How to Get Motivated in the Morning

                                   

Step 1: Stop While You’re Ahead

A simple, effective way to starting your day encouraged and motivated is to leave your last task unfinished so you can quickly finish it the following day.

This way, you’ll get encouraged and motivated first thing in the morning – by keeping the momentum from the previous day’s creative fire going.

You won’t have to think about what you need to do, or see a daunting task of starting something in front of you. You’ll have a in-progress task ready to dive in and finish. And that–finishing an important task first thing in the morning, that you don’t even need to think about what to do–will encourage and motivate you for the rest of the day.

Step 2: Write Out Tomorrow’s Steps Today

In order to make this method of working more effective, write out tomorrow’s steps while you’re still hot today.

Bottom line: Write out how you’ll finish that task with specific steps the night before.

Be as specific as possible. Don’t leave any ambiguity, or you’ll also fall into start-paralysis, since you won’t want to figure out what needs to be done in the morning.

If you don’t specifically write out the steps, that’s still not as bad as starting a completely new task. But it’s still not as effective as writing out the steps, because you can’t just dive in and start executing without thinking.

When you’re still on a roll in your creative zone the night before, use your thinking to write out as specific steps as possible.

The following morning, when you’re not in that creative zone anymore, you don’t need to think – you just do by following your steps.

Step 3: Finish the Near-Complete Task Tomorrow Morning

When you get to work the following morning (or afternoon for you night owls), finish the near-complete task first thing.

All you have to do is execute the specific steps to finish the task that you wrote out in step #2 above. No need to think about what to do and how – just do your list of steps.

Before you know it, you’ll get an important task finished, without having to be daunted by starting a new task or thinking about how to finish the task (which is when you start procrastinating and watch YouTube clips until lunchtime).

Finishing an important task so early in your day will encourage and motivate you. The creative juices and productive mindset will kick back into gear, and you’ll be ready to rock the rest of your day. That new task will be much easier to start, and bigger tasks will be easier to tackle.