One of the basic principles of personal productivity is to tackle the hardest tasks, the ones you don’t want to do, first thing in the morning. If you haven’t tried it, you should.
Suppose you are a salesman. Making sales calls is one of the most important things you can do to close deals, but it’s also one of the hardest, because you need to “disturb” the person on the other side, and you’ll need to hear 20 NOs for every YES you get.
It would be natural for you, therefore, to postpone dealing with the sales calls for as long as possible. The problem with this approach is that on many days you would postpone it so much that you would end up not making the calls at all.
A better approach would be to make all the sales calls first thing in the morning, and make a habit out of it. That way you wouldn’t miss the calls a single day.
I used this principle to start reading more. As I mentioned in this post around six months ago I created the goal to read at least 30 pages of a book every day. The problem is that on many days I would leave the reading to be done after I finished work, and if I worked until 9 or 10 pm (which is not unusual) I would be so tired that I would just skip the reading section and go straight to eat something and to sleep.
Then one day I decided I would wake up, take breakfast and then ready my 30 pages straight away. No excuses.
It worked like a charm, and I practically never miss a day.
Bottom line: tackle the hardest tasks first thing in the morning and just be done with it.
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
That’s what I keep telling my team mates who usually start the real work around mid-afternoon 🙂 Probably the preacher himself needs to change – that’s me lol
This is great advice – especially for larks – I guess owls might be more productive late at night. I try to set aside time for writing in the mornings and always find I get more done when I manage to do that – if I miss my morning writing slot, I never seem to catch up with it.
Really Sir,
I appreciate your idea. I just do the same. I’ve created a goal that I’ll write 5 pages of my register daily. Sometimes, I missed them because of the same reason of working late and getting tired. So, whenever I wake up, I finish my writing work first and then continue my day work. Just have the same thinking as yours. 😀
This is a good idea and something I tend to follow religiously. I am getting ready to start another blog series but this time it will span out for 31 days. I came up with the topic for each day first so that I can start writing about them each day… The topic ideas were the hardest part, the writing will be easy! Great post!
My dad always made me eat my vegetables first. And I still do. Good strategy.