dressing gowns, hair already in curlers. When I got to the meeting, I had to excuse myself and squeeze past a seagull who was scooping the top off a puddle of morning water with its orange beak.

It’s only taken a day, but I’m already a morning person.

When I got to the State Library, I was proud to be among the library nerds I usually curse who stand out the front like people queuing for grand final tickets, waiting for the library to open so they can go in and achieve more by midday than the rest of us would achieve in a week.

Yeah, I’m one of those guys now. You just watch.