It’s one of the worst things you can do in the morning if you want to be focused, productive, creative, motivated, inspired, and present as an entrepreneur. But according to research from Deloitte:

• 43% do it the first 5 minutes of the day
• 76% do it in the first 30 minutes of the day
• 88% do it in the first hour of the day

When you do it so early, it throws you off and leaves you scatterbrained.
Yet your morning makes or breaks the day.
It sets a powerful precedent: Have a great start and you’ll have a ton of momentum in all of your projects; have a bad start and you’ll struggle to stay afloat, limiting all your potential, your motivation, and your clarity.
That’s why it’s so important to protect your mornings and capitalize on those hours. To do so, start by subtracting the things that sabotage you before adding things.

It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential. — Bruce Lee

Stop Checking Your Phone First Thing In The Morning

When you start the morning, your mental, emotional, and physical energy is at its peak. This potential is best aimed toward accomplishing your highest priorities, effectively and efficiently. (Your highest priorities, however, probably aren’t Instagram, emails, and YouTube.)
Here’s what activities to banish and why checking your phone can be so damaging:

Stop checking social media and consuming useless information first thing in the morning.

When people start the morning by consuming information, responding to messages, and checking previous notifications, they haven’t taken one step toward their goals and they’re already filling their mind with (mostly) useless, distracting stuff.
None of it will help them accomplish their biggest tasks.
All of it will weaken their potential for the day.

Never check your emails first thing in the morning.

55% of Americans check their email before they even go to work.
1 in 3 Millennials check their email as soon as they wake up.
This, however, is a cardinal sin of productivity.
The problem with responding to emails or messages so early is that it puts people in a state of reaction: It fills their head with tasks, stressors, and mini-fires they need to put out before they even had a chance to do all their top priorities.
And since they see their emails before they’re at work, they can’t even do anything about it yet — so it says in the back of their mind all morning and they can’t be fully present.
It seems like an innocent little peek, but it’ll sabotage themselves.

Block all phone notifications.

No matter how hard you try, if you get a notification every few minutes, you cannot focus well on what you’re doing.
In fact, if a notification pulls you away from what you’re doing, once you return, you’ll waste a lot of time as your mind readjusts, refocuses, and returns to the same level of productivity before the distraction.
(You lose over 23 minutes each time, actually.)
Worse, every time you check a message, email, alert, etc., your brain releases dopamine, a chemical that makes us feel good.
Eventually, your body gets addicted to these chemicals and you start craving it — and the only way to satisfy that craving is to check Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

How to Take Back Your Morning:

1. Don’t just “try harder.”

Many people will read this, nod their heads, and say:

“Ugh, I do that all the time! I need to try harder to stop doing it.”

Please don’t.
Don’t “try harder” to avoid your phone.
Don’t “try harder” to ignore a notification.
Don’t leave it to willpower.
As Dr. Benjamin Hardy wrote, “Willpower doesn’t work.” Your phone is too addictive to just “force” yourself to avoid it.
Instead, shape your environment so it’s impossible to check your phone.
Here are some easy ideas:

• Put your phone in a different room. (If your phone is your alarm, by any cheap alarm clock to do the same job.)
• Set it on Airplane Mode at night and keep it that way until you arrive at work.
• Set the Do Not Disturb settings so you don’t get notifications for the first hour (or more) of your morning.
• Give your phone to your spouse and tell them not to give it back until a certain time.
• Leave your phone in the car.
• Remove addicting apps and games from your phone.

  2. Add something to replace the screen time.

  When breaking an old habit, it helps to incorporate a new habit to replace the previous one.
  Instead of getting the dopamine ping of checking your phone, feeling great every morning by doing a great awesome routine.
  Meditate. Take a walk. Eat healthy foods. Read something inspiring. Write your goals. Stretch. Etc.
  It doesn’t have to be complicated (or long), but just do something to help you feel 100% ready — mentally, physically, and emotionally — so you’re focused, inspired, motivated, and driven.

  If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six of them sharpening my axe. — Abraham Lincoln

Then, once you start working on your highest priorities, you’ll have a lot more momentum and zeal.

3. How long should you wait before checking your phone?

I would wait a minimum of an hour.
That way you have plenty of distraction-free time to do a quick morning routine and spend time on the things (or people) that are important to you.
I typically don’t check my phone until almost 3 hours after I wake up because I know that time is worth its weight in gold, but I understand it isn’t realistic for a lot of people.
However long you wait, just make sure you take a big step forward on your highest priorities before even thinking about it.
Then you’ll know what it’s like to seize the day.