Imagine your day like 100m athletic or 50m swimming sprint. If you don’t get out of the starting blocks well, you’re unlikely to achieve your best result and you’ll be playing ‘catch up’ for the rest of the race.

It’s the same with the way you start your work day. If you don’t start well, or get distracted by the wrong thing, you’re very unlikely to end up having a good day.

That’s why the first minutes of your day is critical. This is when you set your day's direction and likely outcome. And that's why checking email 'first thing' is less than ideal. Sure, it is important but not the best way to start your day. While doing this isn't bad in itself, it subtly sets you up for less-than-ideal approach to your day.

Let me explain . . .

Getting out the starting blocks well

It’s very tempting to check email first thing in the morning. It’s the prevailing culture these days. Most us check email first thing when we get to work. Some even check it before they get to work. And some check it even before they get of bed!

You’ve probably been checking email ‘first thing’ for some time now. And how’s that going for you, in terms of helping set you up for a productive and successful day? Probably not so great, from what recent clients have been telling me.

That’s why I recommend you set up your email software to open in the Calendar view rather than the Inbox. It allows you to be aware of the big picture perspective of the tasks, activities, meetings and objectives you already have a commitment to, before you check what’s new in the Inbox.

When you see the Calendar first thing in the morning, you’re viewing your own (and possibly your bosses) agenda and priorities for the day. Many of those commitments in the Calendar are probably the result of emails you received yesterday, 2 days or 2 weeks ago. These are the important, higher priority tasks and activities you already have a commitment to.

Seeing them first up in the Calendar at the start of day helps to program your thinking and focus at a subliminal level. As a result, you are much more likely to achieve your ‘real work’ for the day. You’re more likely to head in the right direction if you’ve viewed the roadmap first.

By comparison, when you view the inbox first thing in the morning, you’re looking at everybody else’s agenda and priorities. As I heard someone say recently, ‘the inbox is your to-do list, but everyone else writes on it’.

You will, of course, feel obliged to attend to these new items promptly as they have now become part of your day’s agenda and priorities! I suggest that you will do better thinking and make better decisions about these new inputs after you’ve viewed the bigger picture context of the workload you already have.

Unfortunately, what so many well-intentioned professionals do is go straight to the bright, shiny, new, exciting things in the inbox, at the expense of first viewing the things they are already committed to and then wonder why they are struggling to keep up with everything!

If you don’t already have your Calendar set as the default when opening Outlook or Gmail, why not try it for the next week (or three) and see what difference it makes to the results you achieve each day? I believe this habit makes a fundamental difference to our day by day productivity. Now, it won’t make a big difference if you do it only for today. But if you make it a habit, day in, day out, week after week and month after month, you’ll be amazed at how more productive you’ll be in the longer term.

James Clear writes about the power of habits in his excellent book Atomic Habits. He writes that there are four keys to breaking an old, bad habit and creating a new, good habit. The first of these is that if you want to create a good new, make it highly visible or obvious.

As you can tell, what we've done by changing the default view is we've made the Inbox invisible and we've made the Calendar visible at the start of the day, because that's a good habit. So, if we want to get the good habit going, let's make it highly visible to start with. As one of my recent clients reported . . .

“Opening to my calendar when I first turn on my laptop and open outlook was less stressful and quite calming way to start a day off.”

So, how will you start your day tomorrow?

Most of the time your day gets off track by the way it begins