Intentional mornings.
Mornings don't have to suck + detaching from email.
Content-wise, this was a fun week. Some newly built habits (which I’ll share eventually, I promise), have helped me filter out the noise in social media and tap into the content that helps me learn, get inspired, and laugh.
Professionally, last week was one of those weeks. Busy figuring things out in the early stages, lots of wasted time, and dead ends. But, I’ve made some changes in my daily schedule that I think will stick.
Slowing it down.
Since buying a second business in the summer of 2024, I have found myself waking up and:
responding to emails as soon as I get up
rushing out to the dog park for a quick walk
rushing to the office to kick off the day with my teams
having breakfast at 11 am after 2 cups of coffee wreaks havoc on my gut
Very few tasks pop up in a given week that warrant starting my days off in such a reactive manner. So I had to ask the question, what is driving this kind of behavior each morning? Why is it that by 10 am I am already on my heels?
And I’ll be honest: I have many “meh” answers to this. Aside from a lack of intentionality regarding what needs to be done and when there is no real reason for this pattern.
This made the below changes pretty damn easy to make.
2 adjustments. All the difference.
Given the lack of intentionality and overload of reactiveness, I had to implement some changes. Below sums up what I did and as usual, I share the sources of inspiration for each change.
I deleted Gmail from my phone. This was a big one to commit to, but it had to be done. No matter what, I would peek at what came in overnight each morning, so it had to go. And I have to say, this change made up for 99% of the benefit I was looking for. Some inspiration for this change:
How to manage your e-mail by Tim Ferriss (Youtube: 4 min). Remove the anxiety that comes with email by setting expectations with clients, teammates, and bosses.
Understand that email is a repetitive task, and you manage repetitive tasks by batching them.
The below quote came up in this clip which also resonated:
Challenge your assumptions around when people expect a reply or a matter to be dealt with. Most are perfectly happy with an autoresponder and a redirection or path of escalation if the task is an emergency.
I started each morning with the non-negotiable task(emphasis on this being singular). iPad in hand, I walk my dog (Laura) over to a nearby cafe and tackle the single thing that needs to be crossed off the list for the day. Why?
It’s incredibly freeing and helps combat procrastination. Imagine you head to your office at 9 am knowing that if the day ended right now, you wouldn’t be behind or pilling up your to-do list.
Keith Rabois, Insist on Focus (Youtube, 90sec). If Peter Thiel wouldn’t allow his staff to talk to him about more than one thing they are working on, it’s probably directionally correct to start your morning with the one thing that matters.
Some entertaining finds.
A goal of mine for the year is to better position myself in the content/attention-grabbing parts of business. It’s a massive tsunami already underway and if you aren’t trying to dip your toes into content creation, I’m not sure what to tell you.
One of the benefits of starting to pay attention to content from a creation perspective is you become less of a consumer of it, and more of a student.
Here are a couple of pieces of content I found study-worthy. Each image is clickable to view the original post.
