This is the primary lever that I have successfully used to stick to my morning routines for years now. This actually begins the night before to be perfectly honest in the fact that I turn my phone to airplane mode when I lay down to go to sleep. This delays all texts, delays all social media notifications, delays all emails, delays everything! So that the all important thing called sleep can happen unimpeded and uninterrupted.
Yet for over a decade I would check email first thing in the morning, and that mental productivity and problem solving and challenges of the day, would funnel my energy into a tornado of work work work. But starting my day with work is very very counterproductive. I know that sounds really wrong, but it is not. I have measured my outputs throughout the day, and I can consistently get more done each and every day, by not starting the day with work.
Instead I start the day with development. I need to develop my primary asset which is me myself and I. So I develop my flexibility in a mental way first. I play a couple of puzzle games in order to get my brain up and moving in the mornings. When I successfully conquer those, I develop my physical flexibility. This gets ever more important as I get ever more older! 15 minutes of stretches, twists, reaches, crunches, curlings, stretches, twists, bends, and stretches. There is a pattern here.
Then a couple of hours of working out on the bicycle, weights, pull ups and dips and curls, all the while listening to audible books on the earbuds, makes for an energizing and high accomplished morning.
Now it is time for the best meal of the day, spicy noodles is my preferred breakfast, but I can only get that when in Asia. When at home in Europe, I often have two eggs soft fried, with hot spicy peppers all over them. And of course my daily pot of coffee!
One would think that it is time for email now, but no, because email is a lower productivity activity than reading a couple of hours of leadership material, blogs, leadership tools, and research. This requires my very best energy and speed and insight and thinking, so it gets premium time in my work day. Only after I have completed all these other highest priority tasks and events each day, do we get to email . . . which as we all know, can suck the rest of the day away like hurricane.
But this consistent putting off of all distractions until the most important things are finished, produces an amazing result over time, that allows me to make my best impact on the world. This is what makes life significant and meaningful. I live it intentionally, rather than allowing the urgent to drive the immediate, which in the long run are just distractions.
