How to
Spend The First Hour of Your Work Day on High-Value Tasks
Don’t begin the activities of your day until you know
exactly what you plan to accomplish. Don’t start your day until you have it
planned. — Jim Rohn
Every
morning, get one most important thing done immediately.
There
is nothing more satisfying than feeling like you’re already in the flow.
And
the easiest way to trigger this feeling is to work on your most important task
in the first hour.
Use your mornings for high-value work.
Lean
to avoid the busy work that adds no real value to your work, vision or
long-term goal.
Low
value activities, including responding to notifications, or reacting to emails
keep you busy and stop you from getting real work done. Make time for work that
matters.
In his book, Getting Things Done: The Art
of Stress-Free Productivity, David
Allen says, “If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention,
it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”
Research shows that it takes, on average, more than 23 minutes to fully
recover your concentration after a trivial interruption.
Productive mornings start with early wake-up calls
“In a poll of 20 executives cited by Vanderkam, 90% said
they wake up before 6 a.m. on weekdays.
PepsiCo
CEO Indra Nooyi, for example, wakes at 4 a.m. and is in the office no later
than 7 a.m.
Meanwhile,
Disney CEO Bob Iger gets up at 4:30 to read, and Square CEO Jack Dorsey is up
at 5:30 to jog.”
The
first quiet hour of the morning can be the ideal time to focus on an important
work project without being interrupted.
Don’t plan your day in the first hour of
your morning
Cut
the planning and start doing real work. You are most active on a Monday
Morning.
Think
about it. After a weekend of recovery, you have the most energy, focus and
discipline to work on your priorities.
Don’t
waste all that mental clarity and energy planning what to do in the next eight
hours.
Do
your planning the night before.
Think
of Sunday as the first chance to prepare yourself for the week’s tasks.
Monday
mornings will feel less dreadful and less overwhelming if you prepare the night
before.
If you choose to prioritise…
There
are one million things you could choose to do in your first hour awake.
If you
choose to start your day with a daily check list/to-do list, make sure that
next to every task you have the amount of time it will take to complete them.
The
value of the of putting time to tasks is that, every time you check something
off, you are able to measure how long it took you to get that task done, and
how much progress you are making to better plan next time.
Get the uncomfortable out of the way
You
probably know about Brian Tracy’s “eat-a-frog”-technique from his classic time-management book, Eat That Frog?
In the
morning, right after getting up, you complete the most unwanted task you can
think of for that day (= the frog).
Ideally
you’ve defined this task in the evening of the previous day.
Completing
an uncomfortable or difficult task not only moves it out of your way, but it
gives you great energy because you get the feeling you’ve accomplished
something worthwhile.
Do you have a plan from yesterday?
Kenneth
Chenault, former CEO and Chairman of American Express, once said in an
interview that the last thing he does before leaving the office is to write
down the top 3 things to accomplish tomorrow, then using that list to start his
day the following morning.
This
productivity hack works for me.
It
helps me focus and work on key tasks. It also helps me disconnect at the end of
the day and allow time for my brain to process and reboot.
Trust
me, planning your day the night before will give you back a lot wasted hours in
the morning and lower your stress levels.
Try
this tonight.
If
you’re happy with the results, then commit to trying it for a
week.
After
a week, you’ll be able to decide whether you want to add “night-before
planning” to your life.
Thomas Oppong
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-spend-the-first-hour-of-your-work-day-on-high-value-work-575dc56d2ee4
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