The Importance Of Starting Your Day Right

Starting your day right is one of the most important things for us all. The outcome of the morning affects the outcome of the day. A poor start leads to a poor finish, more often than not.

Today, I want to explore how the way we start our days affects our daily productivity.

You may have heard of Newton’s First Law – for this example, I’ll simplify it:

An object in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest. These states will not change unless acted upon by an outside force.

This doesn’t just apply to objects. We humans also relate to this law. The basic idea is that a productive start creates a productive finish. Waking up early and completing several To-Do list tasks will help you build momentum. This, in turn, will propel you forwards into the day.

If you begin your day in a ‘negative way’ the outcome won’t be great. Waking up, grabbing your phone and scrolling social media is a recipe for disaster. You won’t have built any momentum. The further into the day you get without momentum, the harder it is to get started.

An object in motion stays in motion

The above example should give you a basic idea of the importance of starting our days properly. Of course, a solid morning routine will help with this. But, the thing to focus on the most is ensuring you’re able to build productive momentum as you go through your day.

It’s great to get 5 tasks completed within the first 2 hours of your day. But if you have nothing else planned for the rest of the day, your motion will halt. It’ s been acted upon by an outside force – the inability to continue in motion. An invisible wall, you might say.

How we overcome this is simple. Ensure that for the entirety of your day – or the part of your day that you want to be working – that you have enough work to do. The more specific, the better, as this makes it easier to act and begin working.

That being said, specificity isn’t necessary. You could set the intention to spend the entire day completing a task, such as writing 3 chapters of a book. Your motion will end once you reach the end of that task, though.

This becomes easier by writing out a To-Do list, as that provides a clear sense of direction. When you feel like your momentum is slowing, glance at your To-Do list and complete something. This little boost will propel you to complete all tasks. A good alternative is scheduling.

Once you let yourself slow, however, it will be much more difficult to get started again. Start hard, fast, and don’t stop until you’re done.

An object at rest stays at rest

This is the inverse to the above section. By starting your day without any momentum or motion, the likelihood is that you won’t get much done. The morning is integral for ensuring this doesn’t happen. I’ve noticed in myself, friends, and family, that a poor start to the day results in a lack of motivation. You’ve probably noticed this in yourself before, too.

This is partly because it’s so much easier to not work than it is to actually be productive. Why?

Dopamine Usage

I’m gonna go on a brief but relevant tangent here. You’ve heard of dopamine, one of the feel-good chemicals in our brains. Part of dopamine’s purpose is to reward us for certain actions and to encourage us to take action.

This isn’t always positive action though. In fact, negative action often ‘rewards’ more dopamine. Thanks, evolution. Back in prehistoric times, sugary and high-fat foods were scarce. That meant finding something described before provided high levels of dopamine, encouraging you to eat as much as you could. This is also why it’s so easy to binge on unhealthy foods.

It’s not just food that can cause dopamine spikes. Why are social media, our phones, and TV so addictive? The main reason that I’ve found is colour. Our brains LOVE colour. This is probably another survival reason, such as for identifying ripe fruits. So, when our brain sees highly-saturated colours, you receive a little spike of dopamine.

Unfortunately, our devices manipulate this instinctual reaction by intentionally using colourful designs. Frequent pop-ups and prompts maintain our attention. Combined with beeps and buzzes, we can’t get enough of these dopamine hits.

Further, our brains will always search for the easiest way to receive dopamine. Binging is a result of this. By providing your brain with an easy source of dopamine so early in the day, you’ll feel much less motivated to achieve your goals and receive ‘natural’ dopamine. Why work for several hours to complete a task for only a small hit of dopamine? You could just scroll Facebook and receive more dopamine, quicker! Yeah… that’s what these big companies want you to think.

Some measures you can put in place to counter this are as follows:

• Don’t do high-dopamine activities in the morning. This includes watching TV, YouTube, using your phone for anything that’s unnecessary, or eating high amounts of sugary food.
• Use high-dopamine activities as a reward for working. Completely a task? Great, you can have a cookie! 😀
• Change your environment to minimise the likelihood of engaging in such activities. Turn your phone off, hide sugary foods in the cupboard, install a website blocker extension. Little tweaks like this can massively improve your workflow.

Create momentum

Your best bet is to begin working or create momentum as soon as possible. If you’ve missed the morning slot and have wasted several hours, it’s not too late. You’ll feel so much worse at the end of the day if you let the negative momentum drag you down – I know, I’ve been there. It sucks.

Utilise Mark Manson’s ‘Do Something’ principle: simply, begin. Do SOMETHING. Your momentum has to begin somewhere, even if this is something as small as doing 10 pushups or brushing your teeth. This will massively help to get things going again. Stagnation will kill you, so do something.

Then, capitalise on that slight momentum, and do something bigger. It doesn’t have to be a huge jump. Start with something slightly bigger than brushing your teeth, such as washing a few dishes or doing a general chore. Then tidy your place. Then begin working. Snowball your actions until you’ve built enough momentum to begin working, then ride that wave! Congratulations, you’ve just defied a universal law. Go, you! You are now in motion.

These states will not change unless acted upon by an outside force

Now that you have a decent understanding of the two core parts of this law, we can go a bit deeper. Enter Player 3. This changes everything. An outside force can literally be anything. Examples include:

• Having to pick something or someone up at a specific time
• A surprise phone call or notification
• A meteor hits the Earth
• A work deadline approaching (which is worse than a meteor)
• Needing to pee

Some outside forces can be controlled – many can, if you know how – but others simply can’t. No matter how much preparation and scheduling you too, sometimes things just happen. That’s ok.

Here, let’s adopt part of the stoic philosophy. Focus on the things inside of our control, rather than wasting time and processing power elsewhere.

I’ll refer to our ‘outside force’ as either one of two things, depending on your current state. Either a distraction (in motion), or an enforcement (at rest).

Distractions

There are systems you can put in place to deal with distractions:

• Schedule out blocks of time to work
• Turn off your phone and block distracting websites (social media, YouTube, Reddit, etc)
• Invest in some noise-cancelling headphones
• Ensure you have everything you need before beginning to work. Fill your water bottle, eat some food, go to the toilet.
• Let others in your living space know that you’re going to be working and ask them not to distract you

By planning ahead of time and putting systems in place, you can pretty much eliminate all distractions. There will always be uncontrolled things that happen, but for the most part you’ll be good to go.

Enforcements

We also have enforcements in our productive arsenal. Unlike distractions, these can actually be useful. Enforcements force you to act (it’s easier to think of them like this for the time being). Think deadlines, meetings, or anything that’s been scheduled. Whatever you’re doing, you’ll have to stop and focus on the scheduled activity.

This is particularly useful when ‘at rest’. Work deadlines can be a required kickstart to get you moving again. You’ve likely experienced this with the last-minute essay rush or exam-cram before a deadline. This is also known as Parkinson’s Law, which you can learn about here. The deadline was the outside force, causing you to act and get stuff done.

How can we utilise this to our advantage?

For some people, setting enforcements ourselves doesn’t work. I’ve been there. With a lack of discipline, it can be easy to ignore the enforcement you put in place and to carry on with your day. In this case, you have one of two options:

1. Build discipline and willpower. A great way to do this is through doing comfort zone challenges.
2. Use a form of accountability

Services such as Beeminder use accountability to prompt action. On Beeminder, you set a goal or target, and put down an amount of money that will get paid out if you fail to make progress. The less often you make progress, the more money you will lose. Simple. This might work for you, or it might not. I’ve tried it in the past, and it does work somewhat, but I prefer something with a bit more danger.

Other forms of accountability include using your friends and family. You can get someone to begin a task with you, which helps you both. Another option is a bit more… intense.

Take an embarrassing picture or video of yourself, and give it to someone you trust with instructions if you fail to achieve your goal or task. These instructions could be ‘share on social media’ or ‘post to my boss’. In order for them to not publish your embarrassment, you must provide evidence that you have achieved your task. This can be a real motivator, and gets more powerful the more embarrassing the content is.

You can use enforcements to prompt action and help prevent the time wasted while ‘at rest’.

Summary

How you begin your day is directly related to the results you see. Action and momentum encourage further action, while not doing anything leads to further rest. Unless an outside force, in the form of a distraction or enforcement, changes this momentum, things are unlikely to change.

High dopamine tasks in the morning make it much less likely that we’ll do anything productive with the day. Completing many small and productive tasks in the morning can propel us forwards.

Utilising the ‘do something’ principle and getting started can help us break out of stagnation. Start small and snowball up until you’re being productive. Using enforcements such as deadlines or forms of accountability can also break stagnation.

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