Protecting the First Few Hours

coffee-cup.jpgRecently, I have been more and more careful to protect the first few hours of each working day. In a prior post, I mentioned that I had fallen into some bad habits, and fallen into the trap of checking email at every spare moment.

What I have also noticed is that my energy is very different at 8:00 a.m. than it is at 2:00 p.m. I am a real morning person, and being an energetic type, I usually work out for 1-2 hours each morning (6 days a week with one for rest). As a triathlete, I have followed this routine for years, and now that I am married to a runner, I have only increased my running distances in the past couple of years.

It is likely that I do the majority of my best work each morning before 10:00 a.m., and I have been using a simple, repetitive checklist to help me orient myself to what I need to do each day.

It has worked wonderfully, as I have been tracking the new habits that I want to make sure I learn to maintain each day. Over time, as habits have become hardwired into my routine, I have simply dropped them off the list, trusting that they won’t be forgotten (for now).

In 2Time it’s not recommended that time be spent in any particular way, but in the component Scheduling, one would need to set the time aside for this to work. The fact is, if this activity were just another item on a list of stuff to be done each day, it wouldn’t work as well.