What Do You Do With The First Hour Of Every Day?
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
What Do You Do With The First Hour Of The Day?
How much does the first hour of every day matter?
As it turns out, it seems to matter 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 high school? That 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” .
It disappeared after high school for most of us.
But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. It’s something to think about. Good work habits create time for success and family.
The First Hour Of Every Day for some people means….
The first hour of every day 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.
Step Away From Your Email
Tumblr founder David Karp will “try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an 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.”
Most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work.
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 really critical arrives.
Otherwise, it’s a gradual but rewarding process of training interrupters and coworkers not to expect instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.
What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Every Day
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.”
(If you’re in the Empower Network 🙂 just log in to your back office
Hopefully you don’t hate blogging;it will feel great just to have it behind you.
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 (perhaps during the first hour of every day) 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 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, checking in with prospects/lead, asking your mentors questions, and or engaging in social media if it is key to your business.
What do you with the first hour of every day to increase productivity and reduce stress?