OK Productive
OK Productive
026. Morning Momentum - The Post-Sleepy Episode
How to build momentum in your day
- First, have a good night of sleep (see episode 1)
- Erik drinks a high-calorie, low-sugar coffee shake (thanks, gallbladder) before doing anything else in the morning.
- Energy (calories) and caffeine work well to kickstart the day so long as they're not overdone
- What part of your day has the most momentum? (morning, afternoon, night)
- It may depend on what you'll be doing (see "Have a plan to follow" below).
- Identify which tasks you have planned and how they will affect your energy.
- If you have something planned that requires lots of prolonged focus, engage "no distractions" mode.
- If you have something planned that you have to split up (because of meetings or other interruptions) or it's something you don't have sustained energy for (making lots of phone calls), consider spreading the tasks out with pomodoros or other tasks.
- Use Do-Not-Disturb when you can. Otherwise, consider turning off notifications for non-critical functions like Slack, email, etc. so you can still receive phone calls. This is especially useful for parents!
- Even easier parenting trick: set your phone across the room so you can still take calls, but you won't see all the other distracting notifications
- Don’t check email — there are apps and extensions to help with this!
- Work on a task for 10-20 minutes to build some momentum
- If you need to focus, avoid working at places with lots of distractions or use other environment-design techniques to lower the impact of those distractions
- Changing your phone screen to greyscale doesn't work as well as one might think
- Screen Time on iOS is a great tool and if you have an iPhone you should try it!
- Is flow endurance a thing? Erik can code for longer periods of time than he can do correspondence, social media, graphics, etc. on most days. Is this due to building endurance for programming or is it more nuanced?
- The biggest challenge is not knowing what to do…
- Use your calendar for yourself to plan activities
- Erik’s weekly checklist marks the day of the week that certain tasks are due so he doesn't have to look at his calendar (which is yet another distraction!)
- Managing interruptions
- Managing unplanned time
- Morning vs Afternoon
- Exercise and play spread throughout the day can help with creative tasks and learning. If you take breaks, get up and move around, play, walk, exercise, please!
- Seriously, there's science behind this: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00824/full
