The First 2 Hours

Chapter 1Discover what affects your capacity (and your day)

So how do you currently spend the first two hours of your day?

Go on and think about it now.

I bet the first thing you do (like most of us) is open your email and see what pops up. Then, before you know it, it’s 1 pm and you’re still responding to emails or reacting to requests.

NEWSFLASH! You are letting email dictate your day.

Right now, you’re wasting your energy and your most productive time on email, instead of on the real work you have to do.

Whether you are conscious of it or not, those emails you have read, replied to or filed create distractions for the rest of the day and make you unproductive. You have given up control of your effectiveness.

Don’t worry — this book is not about being anti-email. After all, that’s the way most of us communicate at work. What I am saying is that there’s a time and a place for everything.

You need to start consciously thinking about the types of tasks you do throughout the day, when you do those tasks and whether you are making the best use of your most valuable time.

Why it’s about when

There are good scientific reasons as to why we need to pay attention to when we do specific things at work.

A lot of this can be explained by jet lag.

When we travel across different time zones, we mess with our body’s natural rhythms, known as circadian rhythms.

This is what creates feelings of fatigue and disorientation, and often results in insomnia at 3 am. Shiftworkers, who don’t ...