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Top 4 Ways to Spend the First Hour of a Workday28 Jan 2015

Grab these clever ideas on making your day more productive, successful and satisfying. Applying most of them requires a minimum amount of effort, and the benefits can be very rewarding. Particularly, if it's the way you see your day and what you've achieved that is being improved!

Make a plan

Sort through your tasks and align them in a way starting with the most difficult and concentration-demanding and ending on the light, easy work. Update your to-do list and calendar, make sure you know what you and the team are doing and that everything is arranged and the information distributed.

Eat that frog

This is the most popular and probably one of the most effective methods of making a start of the workday. (The name comes from Brian Tracy’s book on time management.) Get the most difficult and most hated jobs you've got ahead for the day and do them first. This way, the rest of the day has a lot of potential of being pure joy, hasn't it? You also get the great boost of having already completed the big task of the day, so energy and satisfaction shall stay with you for the rest of it.

Customer Service

If part of your job is service work (answering queries, solving issues, providing information etc.), it may be a good idea to do this first, in order not to get distracted later. In general, there is a choice to be made with these kinds of jobs - whether you want to respond ASAP (and provide great service but be constantly interrupted) or to make set times during the day for checking the emails or tickets (and respond less promptly, but accomplish far more overall). Whichever you prefer, it's usually a good start of the day to check in and see what's there to deal with.

Try something new

When you're still fresh and full of energy (presumably), this time of day may be the best opportunity for making some kinds of experiments with new ideas, new tools, new approaches to common problems, fresh solutions and so on. Also, starting something new will demand a lot of your attention and strength, so doing it before you're tired makes sense.

So, do you feel like giving any of these a go? All of the above are worth trying, as very often making a good start is key to having a great day altogether.