How to Prime Yourself for Productivity and Joy

In the never-ending journey for greater mastery of personal development we can easily forget the basics. It’s not uncommon to occasionally lose sight of the foundational building blocks of a positive, purposeful, productive day. Mastering the skill of priming yourself for a great day is the topic for today.

If you’ve been on the personal development train for longer than six months, it’s likely you’ve experienced a lull in your routine. You probably had some morning routine going strong but, somewhere along the way you fell off the road, struggled to get back on, and before you knew it found yourself stuck in a rut. I get it, I’ve had more than one misstep on my journey. It stinks to wake up feeling behind on your goals. So, allow me to share my framework for priming yourself for an effective, fun, meaningful day (without spending 3 hours meditating before 5am).

The three primers below are meant to be executed in order every morning. I find they don’t need to have equal allocations of time to be effective. You will need to try out different amounts of time for each primer and tweak according to what works for you. The key is to keep it SIMPLE. Doing these primers daily for just 5 minutes each is infinitely better than not doing them at all. Consistency is crucial to maximize the benefits of priming your day over the long term.

Primer 1: Engage in Exercise

A shocker, I know. Let me ask you though, when was the last time you engaged in vigorous exercise consistently? This is not a persuasive blog about fixing your health. The long-term benefits of regular exercise are evident. The purpose of priming yourself with activity first thing in the morning is twofold. Both have to do with your mindset.

First, it clears your head. It provides you with an opportunity to breathe deeply, listen to inspirational music or books, and floods your body with endorphins. It’s like a shower for your brain. Think of it like hitting the reset button for your thoughts/feelings/mood. When you move, you feel better and are filled with more energy throughout the day.

Second reason to prime with exercise is you feel like a winner! There’s nothing like setting a goal to run a specific distance or to lift a specific weight and crushing it first thing. When you overcome a challenge you feel confident, capable and excited to take on the day. Contrast that with sliding out of bed, rushing to grab a coffee and plopping down blurry eyed at your desk. That doesn’t sound like the beginnings of a great day to me!

Primer 2: Generate a State of Passion

In the craziness to hit our KPIs, make dinner, respond to that text, check in with family, and clean out that cluttered garage we’ve been meaning to organize for 6 months, it’s easy to forget what we’re after in the first place: A feeling. At the end of the day we all want to be have peace, joy, and feel a sense of meaning in our work. This is why it’s important to prime for passion in the morning. Because everyone says they want to feel passionate about what they do, but very few people are willing to do something to feel passionate.

So, off the back of exercise, what you need to do is give yourself an opportunity to generate a feeling of passion. How you do this can look many ways. The key is not what you do, it’s how you feel afterwards. You want to feel excited, psyched up, and ready to work. You want your mind and heart to be aligned, ready to crush your outcomes for the day. It can look like reading something out loud like scripture, or favorite quote. It could be pacing the room and giving a speech about something you’re passionate about to an imaginary crowd. Or it could be simply repeating affirmations you’ve created for yourself. Remember it’s not about what you do, it’s about the state of passion you are in once you finish.

Primer 3: Plan your work

Have you heard, “People don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan?” It’s easy, especially if you own your own business or your work is self-directed, to get caught up in superfluous trivial work. The day slips by and you felt busy moving stuff around but looking back the big rocks didn’t move at all. That’s why it’s critical to establish priorities at the beginning of the day. This focuses the mind and creates real excitement for your work. 

Something powerful happens when you determine what’s most important and write it down. Nothing is more powerful than focused effort towards a specific outcome. If you want to prime your day for impact take the time to run a short exercise at the beginning of your day. First think through what things you could do with your day, then sort them. Identify which tasks are urgent (must get done soon) and important (are critical to the big picture). Tasks that are urgent and important are top priority. However, if a task is low importance, but high urgency it could be a sign you need to delegate or disregard it all together. By the end of your brainstorming you should have one to three things that absolutely must get done today that you are confident are important and/or urgent.

Now you have a basic understanding of the framework of the three primers, you can start to try out and tweak them as soon as tomorrow morning! Remember to not overcomplicate them, and to adjust the timing of each so you stay consistent with them. With the power of a primed body and mind you are free to feel alive, passionate, powerful, joyful and amped up for your day. I hope you found this framework helpful on your personal development journey.

In the meantime, stay awesome.

Joey