My Morning Routine

That’s from Chapter 2 on “Focus and Productivity.”

(Spall and Xander look at a range of facets of a great morning routine: from “Getting Up” and “Morning Workouts” to “Morning Meditation” and “Evening Routines.”)

Decision fatigue. It’s real.

Research shows we have a finite capacity to process information and make decisions. Which is why it’s so important to routinize as much of our lives—and especially our mornings!—as possible.

In Your Brain at Work, David Rock echoes this wisdom and tells us how powerful our basal ganglia are at executing patterns. He tells us to: “Use this resource every way you can. Once you repeat a pattern often enough, the basal ganglia can drive the process, freeing up the stage for new functions. Develop routines that can be repeated over and over again.”

He also tells us to: “prioritize prioritizing.”

Specifically, he says: “If Emily knew how energy-hungry her stage was, she would start her Monday morning differently. The big difference is she would prioritize prioritizing. She would prioritize first, before any other attention rich activity such as emailing. That’s because prioritizing is one of the brain’s most energy-hungry processes.

After even just a few mental activities, you may not have the resources left to prioritize. Using your stage for something energy intensive such as prioritizing is like flying one of those toy helicopters you see at parks, the ones that are supposed to be for kids but that dads actually buy for themselves. Once Dad gets the helicopter off the ground a few times, it won’t get off the ground again because the power is too low. It gets close, rising a few inches off, and then collapses back down. And the more you try, the less energy there is. Best to recharge and try again later. In a similar way, doing ten minutes of emailing can use up the power needed for prioritizing. Emily experienced this when she couldn’t ‘see’ how to prioritize her day and ended up dealing with her emails instead.”

In other words, once you blow your brain up with emails and other reactive stuff, it’s REALLY hard to settle it back down to do any meaningful work.

This is why Scott Adams (who’s featured in the book) (see Notes on How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big) tells us: “I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Compare that with some people you know who spend two hours planning and deciding for every task that takes one hour to complete. I’m happier than those people.” (Hah!)

Then there’s the whole discussion around choice in general. See The Paradox of Choice for more on the perils of allowing too much choice into your life.

And, most importantly for our purposes today: Commit to a morning routine. :)

Multitasking. Context Switching.

Whatever you call all those activities you’re engaged in when you’re not fully present: Quit doing that! You’re wasting a TON of energy and diminishing the quality of your life experience.

(Yes, I have three fingers pointing back at me as I attend my own lecture!)

Let’s go back to David Rock and Your Brain at Work for a quick look at the IQ points you give up when you constantly shift your attention to text and email: “A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night of sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common ‘productivity tools’ can make one as dumb as a stoner.” <- Yikes.

And, I love Cal Newport’s point (you can’t get through a book on Optimizing your morning (/day/productivity/whatever without mentioning Deep Work) that we create “attention residue.”

As he says: “The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. … ‘People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,’ and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.

The concept of attention residue helps explain why the intensity formula is true and therefore explains Grant’s productivity. By working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task.”

The solution? Of course, create some nice, deep time blocks to hammer the essential.

Cal says: “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction. Put another way, the type of work that optimizes performance is deep work.”

Then we have Brian Tracy who tells us (in Eat That Frog): “Every great achievement of humankind has been preceded by a long period of hard, concentrated work until the job was done. Single handling requires that once you begin a task, you keep working at it, without diversion or distraction, until the job is 100 percent complete. You keep urging yourself onward by repeating the words, ‘Back to work!’ over and over whenever you are tempted to stop or do something else. By concentrating single-mindedly on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50 percent or more…

The truth is that once you have decided on your number one task, anything else that you do other than that is a relative waste of time.”

P.S. From my perspective, the “cycling to work” and “listening to audio books as you drive” examples are less about attempts to “multitask” per se and more about effectively STACKING things. (See our Notes on Katy Bowman’s Movement Matters for more.)

Short story: Multi-tasking is when you’re trying to do a bunch of things at once and not doing any of them particularly well. (Think: That conference call during which you’re online ordering something.) Stacking your life, on the other hand, is when you’ve identified what’s important to you and you’ve found ways to achieve multiple desired outcomes in the same block of time. (Enter: Cycling to work, learning on your drive to work, etc.)

Let’s skip the constant task switching and failed attempts at multitasking and STACK!

That’s another idea from our chapter on “Focus and Productivity.”

Of course, mornings aren’t just about being focused—we’ve got love and energy to round out our Big 3, eh?—but it’s important. After the “diary entries” from the featured people, Spall and Xander wrap up each chapter with some practical tips. They share five on being productive. Here’s the quick look.

1. Write a To-Do List, Then Stick to It. Clarity and commitment are key. (Unless you want to waste brain cells via decision fatigue a la our chat above.) But… Perhaps we can swap out “To Do” for our go-to “Success List” a la Gary Keller in The ONE Thing: “Long hours spent checking off a to-do list and ending the day with a full trash can and a clean desk are not virtuous and have nothing to do with success. Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results.To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.”

2. Do Your Most Important Work First. Now THAT I like! I end my days by roughly sketching out the next day with HYPER clarity on THE #1 most important thing and I ALWAYS do that first—Creative vs. Reactive style. Plus: Here’s another Brian Tracy gem on that subject: “Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it single-mindedly until it is complete is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity.”

3. Don’t Check Your Email First Thing in the Morning. Did we just talk about being Creative BEFORE being Reactive? Yep. I think this is THE (!!!) #1 Rule to productivity. Well, maybe #2. Gotta make sure you’re doing the right thing before email. But, seriously… Are you checking your email first thing in the morning? You think that’s optimal?!

4. Cut Out Morning Meetings and Calls. Amen to this as well. Reminds me of John Maxwell. He realized he did his BEST work in the morning. And he never scheduled another early-morning meeting again. Scott Adams tells us we need to “match our energy to our time.” Know when you’re at your best. PROTECT that time!! If you can get away with it, push your meetings and calls to the afternoon.

5. Break Down Big Goals into Small Pieces. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Take your big goal and smash it into little pieces, line up your dominoes and/or use whatever metaphor you like as you create a bunch of Progress Principle-esque micro wins!!

That’s from a contribution made by Ruth Ozeki, a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest.

We’ve talked about the Hawthorne Effect before and I was familiar with the idea that simply observing people in a study changes their behavior. (In fact, we hired Sonja Lyubomirsky and one of her brilliant Ph.D. students to help us design a study for our corporate client and this was one of the important variables to control for.)

But, I’d never heard about the take on novelty. Fascinating.

For our purposes, let’s note the fact that, as we’ve discussed, your behavior changes the moment you begin observing it—whether that’s a food log or time log or morning routine. Then, let’s put on our lab coats and goggles and get to work EXPERIMENTING!!!

Establish a routine. Change a variable. Observe your performance. Hit a plateau? Tweak a variable. Observe your performance. Repeat. Enter: Your life as one big experiment—with you as both the experimenter and the subject.

Q: What’s the variable you want to start testing? Tomorrow morning a good time? (Or tonight? :)

P.S. I think my favorite part of the book might have been the Dave Asprey section simply because the man is SO RIDICULOUSLY all in on living to 180 years old. He’s the *epitome* of making your life one big bio-hacking experiment. My favorite of his hacks? The fact that he takes 120 supplement pills every day is pretty epic but I’ve gotta go with his “ping-pong robot that serves balls really fast, which is a form of brain training that…” Hah. That, my friends, is ALL IN.

That’s from the chapter on “Evening Routines” in which we’re reminded of the fact (!) that “Your Morning Routine Starts the Night Before.”

And… Like I said, Cal Newport is everywhere. His “shut-down complete!” ritual is such a PERFECT way to capture the power of the fact that your morning begins TONIGHT!! (In fact, as you may know, in both Judaism and Islam the new day begins at SUNSET not at midnight.)

So… Let’s remember that the best way to Optimize your mornings is to Optimize your EVENINGS. For most people the best way to do that is to set a very clear digital sunset rule—AT LEAST an hour before you intend to go to sleep. (Plus: Remember your AM + PM Bookends!)