Morning Motivation: Where can I find it?

You have a list of a million things to do. Maybe it’s your to-do list. Maybe the tasks it takes you to start your business. Maybe the things you need to get done before going on vacation. But no matter what, when given a list of tasks——unless it’s all perfectly sequential——the first question you’ll be asking yourself is, “Which do I do first?”

There are two basic strategies that you can pick from: You can either start with the most difficult tasks or the easier ones. And depending on who you ask, you’ll get different answers. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, said that if you do the easy things in business first, the rest will follow and the business will be successful. Tim Ferriss says the opposite: Do “either the thing that makes you most uncomfortable . . . or ask: Which one of these, if done, will make all the rest irrelevant or easier?”

So there are two camps, two strategies, and it all comes down to personal preference. Are you the type that can jump out of bed and dive straight into work? Or do you need to gradually gain momentum and focus by starting out with smaller tasks? A great video to watch about this is How to Solve the "I Wake Up With No Motivation" Problem by Thomas Frank. The basic idea, if you’re in the latter camp, is that being productive in the small things will give you the psychological positivity to feel ready to accomplish the big things. (Think “small wins” from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit.)

I’m one in the later camp. When I get up, it takes me a while to build motivation, so I start with simple tasks, like a few minutes of pushups, editing a blog post or reading. Then, after I’ve already checked a few things off my daily to-do list, I’m ready for the big jobs of the day.

So figure out where you stand. Knowing what your brain thinks with respect to getting stuff done will be very helpful. Becuase if you need anyone on your side to help you get stuff done, it's your brain.



NOTE: YouTube Watch List example - The video I’m least interested in watching is the one I should watch first. Why? Because if it made it to the watch list, I can tell myself, with certainty, that the video will be entertaining and informative to me. The problem is that not every video provides the same amount of entertainment and information. There are some videos that are there purely for entertainment purposes, and thanks to the lazy nature of human brains, I will always be more likely to click on one of those videos first. That’s why I have to force myself to watch those “difficult” videos. Best strategy? Watch videos, top-to-bottom, in the order I added them to the list.

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