How I stopped working in the evenings
Readtime: 3 minutes
You've heard the advice a hundred times.
Do your most important task first thing in the morning.
Win the morning, win the day.
The usual reason given is about willpower and energy. Most of us have more of both early in the day. Your brain is fresh and your inbox hasn't worn you down yet. So it’s best to tackle the hardest thing while you're at your best.
That's all true. But I think it misses the much bigger reason.
The bigger reason isn't about your morning at all. It's about whether you have a choice in the evening.
Here's what I mean:
If you do your most important work early, then by the time you finish the day's meetings, you have a choice. You can stop. You can close the laptop, see your family, go for a walk, watch something terrible on TV. Or, if you want to, you can carry on working. But the point is that it's a choice. Because the important thing is already done. The day is, in a real sense, complete.
But if you haven't done your most important work yet, you don't have a choice. You've got meetings until 6pm, and the most important thing is still sitting there waiting for you. So you have to do it that evening. The decision has been made for you.
That's the difference. One version of the day ends with you choosing what to do. The other ends with you having no choice at all.
Doing your most important work in the morning is about protecting that choice.
I learned this the hard way at KPMG. As a partner, I used to think my most important work was meeting with board members from my clients or winning a big new piece of work. But it wasn't. My most important work was the time I spent on my own, reviewing the work that the team had done.
And I often used to do this most important part of my job in the evenings, and on weekends. Because those were the only times when I had a chance to do it.
When I realised this, I started making myself Strategically Unavailable for part of the working day. I'd block out time in the morning – properly block it, as a meeting with myself – so I could get the review work done during the normal working day. Which then allowed me to be more available to my teams and clients for the things they actually needed my help with.
The change wasn't just about getting the work done. It was about what it gave me back. My evenings stopped being a continuation of the working day. My weekends started feeling like weekends again. And when I did choose to work in the evening, it felt completely different – because I was choosing to, not because I had to.
There's also a compounding effect to this that I didn't expect. Once you start protecting your evenings, you sleep better because you're not still half-thinking about work. You're more present with whoever you're with. And you wake up with more energy. Which means you're better at doing your morning work the next day. Which then protects the next evening.
Unfortunately, it compounds in the opposite direction too. Skip the morning work, drag the important task into the evening, fail to switch off properly, sleep badly, wake up tired, skip the morning work again. That's the loop a lot of senior people are stuck in.
The hard part is that the morning is also when everyone wants you. Email starts the moment you open your laptop. People schedule early meetings to "fit something in". Teams notifications start firing. There's a constant pull toward responsiveness, and being responsive feels like the right thing to do.
But every morning email you reply to or meeting you accept instead of doing your most important work is a trade. You're trading what for many people is their best hour for a slightly faster reply on something that probably could have waited, or for a meeting that could have been an email. And then you're giving up the choice that would have been waiting for you at 6pm.
So here's something to try:
Block 60 to 90 minutes first thing every morning for your Most Important Work. Put it as a recurring calendar appointment. Mark it as ‘busy’. Then every day before you finish work decide what you’re going to do in that block the following morning. And when you start work the next day, don't open Outlook, don't open Teams, just do the thing.
Then notice how the rest of your day feels. And notice the choice that you have at 6pm.
Your evening is decided before lunch. Make sure you're the one deciding it.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. My new YouTube video seems to have hit a nerve: The Workplace Mistake That Quietly Destroys Careers.