Do your most important task first … or whatever …

I think it was this article (or one of the similar thousand) where I inferred probably the most important lesson on productivity that really works for me. The idea is “do your most important task first” before you do anything else when you start your work day (or evening/night). Thereby psychologically minimizing the potential effort and resulting stress of the work/tasks for the day. I’ve also heard of this lesson being called something like “eat that frog”. You see where the analogy lies.

But my take on that lesson is this. I don’t go to the gym and jump on the bench press with 70 kilos on it. I need to warm up. And I certainly don’t want to get all the heavy lifting out of the way early on to ease things up. So what really works for me is rather than placing any emphasis on any tasks whatsoever (logically taking into account emergent or exceptional cases) the trick is just to get started on anything that is related to the goals of the day. The first thing that comes to mind, the first thing at hand.

I agree totally with the article that the effects of doing anything productive before procrastinating are amazing. But by ignoring priority, size, difficulty, you’ve already got something done and started that momentum rolling without having to eat any frogs or whatever.

I suppose I would call this “The art of effortless momentum“. Just don’t think about it. Just sit down, pick a task and get going, build up some momentum.