Use your morning to attack your day with enthusiasm and intent.

Mornings are so important because your day is not yet cluttered with the debris of everyday life. You are still in complete control of the cues that trigger your habits. This gives you a great opportunity to get a whole day’s worth of productive things done before all of your other interruptions prevents you from accomplishing your goals.

Today we’ll look at the best way to get everything done you want before the rest of the world even opens their eyes.

Getting a great start in the morning requires planning, preparation, and discipline. The planning and preparation need to happen the evening before. The best way to get up and get your day started is to be in the right mindset, motivated by the opportunity, and to be physically prepared.

You also need to have a sequence of activities ready to execute when you wake up. The time when the alarm sounds is not the time to decide what you plan to do. The first few times you wake early this plan needs to be written down. It won’t take long before you have a pattern to follow. Then you need to leverage this early morning activity into maximum value for your day. There is no point in getting up early then burning the time unproductively.

This Morning Started Yesterday

In order to be prepared for a good start in the morning, you need to create a series of habits for the evening before. Your evening habits have several objectives: (1) you need to mentally prepare for your early wake-up call; (2) you need to create the best possible conditions for getting a great night’s sleep (3) you need to know what you will when you wake up. Failing any of these will give you the opportunity to make a decision, and it is probable that decision will be "pull the covers over your head and go back to sleep".

Be Excited!

To be in the right mindset you need to be determined to get up and be excited to get started.

• Plan your wake-up time. 5 am generally seems like a good time to choose because it is early enough to get your morning routine completed and still get to places you need to go when the rest of humanity expects you. Ideally, you plan to wake at this time every day, including weekends. That has always been a bridge too far for me, but I recognize it has a serious impact on my Monday mornings.
• Set your alarm. Don’t just set your alarm, make a commitment to yourself that you will wake up when the alarm goes off. That means NO snoozes. The extra sleep you get by snoozing is probably going to defeat your morning by making you feel groggy and unrested.
• Plan your Wake-Up Sequence. Write down what you will do when the alarm sounds, in detail. This will evolve over time as you identify what really boosts your day, but you need to have a list and be prepared to follow it. When you have repeated this often enough, you will have formed a habit. Studies have shown it takes an average of 66 days to create the habit (Lally, Potts, and Wardle 2009).

Sleep Well

Sleeping enough and sleeping well are necessary to be able to spring from your bed when it is time. Our lives seem to have been filled with toys and gadgets designed to make us sleep less. We need to take action to sleep well.

• Plan your bedtime. Once you know when you will wake up, plan to wind down 8.5 to 9 hours before that. Avoid social media and electronics, perhaps choosing to read instead. You should be reading from a paper book or an e-reader like the Kindle Paperwhite to avoid all that blue light from your e-reader that stimulates your brain and defeats sleep. I don’t have paper books or a Kindle so my iPad wins! Plan to sleep about 7 to 8 hours.
• Don’t drink caffeinated drinks after 3 pm. I love coffee but drinking coffee after3 pm has a noticeable negative effect on how rested I feel the next morning.
• Reduce alcohol consumption. Alcohol disrupts brain chemistry in such a way that it may help sleep quickly in the first part of the night and then cause restlessness in the latter part. There is also an indication that it reduces the amount of REM sleep. This will cause you to feel groggy and unrested the following day.
• Don’t Panic if You Can't Sleep! If you wake-up at some point in the night and struggle to get back to sleep, don’t panic! There are three techniques I use to get back to sleep. First, I try just breathing deeply, focusing on feeling my breathing in the rest of my body and listening to the breath. I find this calms me even after just a few breaths. Sometimes I am awake because there is something I need to remember to do or some issue that is disturbing me. I keep a notebook and reading light at my bedside to record actions I think I need to take to resolve them. I find this addresses the stress. Finally, if I am still tossing and turning I get out of bed, take my book and read for 15 minutes. More often than not, these steps will calm me enough to sleep.

Get Started with Determination

• Get up! Remember you told yourself you were committed to getting out of bed when the alarm sounded. So, do it! I find the habit of throwing back the covers as soon as the alarm sounds almost exhilarating. I get my feet on the floor and move. That also gives me an emotional boost. I have overcome my first challenge and it’s only 5:01!
• Brush your Teeth. Toothpaste is designed to make you brush your teeth. I find it also helps me feel refreshed and ready to go.
• You have gone without water for 8 hours. This is a good time to get your body started by drinking some water. I find cold water helps to refresh me and prepare me just as toothpaste does.
• Exercise. This is a good time to get take care of the exercise part of your physical health. I view this as my investment in having a future! There is no point in having goals if you’re dead. I also feel stronger and capable of taking on big challenges. It does not have to be a full gym workout. There are lots of resources for 7-minute workouts that are a great way to get your day going. My exercise routine consists of 20 minutes of stretching and yoga, followed by a 40-minute run, followed by a 15-minute walk with my dog.
• Journal. I journal for about 20 minutes. I reflect on how I feel about yesterday, I express gratitude, I take inventory of ways to be better today.

There are many variations on this theme. Some people will swear by meditation and yoga. If you already meditate or perform yoga but need to make them more routine, then this is a great opportunity. I suggest you create a morning routine that contains elements you really want to do but are not consistent because of outside demands. These morning routines build great consistent behaviors. You can adapt; it is easier to add things to a functioning habit than to create a whole new one.

Make Your Biggest Impact First

Now that you have taken care of mind and body, it is time to take your most concerted action of the day. It is important that you perform whatever task is most critical to achieving your life goals while your brain is fresh. Studies show you only really have at most 4 hours of creative, intellectually intensive capacity per day. Many of the most productive people spend 2 to 3 hours doing the most critical activities first.

For some, this is the best time to do your most loathsome task. For me, this was often making unpleasant phone calls or cold-calling prospects. Consider creating a list of people to call first thing and then calling them immediately before you have a chance to think about it. Get this task done first and you will feel like you have moved mountains.

I schedule my day. I use an Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize what needs to get done and then time block my schedule to make sure I have the time do what I said I would.

The point is to plan your most important task and work about two to three hours intently on that task.

You Have Won the Day!

Your mornings can be the most productive part of your day for getting the things done you need to get done.

It is now about 11 am and you have already won the day! Congratulations.

The success you feel at having mastered the morning may become such a strong intrinsic motivator, you are already looking forward to tomorrow. Be wary of the inevitable loss of enthusiasm you will feel. I found it helpful to review my morning routine to ensure I was getting maximum value and keeping my attention. I eliminated some things as I went along that did not really impact my day and so I could really focus on the elements that energized me. I found the biggest challenge was to prepare well enough that I did not waste time. I started preparing the coffee and setting out my exercise clothes the night before, just to eliminate 3-4 minutes of unproductive morning time.

It is important you repeat consistently until the habit Is fully formed. The need to execute your most productive morning every morning will be the necessary craving to ensure you overcome the inevitable low points. I really struggled the first time I got sick with a cold and when I had a period of sleeping poorly. I pushed myself to continue to get up, and sometimes it meant I needed a late afternoon nap to recover. Rather than feel defeated, I celebrated having a successful morning in spite of being tired or feverish.

Another possible challenge is the habits of the people around you are pulling you away from your own goals. I struggled when my wife started flying for business every Monday morning. In addition to Monday being difficult because of the weekend inconsistencies, my wife leaving defocused me from getting everything accomplished.  I adapted my morning routine to include being with her for a few minutes while she went through her travel preparation. It became a less stressful event if we viewed it as a bit of together time instead of a mad rush out the door.

Having been intensely productive for your morning means you can schedule many interactive activities for your afternoon. These will probably also be critical to your day, but you have already taken care of the items that need your undivided concentration. I like to have discussions with team members, talk to customers, and build networks in the afternoon. I will also try to push administrative work into the afternoon.  The urgent and important to-do list items for the day will already be behind you.

Bibliography

Lally, Phillippa, Henry W W Potts, and Jane Wardle
2009   Research Article How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol.: 13.