THE MORNING ROUTINES OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, we all start our day at some point. And we all seem to start it differently.

Some of us hop online to check social media, others dive in to email, still others eat breakfast, exercise, or pack lunches for the kids. There’re a million different ways a morning could go.

Which morning routine might be best?

While there’s probably not an ideal morning routine that fits everyone, we can learn a lot from the morning routines of successful people as well as from the research and inspiration behind starting a morning on the right foot.

I collected a wide range of opinions on how best to start a day, from the scientific to the successful. Here’s the best of what I found—maybe it’ll help you get a little more productivity, creativity, and enjoyment out of your morning.

SCIENCE SAYS: WILLPOWER IS HIGHEST IN THE MORNING, SO START STRONG

You’ve maybe heard the advice that your first work of the day should be something meaningful and significant, a task that might take a lot of focus, will, and determination to accomplish. The reason: We’re limited with our self-control.

That’s the idea purported by the strength model. Self-control draws from a common resource that gets depleted over time. You can think of self-control as a muscle—fatigue sets in after exertion.

Researchers at the University of Nottingham and the National Institute of Education in Singapore reviewed 83 studies on self-control to come to the following conclusion:

Results revealed a significant effect of ego depletion on self-control task performance. Significant effect sizes were found for ego depletion on effort, perceived difficulty, negative affect, subjective fatigue, and blood glucose levels.

For those scoring at home, that’s both a psychological and physiological effect on your ability to get work done.

The longer the day goes on, the more fatigue your self-control experiences, the more important it is to make those early morning hours count.

THE EASIEST WAY TO HACK YOUR MORNING: TOMORROW LIST

From research and meta-analyses to Mark Twain, the advice is the same: Get big work done early.

Twain’s advice stems from this famous quote of his:

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

We’ve co-opted Twain’s saying to mean, "Do your biggest tasks first." When you start with a big item (a project/frog), the rest of your day looks pretty great by comparison.

The saying even inspired the title of a best-selling time-management book, Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. Fast Company highlighted Tracy’s work in an article about morning rituals and asked Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani to explain how exactly one implements the frog strategy into a daily system.

Step one: Choose your frog.

Once the frog is chosen, Trapani continues, write it down on a piece of paper that you’ll see when you first come into your office the next day. Then when your alarm goes off in the morning or when you arrive at work, bon appétit!

There are many examples of this specific method of frog-eating, a couple examples of which you’ll see below. The concept is something I like to call a "Tomorrow List."

At the end of your day, write down the tasks you need to complete tomorrow.Look at the list when you start the next day.End your day by creating another list for tomorrow.

And keep repeating.

STEVE JOBS’S MORNING ROUTINE: ONE SIMPLE QUESTION

In a commencement address he gave at Stanford back in 2005, Steve Jobs revealed the motivational tactic that he used to start each and every day.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Pretty powerful stuff. Would asking that question help keep your morning to-dos in perspective?

Source: (.fastcompany.com)