As someone who gets up early and works out, I have noticed that the discipline required to make it to the gym early carries through the rest of my life. The flip side is when I start being lazy in one area of my life it permeates to other areas.
It's good that you've found something that works for you, but sadly it won't necessarily generalise. And the danger of this is thinking that people who don't do this are lazy.
To anybody struggling with this, the thread "Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?" [0] is full of frank and good advice.
Another peculiarity I've found is that all the little things I do are connected. Something as simple as going on HN to read through comments, instead of some other medium, will snowball into a huge change, as the rest of my habits start becoming more in-line with the effects of "reading HN comments." The main point here is that you have little control over your circumstances, your mood, and your self, but you have a very simple choice: engage in something that's beneficial regularly or don't. If you do, everything else has a way of "falling into place" as you unconsciously veer away from negative activities towards more productive ones. The same can be said about friends, as they will undoubtedly have an effect on your overall actions.
With this in mind, the gym becomes this "center." That one thing which you enter voluntarily. The one choice you make to go lift for an hour daily, will be the foundation for everything else to build off of. The choice of doing something that requires discipline will carryover into other areas of life, as you become more independent of outcomes and things that don't matter. A more apt example would be having a family. If you make the intentful choice to make sure your family is doing well, then as long as they are, everything else will be fine. Perfect even. Lifting is no different. As long as you get that 1 hour of discipline, everything else will be just fine.
But another thing's been nagging me. I see it often, this "danger of this is thinking that people who don't do this are lazy." That the side effects of judging people are worse than the benefits you get from the actions which warranted that judgement. There's also the veneer of self-rationalization that I cannot shake from reading such comments. Maybe it is sour grapes? I don't say this with the intent to insult, but I cannot shake the feeling that there's something off about these sorts of thinking. Maybe it's the trying to poke holes in the topic instead of using it as a standard to aim for. Maybe it's the seesaw of polarization. Wherein these people have went from one extreme, of hyper-productivity and massive effort to be "efficient," and then swung to the other side as they burned out and feel like they've "grown as a person," and realized it's ok to be "yourself." Which in itself, would be a good thought, but it's adulterated into being an excuse for lack of want to do something that may or not be beneficial, but hard.
This doesn't mean your solution is wrong! It's just a csse of different circumstances. Very hard to generalize this stuff.
[1]https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/willpower-limited-resource.pd...
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...