Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

A day begun late is spent chasing, and chasing never quite catches up. The narrower truth here is about pace and the position you start from: work begun early feels ordinary, while the same work begun behind schedule feels frantic and takes longer for it. Difficulty is partly a property of timing rather than of the task. What you do first thing sets the tempo of everything after it.

Look at where your mornings actually go. Moving the start of the real work half an hour earlier tends to buy back more than half an hour, because you are no longer paying the surcharge that hurry adds.