I was watching a really good video by Robin Sharma last night (you can see it below) where he was talking about his morning routine and the importance to the days success.

Those first few hours of the day are critical to your productivity and how much you accomplish in business and in life.

How do you spend those hours?

If you’re like most people, one of the first things you do is check email and social media.

This is literally the worst way you can start your day. Why? Because you’re going into a ‘reactive’ mode from the very start. And often how you start your day, is how you’ll end your day.

When you’re reacting from the moment you wake up, it’s extremely hard to switch into a proactive mode later in the day and be extremely productive.

But…

If you start your day by doing the most important tasks which will have the biggest impact, then you build up momentum.  By the time 11am rolls around, you may have accomplished more in the few 3 – 4 hours of the day than most people get done all day.

It’s much easier to be productive in the second half of the day as well when you know in the back of your mind you’ve already got a lot of important things done.

I don’t know if you work out in the morning.  But if you don’t, give it a try.  Starting your day with a good work out routine where you really sweat, is one of the best things you can do.

I myself often go to the gym, when I do for the rest of the day, I have this good feeling because I knew I’d got something important done. So it wasn’t lingering in my mind as something I needed to get to ‘later on.’

With my emails, I try to write them always in the morning. That doesn’t always happen. I’m changing that bad habit, however changes to habits take atleast 30 Days

They can be left to the very end of the day. And whenever that happens… they kind of suck.  At least in my opinion. I can see a massive difference between the quality of the content compared to how they sound if I devote the first hour of the day to writing.

All of the above is much easier said than done.

Naturally, we all want to take the path of least resistance. It’s much easier to check emails or social media first thing in the morning. You don’t have to concentrate so much.  It’s stimulating. And you at least feel ‘busy.’ But busy does not equal productive.

I know a lot of people who are in an extreme state of busyness for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, who never ahead.

The trick is to know the difference between what’s busy work and what’s productive work, and to not fool yourself into believing one is the same as the other.

So find the time of day when you’re at your peak state and you have the most energy, and get the most important and creative tasks done at that time. When you’re feeling less energetic and focused, then you can use that time for ‘reactive’ tasks like checking and responding to email.

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