Start on the right foot

Every travel starts with a first step, every day starts with a first hour. To find flow, the state when time just blurs and your best works appear as by magic, can be a conscious process - here is how I do it.

 Photo by eklektik2sx Flickr CC

Procrastination ruins the day

To not start immediately takes at least the same amount of energy as just doing it. Save energy and get started.

Thinking back at my bad days, they usually started off with something going wrong. Maybe I overslept, had to speed through the morning routine, arrived late at the office, desperately trying to plow through the email - rushing to keep up. By noon, headache and very limited sense of satisfaction.

Other times I can fall into the same negative spiral by doing things in the wrong order. There are certain times of the day when we are better at doing certain things.

Program your day to use peak brain productivity

If we plan our day according to our natural rhythm, things are easier. Personally I function best in the morning, I try to do my planning and strategic work before office hours. We all are different, the important thing is that some tasks are easy and can be done even on low blood-sugar just before lunch.

Chances are that others have a similar rhythm to you, if you are hungry and grumpy just before lunch, probably your customers are to - and it might not be the best time to make those important calls.

Look through your day and see how much time you spend on email, phone calls, planning, writing reports, meetings and try to do them in the order that your rhythm will allow.

The ideal start

A brilliant start could be something like this and takes between 1,5 and 2 hours:

1. Wake up and do some stretching or exercise.
2. Sit quietly for some minutes (more or less structured meditation).
3. Eat a healthy breakfast with wholegrain and protein (egg or milk).
4. Look through the agenda and your planned activities for the day.
5. Think through the most important goal for the day, I use this most precious time to go through the logic of the day’s most important presentation or write my blog post.
6. Head for work.

How to deal with the unforeseen things that pop up

Then things seldom goes according to plan. Live with it. It is not really worth being upset about, if you do, then you’re into the negative spiral again.

Realistically, the only thing you know about a plan is that it will not be 100% accomplished - it just never happens. That is no reason not to plan, the most important part of a plan is the planning.

Plan your next day

Every monday morning I start a little earlier to look through the week’s commitments. In GTD (Getting Things Done) this weekly review is seen as the very key to success. It is also the first thing to go wrong.

Most of us have tried Filofax, Outlook, to-do lists and an array of the most popular planning tools, just to fail a couple of months later. If you look back on what happened, most of us would find something like this: You start up full of enthusiasm, plan everything in sight to the most minuscule detail, something unforeseen happens and things have to be pushed to later, after three weeks a mountain of things have accumulated and the system breaks down.

The remedy? Simple, two things are all that is needed. Just do a weekly review to look through the accumulated and planned tasks to decide if they still are interesting, secondly don’t plan more than what would cover 75% of your day.

To have spare time in the day means an opportunity to handle unforeseen opportunities without stress, and it gets even better. If, at the end of the day, you find you have time over - just pull something small from tomorrow’s list, it gives you the most wonderful feeling of being on top of things.