First Things First
When you look at your calendar, where is the strategic work scheduled? For many leaders, the answer is nowhere. Or it’s squeezed into late afternoon, after the meetings and emails and fire-drills have eaten up the day. By the time you sit down to think about the board presentation or the 3-year objectives or the difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding, it’s 3pm and you’re already tired.
Research shows that your brain’s capacity for complex judgment declines throughout the day as you burn through mental energy. For example, you have probably heard that judges are more likely to grant parole in the morning than in the afternoon. Something similar happens when you front-load your day with the tactical, urgent-seeming tasks and push the real thinking work until later. For most of us, “later” means we will be doing our thinking with a depleted brain.
One solution is to flip your day around. Take the first 90 minutes and dedicate them to the work that will move your business forward. Think through that strategic decision, plan for the hard conversation, take a deeper look into the latest developments in the tech that affects your company. Everything else comes after. Most leaders already know this. The gap is rarely awareness — it’s the daily discipline of actually protecting that time before the world comes rushing in.
Your calendar may resist this. There will always be urgent issues that feel like they can’t wait. But most of what feels urgent at 8am will still be there at 10am, and you’ll handle it better with meaningful work already behind you.
Put this into practice: Tomorrow, before you open your inbox, spend 90 minutes on your single most important project. Pay attention to how it feels compared to tackling that same work at the end of the day.
Until next time, Sherif