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Your Most Important Things for the day — the things you most need to accomplish that day — should take priority over everything else. However, we all know that fires come up throughout the day, interruptions through phone calls and email and people dropping by, new demands that will push the best-laid plans aside. If you put off your MITs until later in the day, you will end up not doing them much of the time.

Before you check email or blogs or do anything else in the morning, plan out your day and start on your first MIT. Don’t let yourself be distracted by anything else, and work all the way until you finish that first MIT. There. Now you’ve gotten at least one important thing done. Now, take a 10-minute break, and if you can stand it, get started on your next MIT.

Try to get all three of your MITs done (or 1 or 2 or 4, depending on your setup — but don’t do more than that) before moving on to anything else. If you can do that, the rest of the day is gravy!

I might get flamed for this hack by night owls, so let me qualify this tip by saying that if you stay up late at night and get a lot done, then do what works for you. Late night hours are really not much different from the early morning hours, as both times are much quieter with fewer distractions. However, as a former night owl, I recommend the morning hours simply because many times I would stay up well past midnight, but be very tired and not get anything done for the last 6-7 hours. Mornings are much more productive for me.

I started becoming an early riser last year, gradually waking earlier over the course of more than a month (see How I Became an Early Riser). This month, I’ve been trying to develop the habit of a Morning Routine, and the great thing about a morning routine is that you can develop whatever routine works best for you, and tweak it as you go. Decide what you’d like to accomplish each morning, and build your routine around that. Like to exercise? Put that in there. Healthy breakfast? Go for it. Check email? Fine.

The morning is your time.

The mornings are a fresh start, peaceful and free of ringing phones and constant email notifications. If you get your Most Important Things done in the morning, the rest of the day is just gravy.

The first step of this hack is the more necessary — we often have an overload of information coming at us in different ways, and it is distracting and a waste of our time. Do we really need to read 100 blogs every day? Edit your feeds to just the ones that you really love. Trust me — you can let go of the rest. Also edit the email (and snail mail) that comes in: can you unsubscribe from mailing lists, newsletters, or other unnecessary, regular emails? Can you filter out all the forwarded chain mail you get from friends and family (or ask them to stop sending them)? I’ve done this, and it saves a lot of time. The few chain mails (or joke emails) I still get, I delete immediately. Stop getting catalogs in the mail too.

What other information are your receiving on a daily, weekly or monthly basis? Can you cut out your magazine and newspaper subscriptions without really missing anything? Do you get routed email from coworkers that you really don’t need to be getting? Do people routinely cc stuff to you unnecessarily? Think about everything you receive, and edit brutally. You will drastically reduce the time you spend reading. For everything else that begins to come in after your editing process, ask yourself if you really need to be getting that information regularly. Most of the time the answer is no.

Now, after this process, you should be left with less to read. Here’s the next step: crank through it all.

I make sure to empty all my inboxes every day — physical, voicemail, email, blog reeder. I just crank through them, making quick decisions as necessary, saving some important ones to be read later if I don’t have the time to read them now. Sometimes I’ll print them out and take them with me on the road for reading when I catch some unexpected spare time, like waiting at the doctor’s office.

Reading my blogs is a good example: I use Google Reader, and when I check my feeds in the morning, I use the “view all” mode, where I’m reading all the blogs at once. I use the mouse wheel and just scroll down through them all, reading the headlines quickly. If I see a headline that sounds interesting, I’ll click on it to open in a new window to read when I’m done, then continue to scroll through the rest of my unread posts. I can quickly get through more than 100 posts this way. Then I’ll go and quickly read the posts I’ve opened in new tabs. If I don’t have time to read them now, I’ll bookmark them in a folder I call “Inbox” to read later. When I have time later, I’ll read through all my Inbox posts, and delete them (or save them elsewhere if I want to post about them). But the key is to crank through them, really only reading the really interesting ones.

Editing and cranking through the information you receive can free up a lot of time for more important things — like achieving your goals.

The decluttering your work space part of it is simply to remove all extra distractions, on your desk and on your computer. If you’ve got a clean, simplified workspace, you can better focus on the task at hand.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Gather all papers on your desk (including any scraps, post-its, phone messages, etc), put them in your inbox, and process through them rapidly. (See 3 Steps to a Permanently Clear Desk)
2. If you’ve got folders or stacks of paper on or around your desk, process them and put them away as in step 1 — listing them on your projects or actions lists, and filing them out of sight.
3. Get rid of distracting knick-knacks, posters, pictures, etc. A few photos of your family is fine, but if you’ve got a lot of other stuff, it’s probably distracting.
4. Clear your computer desktop of icons. File or trash them, then turn off desktop icons so you’ve now got a clutter-free desktop. Close unnecessary windows on the computer (especially solitaire or minesweeper or whatever your current distracter is). Now choose a nice, serene desktop picture (and using a photo of a magazine model doesn’t qualify as serene).

Ahhh. A peaceful working environment. I also suggest using headphones if you have a problem with the ambient noise in your office, or people dropping by too much.

Now, with distractions minimized, focus on the task at hand. Don’t check email, don’t work on five projects at once, don’t check the stats on your blog, don’t go to your feed reader. Work on that one task, and work on it with concentrated focus until you are done. (See How NOT to Multi-task.) Then celebrate your achievement!

Removing distractions from your workspace and really focusing on one task at a time will greatly increase your productivity. If your distraction is reading Zen Habits … well, that’s OK. But only that one exception.

This is one of my favorite tips. My best days come when I get into work early, and begin my work day in the quiet morning hours, before the phones start ringing and the din of the office begins it crescendo to chaos. It is so peaceful, and I can work without interruption or losing focus. I often find that I get my MITs done before anyone comes in, and then the rest of the day is dealing with whatever comes up (or even better: getting ahead for the next day).

Added bonus: you skip rush-hour traffic.

But just as productive is the second part of the tip: leave early and work fewer hours. I don’t mean to shift your 8-hour day to 7 a.m.-4 p.m. … that by itself would work well, but I’m recommending you take it even further: work only six or seven hours.

I know: you may not be able to take this option, depending on your job. But you might be surprised. Many bosses are not worried so much about the number of hours you work, but the amount that you produce. So think out a plan, write up a proposal, and talk to your boss. The worst that can happen is he/she will say no. If you work for yourself, you have no excuse.

Why does this hack work? If you commit to working only six hours today, and leaving by 3 p.m., you have a much tighter deadline. You have no time to waste surfing the net or playing solitaire or talking to your coworkers or sitting in long meetings. You must crank out the work, and get everything done, so you can get out of the office on time. On the days when I leave early, and know that I have to get out of the office early, I am focused. I’m a productivity machine.

Motivation tip for this hack: set a daily appointment, so that you’ll be sure to get out of the office on time. This could be a workout appointment with a workout buddy, or the need to pick up your kids, or something you need to do with your significant other. Whatever it is, be sure that you will not miss it, and get out of the office in time to be there.

It’s paradoxical, but if you work fewer hours, and know that your time is limited, you will be more focused. Then you have more hours to yourself! Everyone wins.