My immediate focus for my Effectiveness Project is to develop practices and rituals that make a real, positive difference to my work.

I’ve tried a bunch of different things over the years for starting the working day the right way. I’m going to revisit many of these in the next few days and will share them here.

This may be the simplest thing you can do: ask yourself the question,’if I could only achieve one thing today, what is it that would give me the greatest satisfaction at the end of the day?’

If you can find an answer to that question, the obvious thing to do is to start working on it right away. Make it the very first thing on which you take action.

And be smart about it. This isn’t a ‘world hunger’ question. This refers to specific tasks, projects or problems that are occupying your mind or are standing in the way of greater progress.

Funnily enough, it’s not always easy to find an immediate answer to this question. And maybe that’s why the question is so powerful. It forces us to check in on what our real priorities are.