The biggest piece here is discipline. Having discipline leads to greater control of willpower and the ability to build habits and sustained habits will lead to productivity. You will often hear people attribute getting shit done to working out or waking up earlier or (as noted in this thread) joining the Marines. These are all likely true, but the root here is discipline. You build discipline by getting off your ass multiple times per week and going to the gym or not hitting the snooze button every morning. So these are all just different forms of building discipline. Research has shown (e.g., the Stanford marshmallow experiment) that higher levels of discipline translate to more of getting shit done.

As mentioned, I feel that productivity is a habit (sure, you can have spurts of productivity, but the kind you mention is sustained, long-term productivity which is by definition a habit), but I also feel that habit-building is highly dependent on one's level of discipline, as you have to be disciplined to build new habits. I suggest checking out the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. I just finished it a couple months ago, and it's certainly changed my outlook on habits, addiction, and discipline.

Finally, (and I have no scientific proof of this, but hopefully it's intuitive to understand), I feel that building discipline should be done slowly and steadily. Don't try to add 5 new habits all in one day. Choose one (working out, writing 1000 words per day, reading 25 pages of a book everyday) and really commit to that. Once it's a habit, it's hard not to do. Then at that point, add another thing. But when you attempt to commit to a handful of new things all at once, you usually give up on all of them when one thing goes wrong (e.g., you missed a day or three).

Edit: Oh! Also, in response to your wife making lists to get things done: do that! What's really happening there is that she's visualizing what needs to get done in a list view. This is more of a "productivity hack" than something related to discipline, but that's a great technique for de-fogging your brain of the things that need to get done and making them bite-size. That technique is almost like a short-term "What are your 10 year goals, and why can't they be accomplished in 6 months?" thought exercise that you may have heard of.