This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits and we’ve been returning to this daily-habit theme periodically since.
The habits we covered in January and February were related to my morning routine. In March, we began coverage of habits on intellectual stimulation and productivity, such as reading and carrying out a daily math or computer science exercise.
Today, we continue on with another productivity habit: That is, avoiding looking at—or even allowing notifications from—email or social media until a set time each day. For me personally, this time is 10:30am, which coincides with when I host my daily stand-up meeting with the data science team at my company, Nebula, and which is typically the first meeting of my day.
While avoiding meetings and messages until 10:30am, I’m afforded with a roughly two-hour period each morning that is the most delightful and luxurious part of my workday. I can focus deeply on the most urgent and important tasks of the day (check out Episode #456 for how I structure this deeply-focused work into blocks called pomodoros). This could be researching for a SuperDataScience podcast episode, recording videos for my YouTube channel, or writing code to train a machine learning model.
Once I hit the 10:30 mark, meetings begin, I start tackling emails, Slack messages, and LinkedIn comments. The rest of my day thereafter can feel frazzled, with a lot of productivity-killing task-switching and often no more deep work until the evening when everyone else has seemingly signed off for the day.
Depending on your role, it might not be possible to say “no” to opening your email inbox until 10:30am, but could you give yourself even half an hour or an hour of deeply focused work on the most urgent and important task of the day before cluttering your mind with what everyone else wants you to do? Or maybe it can’t be done every day of the week, but perhaps even on one day or two of them? Try to find a way to experiment with this no-distractions approach to the start of the day — I think you might find it invaluable and, frankly, rather enjoyable.
Like the other habits I’ve already covered in my Five-Minute Friday episodes on my daily habits, I choose to log my “no email or social media until 10:30am” habit as a binary habit — either I avoided my message platforms or I didn’t — so using the habit-tracking template I introduced Episode #538, I set the min column for this particular habit’s row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. You can adapt this habit, particularly the specific threshold time to whatever suits you best.