I have also found that anything that requires creative thinking is best done early in the morning and simple mechanical stuff late in the afternoon.

Note that this varies from person to person. I have the opposite polarity to you: it takes me a few hours in the morning to get out of the mechanical crap stage, and I hit my coding flow in the latter half or two-thirds of my workday.

The important thing is for each of us to figure out what works individually and plan around that. I am fortunately able to have most of my meetings in the morning, for example, where they don't interrupt my creative time.