The Golden Hour

It’s that time of the semester again, when academic lives heat up, work is probably calling, and personal events like graduations, recitals, and parties ramp up as well.  Stormy weather is typical in the spring and I’ve always thought it was apropos, given the often chaotic schedules that many have this time of year.  Now is the time to be extra vigilant of your time and productivity.  So how do you cope? 

One strategy is to pay close attention to what you do during that first hour of your work day.  Emergency medicine says that the first hour (or so) after a trauma is the most important to intervene to prevent worsening injury or death.  This is known as the golden hour.  What I’m suggesting is you implement your own golden hour, not to prevent death (yikes), but to encourage productivity and success.

Julie Morgenstern wrote a book called Never Check Email in the Morning (a work-life management book I recommend) and, while refraining from email all morning is probably not possible for most of us, what is possible is to delay checking email for an hour after you get to work.  (If your work culture simply won’t accommodate that – and by that I mean you would get fired or be professionally damaged -- an alternative is to scan email for absolutely critical stuff, spend a few minutes responding, and then turn it off for an hour.) Now, wait…I hear my fellow email addicts crying and gnashing your teeth. Before you tear your clothes and run in to the street to protest this madness I’m recommending, hear me out.  Email is hardly ever the source of high level or crisis information that simply must be addressed first thing.  Those things usually come in the form of a call or a text.  Email is great at getting you off task and distracted from what is critical, so it’s important to not think of email as “instant messaging” that requires that kind of immediacy. 

So what do you with that hour?  There are many ideas. Here are the best:

1. Work on the one thing that is necessary -- not preferable…necessary --  that you do that day.  What task or project would have the most impact on your work or would advance your goals?  What activity needs to be done so that you feel you actually got something accomplished that day?  Work on that.  I frequently end my day thinking about the next day’s first hour.  I write that activity down on a Post-It placed on my computer keyboard so that I see it first thing.  To earn extra “organization goddess/guru” points, you can even assemble all the materials you need to do for your activity and have them ready to go in your “first hour” file.
2. Do the hardest thing first.  Need to have a difficult conversation with someone?  Hate to look over your budget spreadsheets?  Whatever it is, get it done right away, so that it won’t be weighing on you through the rest of the day.
3. Feel empowered.  Some recommend that you use at least a few minutes of that hour to get inspired, because that will drive you, and possibly insulate you from other stressors, for the rest of the day.  

Other factors to support this golden hour, according to Ilya Pozin,  are to eliminate distractions, to eliminate multi-tasking, and use the phone instead of emails when conversation is what’s needed.  (How do you know when a call is better?  When the email string comes back twice or more.)

Then, after your golden hour has passed and you’ve completed or made progress on your task, open your door, turn on email, and let the day come in!

Have you used this strategy?  How did it go?  What other recommendations for maximizing this time do you have?