One of the contract's I'm doing works best if I get up at 5.30am. I don't have to, but if I do, I get to reduce the commute time, and spend more time with the kids. These are great motivators, but they're struggling in the battle against my internal clock.

I'm an night-time person. I've always done my best work from around 5pm through to about 2am. At midnight my head is buzzing with ideas and sleep is the last thing on my mind. In fact I can't sleep. If I try to go to bed I just keep getting up again to write down things I think of, ideas, stuff to do tomorrow etc etc. I find mornings however are best appreciated with heavy eyelids from the horizontal comfort of a cuddly duvet.

The worst thing about this is that my wife's internal clock is the opposite to mine. Around 9pm she starts to fade and it's a rare evening when she's still concious after 10pm. But whatever time she needs to be up, she springs gazelle like into action unpurturbed by the process of de-duveting. When one of us is awake and doing, the other is snoring :(

The ideal solution would seem to be a 28 hour day, so I wonder what sort of bump this planet would need to add 4 hours to a day?