Taking effective action on YOUR priorities won’t happen by accident. In fact, without a bit of planning, and some focused effort, it won’t happen at all.

I use three anchor activities in my week – the Workday Startup, the Workday Shutdown, and the Weekly Review – to keep me oriented in the right direction. Today starts a 3-week series that will highlight each of these “rituals,” starting with the Workday Startup.

I fully expect your version of a Workday Startup to look different than mine, but here’s the goal: your Workday Startup should help you start your days with a consistent set of activities that help you focus on YOUR priorities and affirm your intentions for the day.

Having a set of consistent activities gives you a cue that you are about to start working. This has been incredibly important to me since I started working from home, but it has merit wherever your workday begins. The idea is simple: these activities are a gateway from whatever I was doing before work, to the workday.

It’s like brushing your teeth before you go to bed or stretching before a workout. 

The Workday Startup is literally on my calendar for the 30-minutes leading up to my workday and the calendar entry includes a link to the Google Doc that acts as my repeating agenda. At some point you memorize the agenda, but I open the Google Doc anyway because it’s easier to skip the hard parts if I don’t have a checklist staring me in the face.

Here’s what I do every morning:

Review daily sales reports from my printing business. Now that I am not materially involved in operations, it gives me a day-to-day picture of the customers they are serving, the kinds of projects they are working on, and the flow of cash into the business.

Review my calendar and tasks for the day. I’ve already made decisions about how I will spend my time and each morning I am reviewing those choices to ensure they are still the most valid and valuable uses of my time, energy, and focus. I renegotiate if necessary, but mostly I am reminding myself of the work that matters most today.

Set alarms on my watch. This probably seems silly, but in a world of incessant notifications, I ensure that any meeting I have with a human has an accompanying alarm that will prompt me if I lose track of time. The alarm in my Apple Watch is silent and persistent, so I have to interact with it to make it stop.

Review and respond to any messages. I check my email, slack, and text messages, replying to any that need a response before I dive into my work. I leverage focus modes on my phone to prevent intrusive notifications throughout my workday so I want to be as current as possible before I shut out the world. It is massively important to ensure MY priorities are clearly defined before I do this, because email is filled with Other People’s Priorities and can derail the whole day. This is also a great opportunity to delegate work out to my assistant or other members of my team. 

Your routine is going to look different, but I challenge you to consider how a block of time designed to help you enter your workday with purpose could change the game for you. What activities would help you to focus your time and energy more intentionally on the priorities YOU set?

What is one thing you would do in a Workday Startup?

An important note: this is not my “morning routine.” My wife and I workout and pray together each morning before any of this happens. I read, shower, and eat breakfast before diving into this ritual. This block of time is specifically a way to jump start my WORKday.

Next week we will dive into the Workday Shutdown routine that helps me close my day out with a sense of completion…and prime myself for the next workday.The new year is right around the corner and I want you to start 2025 with complete clarity about how you want your business to work for you. Grab my new PDF, 3 Questions Every Small Business Owner Should Answer Before The End of the Year, and you’ll not only be primed to clarify how to get more of what you want from your business, but you’ll have a chance to grab 90-minutes of free coaching with me.