Dr. Ed Torrey explains how you remember your day by its beginning, end, and emotional peaks. He wakes two hours before colleagues to work uninterrupted, and recommends using evenings for real family time or priorities instead of passive scrolling.
Dr. Torrey (Dr. Ed Torrey).
Two hours.
Hi, this is Dr. Torrey with another short video from ProductivityPearls.com this one is all about how you start and end your day. Now, this is super important. When people study memory and how we remember things and how we feel about things, they often mention that how things start and how they end are key components to how we remember our day. Now, why is that important? Well, the way we remember is important because it informs our mood if we look back on it favorably. Think about that feeling when you're leaving work and you think, man, I didn't get anything done today. That feeling, you feel like crap, right? It actually can ruin your evening in a way. So. So be careful about that. That emotion that you feel. Your emotions impact how you interact with people and how productive you are with other aspects of life. So it's important to think about your mood and your behavior's impact on your mood. So what I like to do is, first of all, when it comes to memory, we tend to remember the beginning, the end, and then the peaks of emotion throughout that whatever that moment in time was. So peaks of emotion, like extreme emotion? Not necessarily extreme, but high emotion. Whether it's high anger or high happiness, laughter, those sort of things. These are the things we tend to remember. The peaks. Right. So the beginning, the end, and the peaks. I'm not talking about the peaks of emotion right now. I'm talking about the beginning and the end, how you begin your day and how you end your day. Now, here's why this is super important. How you begin your day can inform how the rest of your day goes, your mood and interacting with everybody and all that stuff. So if you are able to accomplish a major thing for yourself, something, a goal of yours or a task that you really had set out, a high priority item, if you're able to accomplish that early, then whatever occurs in the rest of the day is sort of irrelevant because you already got that high priority item done right? And the same thing goes for at the end of the day. Now, oftentimes we find that our mornings are super quiet and our evenings could be super quiet. Now, you could spend your evening wasting it away watching TV or snacking on junk that you shouldn't be snacking on. You could waste your morning away by keep hitting snooze. Keep hitting snooze. But the fact is, if you get up earlier than everybody else, this is exactly what I do. I get up earlier than everyone else. I drive into work super early. So much so that I actually get two hours of work done before anyone even shows up. Then when they show up, I'm still starting to get I'm still doing work, right? So because I get stuff done before anyone shows up, there's no interruption. Also, the rest of the day, if somebody needs my help or I need to change shift gears and work on something else, it's okay, because I already prioritized how my morning would be. So be conscious of how you start your day and then also how you end your day. And make sure you're doing this with productive stuff, whether it's time with family, real time with family, not time in front of a tv, but real time with family, or it's time engaging in a high priority task. Whatever it is, put those on either end of your day and it will completely shape how you perform in the rest of the day and the amount of stuff you're able to get done.
