Success Building: Get Things Done When Your Mind is Sharpest!

There's an old truism that when you're self-employed — or working on some project that's your side gig — what matters is not so much whether you're working harder, but whether you're working smarter.

If we're to believe that particular narrative, one of the most important things we can do for ourselves is to try to do our work when our brain — our mind — is at its best.

That means that if you're a morning person get up early and spend the time when your brain is really sharp on whatever your project is. Your routine housework or whatever else "busy work" you might have will keep until a time when you're starting to feel worn down a bit.

We humans tend to be very routine driven creatures, but some of the routines we form are often centered around the schedule of the greater world rather than our own internal rhythms... which also ebb and flow during the day and during the month as well.

If you're self-employed — or even if you just have a side hustle that you're hoping will grow into a greater part of your life — you really need to give it your best.

Whereas some situations run on timing that's tangibly unavoidable, if mornings are your best time don't get up and just do housework and laundry simply because "that's what you've always done," find a way to get up and work with your project... leave the housework for some time when things are slowing down.

After all, the time of the day your laundry happens to be clean is only your business not the rest of the world’s!

Granted, we don't always have 100% control over the situation — for example if you have kids you have to get up and get breakfast and make lunch for before they go off to school.

We're all subject to working with the same 24 hours on any given day. What we're perhaps are not so good at is optimizing how we use those 24 hours. We might be quite good at making sure we can jam everything that needs to get done into that 24 hours but how much do we actually pay attention to focusing on how to have the best order of operations?

In recent years, I have shuffled my day around quite a bit.

I used to get up and spent the morning focusing on sorting through my emails, and checking all my eBay accounts and making sure that everything got packed up and ready for the post office first thing. I felt it was advantageous to "get it out of the way."

Maybe it was in some way... but by the time I got ready for creative things, I was already feeling a bit blank.

In truth, I was not choosing the best way to approach things. For starters, an order or two would invariably drift in and need to be taken care of at three in the afternoon before I would head out to the post office... meaning that I had to break off whatever else I was doing.

What's more, my brain is sharpest in the morning and my brain actually doesn't need to be particularly sharp to put things in boxes and envelopes to ship them! On the other hand I tend to really slack off on my writing if I don't get started on it until late in the day. My creativity and ability to think straight tends to be at its best during the first 2-3 hours after I've gotten up.

Consequently, I now get up, make myself a cup of coffee, ignore the world completely and do nothing but create rough drafts of both creative writing and writing gigs that I have to complete. The clamoring emails can wait another three hours. The packing and shipping can wait another three hours.

It Doesn't Have to be Perfect!

Now, notice that I said "rough drafts."

It's only the creative part I'm worried about when it comes to writing... the detail works — such as checking for spelling errors, grammar and adding pictures to the writing — gets done whenever I have time to get around to it. What's important is that I use my fresh mind to assemble the creative backbone of what I need to write and then I can always return to it later and make it pretty.

We all have our own cycles, and central to being able to work with optimizing your order of operations during the day is taking time to figure out when you really are at your best. Some people work best in the early afternoon — they need the entire morning just to get up to speed and be firing on all cylinders. Some people are "night owls" and they can't concentrate or focus until it is quite late and all the noise of the day has subsided.

These sorts of things are for you to determine... which is something that takes a little time and you have to do through a process of being very mindful and conscious of your own energy levels during the day.

Yes, that can be a challenge in and of itself! When we've been doing something for a while, it's easy to fall into a sort of trance where we just do everything on autopilot and we aren't even particularly aware of our mood swings from day to day. We might be peripherally aware that some routine things make us more angry/irritated at certain parts of the day but taking a personal inventory of our creative flow can be kind of important here.

And yes, sometimes I discover that something I wrote in the heat of the moment while my brain was going at 90 miles an hour during the early morning, actually turns out to be pretty much garbage that I have to throw away... and that's OK. Thankfully, it doesn't happen very often!

Ultimately, does it make a difference?

My days tend to be very full, and it is pretty certain that if I don't get some rough drafts hashed out when my brain is fresh and sharp, that day will not contain any new creative material.

Of course, you have to figure out your own optimal times!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

How about you? Do you know when your "best" time of the day is? Do you use it for your most important creative work? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.08.01 00:38 PDT
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