I like this, but I have this bad habit of taking what's worked for successful people and having it not work for me. I've tried every imaginable scheduling technique until I realized that they just don't make much difference for me.

What does? The project itself. If I fall in love with the task at hand, I want to work on it so badly, I don't need a schedule. If I'm not in love with the task at hand, schedules don't work.

As a child, when I got a new baseball glove, I slept with it the first few nights. Now I do the same thing with hard copies of clean compiles. That's love.