Last week we talked about getting up and doing your work early in the morning. If you missed it, the main arguments for doing your work before anyone else is up were:
• Early in the morning, there are no fires to put out. You can focus solely on the work that needs to get done.
• You guarantee that the most important thing you need to do actually gets done. It doesn’t get pushed aside, day after day.
Today, I’ve got one more reason for you. It’s called willpower depletion. Give this quotes a read and learn from people much, much smarter than me:
“Some of the earliest evidence of this effect came from the lab of Roy Baumeister. In one early study, he brought subjects into a room filled with the aroma of fresh-baked cookies. The table before them held a plate of the cookies and a bowl of radishes. Some subjects were asked to sample the cookies, while others were asked to eat the radishes. Afterward, they were given 30 minutes to complete a difficult geometric puzzle. Baumeister and his colleagues found that people who ate radishes (and resisted the enticing cookies) gave up on the puzzle after about 8 minutes, while the lucky cookie-eaters persevered for nearly 19 minutes, on average. Drawing on willpower to resist the cookies, it seemed, drained the subjects’ self-control for subsequent situations.” – American Psychology Association
The theory is that self-control and willpower are kind of like the battery in your phone. First thing in the morning, you can accomplish anything, but every single minor choice you make depletes that willpower a little bit. By the end of the day, the tank is empty.
It’s easy to be on a diet at breakfast. You get up, you pack your lunch, you make your egg whites… by 7 pm, you’re exhausted, so you sit down with a bowl of ice-cream for dinner. In your own life, there are countless examples of this; since this paper came out in 1998, there has been more and more evidence to support it. There is a good reason you’re tired. Doing your work first thing in the morning means you can focus. There are no distractions and your willpower is fully charged.
I know I can do 2-3x the amount of work with an hour in the morning vs an hour in the afternoon or at night.
Think you do your best work at night? Try this for a week. See what you can accomplish with 1 hour in the morning. Test it. You might be a night owl. It’s a real possibility. 10% of people are too foggy in the morning to get anything done no matter what they try, but that’s only 10% of the population. Even if you think you’re in that group, it might be worth testing your theory.
And when you get up, you should have something you plan to do (or else getting up is kinda silly). How about a nice routine of practicing with The Final Step? It’ll be a nice, short review to get the brain juices flowing. Not too much, but 5 minutes should do you a world of good.
Get your copy by following this link:
www.physicianassistantexamreview.com/thefinalstep
Brian Wallace