Even the most professional people can have trouble starting their day on time. It typically stems from a couple of wrong moves right at the beginning, causing a domino effect that can set back your entire day.
By correcting those things from the time you wake up, it’s quite possible to begin every day like clockwork.
1. Start Thinking About Tomorrow, Today
When you’re finishing up for the day, you’re most likely putting work behind you and out of your mind.
That’s actually really healthy, but before you hang it up for the day, take 20 or 30 minutes to go over the next day’s tasks and responsibilities, at least for the first portion of the day. That way, you can anticipate when you realistically need to start, while also minimizing surprises.
2. Learn How to Say No
Speaking of those surprises, a lot of them have the tendency to occur in the morning, and they can quickly throw you off schedule before you even get started.
With the exception of critical issues that have to be addressed, it’s good to get in the habit of putting some things off until later or delegate them to a partner or employee. Otherwise, you’ll never get anything done.
3. Reserve Time When You Are Uninterrupted
Instead of saying no to certain tasks during the first part of the day, it may be even more effective to simply set aside a block of time, say, an hour or so, when you are unavailable.
So, even though you are actually beginning your day at 7am, as far as everyone else is concerned, you don’t start until 8am. You can still be reachable to put out any serious fires, but removing interruptions completely for a brief time will ensure that you get caught up.
4. Complete Tasks Early
There is nothing that gives us the kind of peace of mind that we get from getting things done ahead of schedule. As a business owner, you of course have to schedule pretty much everything, but some projects and tasks can actually be completed way in advance.
You may not have very much free time, but whenever possible, you will thank yourself if you get anything that you can done early.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.