The Fantastic Life

The First Hour of Work

 

Today’s LIFEies includes a few nice items to start your work day.  Here are three that caught my attention:

  • Make your client calls in the first hour. This includes all past clients and influencers.
  • Do not check your e-mail until you finish your top three big tasks for the day.
  • Plan your frog (worst item to do that day) the night before each morning. Then eat it first thing (do what you can immediately).

At our company, we are committed to working on these. I have highlighted in green below our top three at The Coppola-Cheney Group.

Rule #6 from my book The Fantastic Life: Set Goals
This rule simply shows how setting goals allows you to successfully make changes in your life.  Set them and see the difference it makes.

 

 

 

What Successful People Do With The First Hour Of Their Work Day

Many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room at the start of every day. You should, too—here’s how.

By Kevin Purdy

August, 22 2012

Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too.

Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That.

Tumblr founder David Karp will “try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. “Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive,” Karp said. “If something urgently needs my attention, someone will call or text me.”

Not all of us can roll into the office whenever we want to, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. It’s an idea that serves as the title of Julie Morgenstern’s work management book Never Check Email In The Morning, and it’s a fine strategy for leaving the office with the feeling that, even on the most over-booked days, you got at least one real thing done. It’s a gradual but rewarding process of training interrupters and coworkers not to expect instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.

Gain Awareness, Be Grateful

One smart, simple question on Q & A site Quora asked “How do the most successful people start their day?” The most popular response came from a devotee of Tony Robbins. It involves light exercise, part of it involves motivational meditation, but the most accessible piece involves 10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among your family and friends, in your career, and the like. Then, visualize “everything you want in your life as if you had it today.

“Do the Big, Shoulder-Sagging” Stuff First

Brian Tracy’s classic time-management book Eat That Frog gets its title from a Mark Twain saying that, “if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you’ve got it behind you for the rest of the day, and nothing else looks so bad.” Combine that with the concept of getting one thing done before you wade into email, and you’ve got a day-to-day system in place.

Choose Your Frog

Choose your frog, and write it down on a piece of paper that you’ll see when you arrive back at your desk in the morning. If you can, gather together the material you’ll need to get it done and have that out, too. One benefit to tackling that terrible, weighty thing you don’t want to do first thing in the morning is that you get some space from the other people involved in that thing–the people who often make the thing more complicated and frustrating. Without their literal or figurative eyes over your shoulder, the terrible thing often feels less complex, and you can get more done.

Ask Yourself If You’re Doing What You Want to Do

Feeling unfulfilled at work shouldn’t be something you realize months too late, or even years. Consider making an earnest attempt every morning at what the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford to do:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

“Customer Service” (or Your Own Equivalent)

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark answered the first hour question succinctly: “Customer service.” He went on to explain (or expand) that he also worked on current projects, services for military families and veterans, and protecting voting rights. But customer service is what Newmark does every single day at Craigslist, responding to user complaints and smiting scammers and spammers. He almost certainly has bigger fish he could pitch in on every day, but Newmark says customers service “anchors me to reality.”

Your own version of customer service might be keeping in touch with contacts from year-ago projects, checking in with coworkers you don’t regularly interact with, asking questions of mentors, and just generally handling the human side of work that quickly gets lost between task list items. But do your customer service on the regular, and you’ll have a more reliable roster of helpers when the time comes.

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