The Opportunity of the Morning
“Win the morning, win the day.”
“If I’m not going to take action towards my goals at the beginning of the day - before I have any distractions, any complications, any other demands on my time - then I can stop kidding myself that I’ll do it at the end of the day.”
In an earlier post we talked about Time to Mobile, and suggested a practice around how you use your mobile phone at the beginning of the day. If you haven’t read that or tried the practice, go read it, then try it, then come back.
Welcome back! The first thing to note is how you got on with the practice itself. Did you attempt it? How successful were you? We ask these questions very lightly: each practice is simply an invitation to try something new, something that may help you, and see if it served you. People who tried this practice previously have found it hard to resist the temptation of the phone first thing in the morning - perhaps you did too? It’s worth remembering that they are designed to do this. The allure of the unknown - I wonder what is on my phone right now - and then the little hit of dopamine when we pick it up, it’s a very powerful thing.
The beauty of practicing this restraint is that it shows you how powerful that temptation is. That’s a useful thing to notice, and a reminder that it’s unlikely to disappear overnight. So don’t beat yourself up about it!
However, there is a moment with this practice, and something similar happens with every new adjustment we make. A few days in, you wake up, and on autopilot, you pick up the phone. Then it’s the realisation, “Oh no! I’m supposed to stay off my phone for a while each morning, and I’ve picked it up straight away.”
What do you do then?
Do you put it back down?
Or do you say to yourself, “I’ve done it now. I might as well keep scrolling”?
Research says that most of the choices we make each day are made on autopilot. What we do in decisive moments like these can be so powerful, because at the end of the day, who is running your life? Is it you? Or are you allowing life to happen to you?
Assuming then that you do get into this habit - you give yourself the gift of an hour or half an hour free each morning - you now have the opportunity to take control of your life, one day at a time. The quote we started with - “Win the morning, win the day” - speaks to the power of this quiet time at the beginning of your day. Before any other forces can go to work on your limited resources of time and energy, what do you want to accomplish? And what can you do today to move closer to that goal?
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Taking one micro-action, one tiny step, on a daily basis can be radically transformative.
And if you notice that you aren’t taking these actions, great - maybe that means those goals aren’t really the things you are interested in. Now you know that, you can find out what is important to you, and then what’s most important to you, and prioritise from there.
