Rise and Shine – Tackle Your Day First Thing in the Morning

The smell of coffee. Birds chirping. Sunlight streaming into the window blinds.

The morning doesn’t have to be all bad! And yet so many of us continue to prefer to sleep through one of the most enjoyable – and yes, impactful – parts of the day.

Look, I love a good sleep as much as the next person. But with a little discipline and time management, you can get plenty of rest in by turning in at a reasonable hour and allow yourself to get a fresh jump on the day during the period when you are least likely to be bothered by interruptions and distractions from other forces that aren’t invested in your priorities for your day. I fully credit my ability to build a multi-million dollar business with my capacity to change myself into a morning person. It has been a habit that has stuck and it has made all the difference in my life.

I’m not alone. A consistent theme you will find among high performers in every field of endeavor is that they were all up long before you most likely were today. They weren’t necessarily born as “morning people”. Making a practice of waking early is a habit just like anything else that you need to do to succeed.

• The Morning Experiment

If you aren’t convinced that you can do it, why not spend an experimental period and just try it out? Commit to spending a month to waking up early – you may be surprised with the results. You’ll likely find that you aren’t just more productive – you’re also happier and less stressed from beginning the day on your terms with more time for things like exercise, focusing on key priorities, and preparing breakfast. All of these are excellent reasons to be an early riser.

Success stories are littered with writers and entrepreneurs who carved out key focus times to work on their passion projects between 5 a.m. to 7 a.m each day before they reported to their “real job”. You may be stunned at how much you are able to cram into your day when you aren’t “playing defense” responding to inquiries from others. As I’ve written before, it all begins with laying out your game plan for the morning before you even go to bed. It’s not doing you much good to wake up and stumble around in search of what you should be doing. If you are going to forego the sleep, make sure it is worth your while!

• Own Your Schedule

Too many people spend their days allowing their agenda to be entirely dictated by others’ directives. They find themselves responding to emergencies and the latest “crisis” of the moment, rather than being able to focus on the growth activities that will help them develop over the long haul. The challenge, of course, is that many of us work for someone else in some sense – if not as an employee, perhaps as someone serving a client. This is, of course, why so many of us work toward financial independence to begin with. We want to live our days without having to perpetually answer to someone else’s whims. Yet it is inevitable that the demands of others will necessarily intrude upon your day – what you can control is how efficiently you respond.

• Most Important First

A key part of winning the morning is devoting it to a task that advances whatever you have identified as your most important priority of the day. You will then have earned a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment that will carry over into all of your lower-priority but still important items to check off for the day.

Only after working through a few of your key priorities will you allow yourself to spend any time on others’ priorities. By this strategy you will have knocked out far more in the beginning of the day before most others are just beginning to stroll into the office and power up for the day. I try to not allow for any meetings or phone calls in the early part of the morning if I can help it because these tend to be activities that require less of my creative energy. These are excellent activities to take part in later on when my energy for the day is waning and it is not as critical that I be 100% focused.

Again, if your work is more focused on delivering presentations and executing tasks through meetings, then your approach may be entirely flipped compared to mine. In my experience, however, these tend to be activities that could be minimized – the same goes for writing and responding to emails.

• Busy Does Not Always Equal Productive

Too many folks I know seem to live in their inboxes, perking up at the first ping of a message coming in. This is the behavior of an addict, not someone in full control of life. It should not be a badge of honor to be so frantic and busy that you are working yourself into the ground each day, especially if this effort is mostly directed toward forwarding the goals of others.

If you are so concerned about missing a message or potential lead that you feel the need to monitor your inbox 247, then you have bigger problems – simply put, your life is out of control. To the extent possible, try to work in specific chunks of time that you devote to email and correspondence. Don’t let it dictate the flow of your entire day. We need to migrate away from seeing email as a pleasurable treat and more to being a nuisance perhaps. After all, your eyes don’t light up when you receive a new bill in the mail asking for more of your hard earned money. You should think of emails in a similar vein – they are simply demands on your finite time. Remember that this is fundamentally your most precious of all the resources at your disposal. You will never be able to make more of it.

I employ this strategy just about every day – including weekends. Everyone’s schedule and approach differs in this regard – especially in terms of how your time is affected by your family and personal obligations – but I have never accepted the credo that weekends should be blocked off from work. In truth, these are prime opportunities to check off your major items you want to accomplish while still leaving plenty of time for fun and enjoyment – especially if you are knocking off critical items first thing in the morning. Just putting in an hour or two on weekend mornings will add up to a considerable chunk of time to get things done over the course of a year. This is time you can be working on a plan to climb out of debt, get in shape, catch up on reading – the potential for knocking off your important tasks, as important to your urgent duties, is endless.

What success have you seen as a result of getting down to business earlier? What is the routine you use in the morning to get the most out of your day?

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