The 1 Thing You Must Avoid Doing if You Want to Have a Productive Morning

Don’t rationalize.

The most important decision of your day is the first one you make.

For most of us, that decision is between getting up when we hear our alarms, or hitting snooze to get a few extra minutes of sleep. Most of us make this decision without much thought: either we’re ready to go, or we’re not — simple as that. Seems harmless, right?

Well, not exactly.

Deciding to hit snooze in the morning is detrimental to your daily productivity. Although the decision really doesn’t seem like an important one — it’s a matter of only a few minutes — it determines how the rest of your day is going to go.

When you rationalize with yourself in the morning, you’re more likely to do the same throughout the day.

Think about it this way:

You wake up in the morning, tell yourself all you need is 5 more minutes of sleep, and hit snooze.

When it’s time for breakfast, instead of making a healthy, balanced meal, you choose to run through McDonald’s because it’s easier, You don’t have as much time to make breakfast anyway because, well, you hit snooze.

You told yourself you were going to workout today, but the McDonald’s isn’t sitting right, and you decide working out tomorrow fits your schedule better. Plus, not exercising today gives you more time to focus on that big project you’ve been working on for the past 5 months.

But when it comes time to actually work on it, you’re tired, and you decide to throw on some Netflix. You tell yourself tomorrow is a better day for the project — you’ll come home from your workout and really get going on it.

Then tomorrow comes, you wake up, and hit snooze.

Face it: humans are creatures of habit.

We generally do the same things, every single day.

So, if you decide to rationalize with yourself in the morning, what makes you think you won’t rationalize with yourself when it comes to other obligations throughout the day, too?

If you want to use your mornings (and the rest of your day, for that matter) effectively, don’t rationalize with yourself when you wake up.

If you said you were going to wake up at 5:30A.M., do it.

I don’t care if you didn’t sleep well — you can catch up on sleep later. That extra 5, or 10 or 30 minutes of sleep in the morning is not going help with your daily productivity.

It’s simple: All you need to do, is exactly what you said you would.

Thanks for reading!

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