TCW #039 | Your new daily kickstart ritual
Plan your day, get it done, feel in control, and set yourself on a path to a more fulfilling and productive career.
Hey, it’s 📣 Coach Erika! Welcome to a 🙏 paid subscriber edition🙏 of The Career Whispers. Each week I tackle reader questions about tech careers: how to get one, how to navigate them, and how to grow and thrive in your role.
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Last week, I taught you about how to implement daily wind-down rituals to close the book on work, open your mind to creative thinking, stop work anxiety from leaking into your private life, and better enjoy your non-work time.
This week, I’ll lay out a short, scientifically-backed daily work kickstart ritual that will allow you to:
start your day with a plan you can trust (and stick to)
get more of the right things done, every day
feel a daily deep sense of accomplishment that will lead to career-defining impact in the long run
As a bonus, this daily kickstart ritual does not require coffee or any other stimulant.
Trust me, I’ve been pregnant all year and haven’t had a lick of coffee, yet I’ve had 10 of the most productive months of my life (yes, pregnancy is longer than advertised, and yes, that is an annoying fact (to me) but perhaps a fun fact (for you).
Let’s dive in.
The thesis behind daily kickstarts
The ritual behind this week’s post was derived from one of my favorite books on professional impact and productivity: Deep Work by Cal Newport.
Cal's writing brings in thoughts and quotes from other great productivity writers and researchers. One quote that stuck out to me is from Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist and researcher:
"Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.”
Roy Baumeister
Productivity in the long run requires that you correctly identify and knock down the short-term distractions that will limit your long-term impact. But doing this is tricky and requires balance and many painful tradeoffs (like Tiktok, sadly).
Working for a company (or anyone other than yourself) definitionally means that we have to drive value to the business on their terms, not just based on our own career goals.
There are many ways that workers (including me!) trade long-term strategic and career productivity for short-term productivity, in service to their employer and at the cost of our own long-term impact:
Calendar-driven time management
All too often, we let our (fully booked) calendar drive our daily agenda, without questioning the merit of each of these meetings that “just popped up” or assessing them against our longer-term strategic goals. It’s especially hard to ask these questions when you have back-to-back meetings every day with no time to make a strategic plan in the first place.
Interrupt-driven time management
Or it's the constant barrage of Slack messages, chat pings, texts, emails, and shoulder taps that drive our cognitive focus. Omni-channel access makes us excellent first responders, but terrible strategists.
Short-term incentive-driven time management
The workplace will continuously reward firefighting and heroism over strategic thinking and deep work. We all know you’ll get more kudos and dopamine hits for fixing the bug that’s crippling production page load times than you’ll get for writing the well-researched design doc that would eliminate the entry point for 97% of those exact same bugs. This reward system is natural, since businesses have customers and shareholders to manage today, and your design doc isn’t real until it’s real.
OK, so that’s the reality check.
But the good news is that we are in control of the tradeoffs we make with our time.
For one, we often forget that planning takes cognitive energy, whether or not we start with a plan.
When we don’t have a solid plan at the beginning of the day, we’re constantly planning, replanning, communicating changes to the plan, and thinking about all the other things that need to be replanned. This is a ton of cognitive energy we’re wasting because we’re not taking the time to make a plan that we can stick to.
It’s a conundrum to face these daily distractions, but only when you’re thinking about the short-term.
Longer-term impact and fulfillment in our careers often come from the strategic and impactful work that requires deeper thinking, rather than responsiveness alone.
This is where the daily kickstart ritual comes in.
This kickstart ritual forces you to be intellectually honest with yourself about the tradeoffs you’ll make with your time and priorities — balancing against the responsiveness and availability that your employer expects and the longer-term impact you want to create at this company and for your career overall.
Your new 15-20 minute daily kickstart ritual
Each day for the next 2 weeks, add a 15-20 minute invite to your calendar.
Add it at the very start of your day, before your meetings start. For some of you, this will require starting your workday 15-20 minutes earlier, if you can’t move meetings around and if you usually start your day diving into your first meeting.
Add a document to the calendar invite if you don't already have a running "todo" list or other task management tool.
Kickstart ritual
Review the daily plan you made from the previous day’s wind-down ritual
Check your email for anything that came in overnight that needs a response by EOD today and requires either (1) deep thought or (2) action that will take time today.