Every morning when Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need Ernest Hemingway got up, he started writing right away.
He said this about his daily schedule: “When I’m working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon as I can after getting up. No one bothers you, it’s cool or cold, and you go to work and get warm as you write.
Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (audiobook) talks about the habits of Hemingway and hundreds of other successful authors, artists, and scientists. These habits point to the most effective way I’ve found to get things done and make daily progress in the areas that are important to you.
Let’s talk about the only Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need tip you’ll ever need,
Here are 3 Questions for 2023: What is the Only Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need?
1. why it works, and what keeps us from using it all the time?
Productivity, Made Easy
Don’t make this go on and on. This tip for getting things done is simple: every day, do the most important thing first.
Sounds easy. No one does it.
Just like Hemingway, who wrote a huge amount of high-quality work throughout his life, you can make surprising progress every day if you do the most important thing first.
2. Why It Does Work?
Most of the time, we think that being productive means getting more done each day. Wrong. Productivity means always getting important things done. And no matter what you are working on, only a few things matter.
To be productive, you Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need to keep a steady, average speed on a few things, instead of going as fast as you can on everything.
Because of this, this plan works. If you start each day by doing the most important thing, you’ll always get something important done. I don’t know how you feel, but for me, this is a big deal. Many days, I spend hours doing the fourth, fifth, or sixth most important things on my list and never get to the most important thing.
As you’ll see below, you don’t have to use this strategy first thing in the morning, but I think starting the day with the most important task has some advantages over other times.
First, people tend to have more willpower in the morning. That means you’ll be able to put your best energy and effort into your most important task.
Second, I’ve found that the further into the day I get, the more likely it is that unexpected tasks will pop up and I won’t spend my time the way I had planned. This is less likely to happen if you do the most important thing first each day Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need.
Lastly, the human mind seems to dislike projects that aren’t finished. They cause stress and tension that can’t be resolved. We usually want to finish what we start. If you start a task, you are more likely to finish it, so start the important tasks as soon as possible. (This is just one more reason why it’s more important to start than to finish.)
We don’t do it because
Most people spend most of their time doing things that other people want them to do.
I think this is partly because of how society raises us. In school, we get homework and are told when our tests are. At work, our bosses give us due dates and tell us what they expect of us. There are things we have to do at home to take care of our kids and our partners. After doing this for a few decades, it can become very easy to spend your day reacting to the things around you. We learn to act based on what someone else wants, tells us to do, or needs from us or Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need.
So it doesn’t seem strange that when it’s time to start our day, we open our email, check our phone, and look for our latest marching orders.
I don’t think this is right. The tasks that other people give us may seem important, but what is urgent is rarely what is important. The most important things we do are the ones that help us move forward with our hopes, dreams, creations, and businesses.
Does that mean we shouldn’t take care of our duties as parents, workers, and citizens? Of course not. But we all Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need time and space in our days to do what we want, not what other people want.
3. Don’t like getting up early?
Do you feel sad when you hear the word “morning”? Do you think of The Eye of Sauron when you see the morning sun? Can you think of anything worse than sunbeams gently falling on your pillow?
No worries, night owls or Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need.
As I read about the daily habits of hundreds of authors, artists, and musicians in Daily Rituals (audiobook), I noticed an important trend: there was no trend.
There isn’t just one way to succeed. There are just as many “night owls” as “early birds” who do great work. But no matter what their daily schedule was like, every successful artist liked the idea of setting aside a special time each day to work on their projects.
I work best in the morning. Your results may differ Productivity Tip You Will Ever Need.
“Do the most important thing first every day” is just a simple way of saying, “Make time and space every day to work on what’s important to you.”
Check out my book Atomic Habits for more ideas on how to break bad habits and start good ones. It will show you how small changes in habits can lead to big changes in your life.
