Check your phone first thing and everyone else sets your morning agenda.

Whatever you look at first gets to set the agenda. Open the phone before you are properly awake and you inherit other people’s requests, moods and arguments as your opening thoughts, and the day runs reactive from there. None of those messages were timed around what you needed from today. They were just there first.

Keep the first twenty minutes for something you chose: water, a shower, the thing you are dreading, three pages of a book. Charge the phone across the room so the first reach has to be deliberate. Try it for five mornings before deciding whether it made any difference.