You’ve probably heard this expression before, which is to “eat the frog”—do the hardest tasks, your most dreaded task first (such as looking for aliexpress best sellers), so that everything else is downhill from there. This doesn’t work. The problem with trying to do your most dreaded task first is that you’re most likely going against your very ingrained circadian rhythm. There are certain things that you do better first thing in the morning, late at night, or middle afternoon, and they’re all different for every kind of person.
Let’s say that your most dreaded task is to write a big blog post. You have to write a 1,000-word blog post. It’s the most important thing you have to do today, but you know that you you can’t get into that creative mode before 8 o’clock at night. If you try to write that first thing in the morning and try to get that done, you’re just going to ruin your day.
Forget about “eating the frog”; the task that you should do first is the task that you are holding up the most. Follow me with this. If you are slowing things down, if you are holding up your team from their work because you have to approve something, or if a client is waiting for you to get back to them or a prospect is waiting for you to give a proposal, do the thing that you are slowing down the most and then everything really will get easier throughout the day.
Many successful people are talking about how they wake up early, they wake up before the sun comes up. I personally wake up at 4:45 every morning and that’s not because it makes me more successful. It’s because I have four small children that wake up at varying times throughout the morning and that’s the only way that I can guarantee that I get at least a half an hour to myself to work out and maybe have a cup of coffee. That’s the realistic nature of the life of an entrepreneur, especially an entrepreneur that has a family.
In hand with that, is the idea of having a morning routine. Most articles will tell you and get you in the mindset that if you don’t have this amazing morning routine, you couldn’t possibly be successful, so just go back to sleep because you’re wasting your time. I don’t have a morning routine; the morning routine basically starts at me waiting for somebody to wake up.
So, there are things that I would love to get done in the morning and that I am able to get done on most mornings, but I can’t count on that. What I do have is a nighttime routine that sets me up for a successful day the day after, and also allows me to sleep better because my head has been cleared. Don’t necessarily wake up early, but try to be consistent and try to control the factors that you can. I can’t control when my kids wake up, but I can get up earlier and as such I can go to sleep earlier; it’s a conscious decision that I’ve made to own my time and schedule myself rather than letting somebody else do it for me.
