The Morning Routine Experts Recommend
For Peak Productivity
What’s the
best way to start your day so that you really get things done?
Laura Vanderkam
studied the schedules of high-achievers. What did she find? Almost
all have a morning routine.
But you’re
busy. You don’t have time to read all that stuff. You need a plan. Okay, time
to round up what the experts have said and build a roadmap.
1) Stop
Reacting
Get up before
the insanity starts. Don’t check your email or anything else that is going to
dictate your behaviour.
Productivity
guru Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour
Workweek, says:
‘I try to
have the first 80 to 90 minutes of my day vary as little as possible. I think
that a routine is necessary to feel in control and non-reactive, which reduces
anxiety. It therefore also makes you more productive.’
Most of us
get up and it seems like things are already in motion. Got to race to
something. Emails coming in. We’re already behind.
So of
course you aren’t achieving your goals. You immediately started with what
the world threw at you and then just reacted, reacted, reacted as new things
came in until the day ended or you were too exhausted to do what was important.
You need to
wake up before the insanity starts. Before demands are made on you. Before
your goals for the day have competition.
Okay, you’re
ahead of the maelstrom. What do you need to do before things get thrown at you?
2)
Decide The 3 Things That Matter Today
Cal Newport is so productive it makes me cry.
He’s a professor at Georgetown, cranks out academic papers, has written 4 books,
and is a dad and a husband. And he’s done by 5:30PM every day. What did Cal
have to say?
All tasks are
not created equal. Most of us deal with two fundamentally different types
of work, Shallow and Deep:
Shallow work
is little stuff like email, meetings, moving information around. Things that
are not really using your talents. Deep work pushes your current abilities to
their limits. It produces high value results and improves your skills.
Shallow work
stops you from getting fired — but deep work is what gets you promoted.
Deep work must get priority.
In his
book The ONE Thing,
Gary Keller applies the “Pareto principle” to the workday:
Most of us
get 80% of results from 20% of the work we do. So focus on that 20%.
What really
creates progress vs. treading water? What gives disproportionate results?
Do those things.
And don’t be
vague. Specify what you need to get done. Research shows
having concrete goals is correlated with huge increases in
confidence and feelings of control.
People who
construct their goals in concrete terms are 50 percent more likely to feel
confident they will attain their goals and 32 percent more likely to feel in
control of their lives. – Howatt 1999
Okay, you
know what is important. Now you need to think about when.
3) Use
Your “Magic Hours” For Your 3 Goals
Just like all
tasks aren’t created equal, all hours aren’t created equal either.
Dan Ariely is
a behavioral economist at Duke University and the New York Times bestselling
author of Predictably
Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
Dan says
you have 2-2.5 hours of peak productivity every day. You may actually
be 30% more effective at that time. Here’s Dan:
…it turns out
that most people are productive in the first two hours of the morning. Not
immediately after waking, but if you get up at 7 you’ll be most
productive from around from 8-10:30.
And Dan’s
findings line up with other research. It is postulated that 2.5 to 4 hours
after waking is when your brain is sharpest. You want to waste
that on a conference call or a staff meeting?
Studies show
that alertness and memory, the ability to think clearly and to learn, can vary
by between 15 and 30 percent over the course of a day. Most of us are sharpest
some two and a half to four hours after waking.
But does this
really work? In studies of
geniuses, most did their best work early in the day.
Those are the
hours when you should be working on your 3 goals. Designate that part
of your day as “protected time.”
Maybe you
know that you’re a night owl. Fine, then protect those hours. The
important thing is to do your key tasks during your key hours.
You know
what’s important today and you know when your best hours are. But maybe you’re
not motivated or you feel like procrastinating. How can you get going?
4)
Have A Starting Ritual
Charles Duhigg is a reporter for the New York
Times and author of the bestseller The Power of
Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. What did he say
about fighting procrastination and getting things done?
Finishing
things isn’t as much of a problem as just getting started in the first
place. Here’s Charles:
One way to
use habits to fight procrastination is to develop a habitualised response to
starting. When people talk about procrastination, what they’re usually actually
talking about is the first step. In general, if people can habitualise that
first step, it makes it a lot easier.
Maybe getting
that cup of coffee is the signal that you’re getting down to business. Or do
you have a spot where you’re usually productive? Go there.
Wendy Wood, a
professor at USC explains how your environment activates habits — without your
conscious mind even noticing.
Habits emerge
from the gradual learning of associations between an action and outcome, and
the contexts that have been associated with them. Once the habit is formed,
various elements from the context can serve as a cue to activate the behavior,
independent of intention and absent of a particular goal… Very often, the
conscious mind never gets engaged.
Some days it
just isn’t going to happen. You can’t get going on that #1 task. What should
you do when all else fails?
5) Use
“Positive Procrastination”
Yes,
procrastination can be a good thing — but it has to be the right kind
of procrastination.
When do you
usually get 1000 things done? When you’re avoiding that one thing that
absolutely terrifies you.
If you know
you can’t do that scary thing right now, do not turn to Facebook or video
games. Tell yourself it’s okay to avoid it — as long as you’re doing the #2
thing on your to-do list.
Dr. John
Perry, author of The Art of
Procrastination, explains a good method for using this to trick
yourself into massive productivity:
The key to
productivity…is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about
it. At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not
impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and
seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include
some doable tasks that really matter. “Doing these tasks becomes a way of
not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes.
A similar tip
is described by Piers Steel, author of The
Procrastination Equation:
My best trick
is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by
working on another.
Dr. Steel
says it’s based on sound principles of behavioral psychology:
We are
willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something
worse.
At this
point, I know what some of you are saying: Where are the bullet points? I
need bullet points to follow!
No problem.
Here you go:
Sum Up
Here’s what
we can put together from listening to all the experts:
1.
Stop reacting. Get up before the world starts making demands so you can
figure out what’s important to you.
2. Decide what matters today. You
won’t get everything done, so what will move the needle? What will let you end
the day feeling like you accomplished something? No more than 3 goals.
3. Use your “magic hours” for those
three things. Your peak productivity time is probably an hour or two after you
wake up. If you know your best hours are at another time, fine. Protect your
“magic hours.”
4. Have a starting ritual. Go to the
place where you get stuff done. Get your coffee. Anything that tells your brain
it’s time to rock.
5. When things go sideways, use
“positive procrastination.” If you can’t tackle the super scary
thing, do the pretty scary thing. Designating a super
scary thing in advance as a decoy can make that pretty scary thing much
easier.
We’re all
trying to achieve work-life balance. You’re not going to get everything done. But start the day
right and you can definitely accomplish what matters. I’ve said it before
and I’ll say it again:
‘You can do anything
once you stop trying to do everything.’
No comments:
Post a Comment