What Successful People Do With The First Hour
Of Their Work Day
How
much does the first hour of every day matter? As it turns out, a lot. It can be
the hour you see everything clearly, get one real thing done, and focus on the
human side of work rather than your task list.
Remember
when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about
your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was
called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people
schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too.
The first hour of the workday
goes a bit differently for Craig Newmark of Craigslist, David Karp of Tumblr,
motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you
it makes a big difference. Here are the first items on their daily to-do list.
Don’t
Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That.
Tumblr founder David Karp will
“try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him.
“Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive,” Karp said. “If
something urgently needs my attention, someone will call or text me.”
Not all of us can roll into the
office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs
that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization
and single-focus work. It’s an idea that serves as the title of Julie Morgenstern’s work management book Never Check Email In The Morning,
and it’s a fine strategy for leaving the office with the feeling that, even on
the most over-booked days, you got at least one real thing done.
If you need to make sure the
most important messages from select people come through instantly, AwayFind can monitor your inbox and get your
attention when something notable arrives. Otherwise, it’s a gradual but
rewarding process of training interruptors and coworkers not to expect
instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.
Gain
Awareness, Be Grateful
One smart, simple question on
curated Q & A site Quora asked “How do the most successful
people start their day?”. The most popular response came from a devotee of Tony Robbins,
the self-help guru who pitched the power of mindful first-hour rituals long
before we all had little computers next to our beds.
Robbins
suggests setting up an “Hour of Power,” “30 Minutes to Thrive,” or at least
“Fifteen Minutes to Fulfillment.” Part of it involves light exercise, part of
it involves motivational incantations, but the most accessible piece involves
10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among
your family and friends, in your career, and the like. After that, visualize
“everything you want in your life as if you had it today.”
Robbins offers the “Hour of Power” segment of his Ultimate Edge series as a free audio stream (here’s the direct MP3 download).
Blogger Mike McGrath also wrote a concise summary of the Hour of
Power). You can be sure that at least some of the more driven people
you’ve met in your career are working on Robbins’ plan.
Do
the Big, Shoulder-Sagging Stuff First
Brian Tracy’s classic
time-management book Eat That Frog gets
its title from a Mark Twain saying that, if you eat a live frog first thing in
the morning, you’ve got it behind you for the rest of the day, and nothing else
looks so bad. Gina
Trapani explained it well in a video for her Work Smart series).
Combine that with the concept of getting one thing done before you wade into
email, and you’ve got a day-to-day system in place. Here’s how to force
yourself to stick to it:
Choose
Your Frog
"Choose your frog, and
write it down on a piece of paper that you'll see when you arrive back at your
desk in the morning, Tripani
advises."If you can, gather together the material you'll need
to get it done and have that out, too."
One
benefit to tackling that terrible, weighty thing you don’t want to do first
thing in the morning is that you get some space from the other people involved
in that thing--the people who often make the thing more complicated and
frustrating. Without their literal or figurative eyes over your shoulder, the
terrible thing often feels less complex, and you can get more done.
Ask
Yourself If You’re Doing What You Want to Do
Feeling unfulfilled at work
shouldn’t be something you realize months too late, or even years. Consider
making an earnest attempt every morning at what the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs
told a graduating class at Stanford to do:
When I
was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as
if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an
impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the
mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my
life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the
answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to
change something.
“Customer
Service” (or Your Own Equivalent)
Craigslist founder Craig
Newmark answered the first hour
question succinctly: “Customer service.” He went on to explain (or
expand) that he also worked on current projects, services for military families
and veterans, and protecting voting rights. But customer service is what
Newmark does every single day at Craigslist, responding to user complaints and
smiting scammers and spammers. He almost certainly has bigger fish he could
pitch in on every day, but Newmark says customers service “anchors
me to reality.”
Your
own version of customer service might be keeping in touch with contacts from
year-ago projects, checking in with coworkers you don’t regularly interact
with, asking questions of mentors, and just generally handling the human side
of work that quickly gets lost between task list items. But do your customer
service on the regular, and you’ll have a more reliable roster of helpers when
the time comes.
What do
you with the first hour of your workday to increase productivity and reduce
stress? Tell us about it in the comments below.
