0528-Turbocharge Your Career Before Breakfast

By LAURA VANDERKAM

When we think of our jobs, we tend to think of things we have to do. There are meetings that consume much of the day, and emails about scheduling those meetings that consume all the pockets of time in between.

You may have things on your wish list ? time to think, time to create ? but who has space in a packed schedule for that?

You do. You just have to get up earlier.

Successful people know that mornings are generally, a great time for getting things done. Emergencies have yet to brew and only the most masochistic offices schedule conference calls for 6 a.m.

Research into the science of willpower is finding that our supply of self-discipline is most robust after a good night’s sleep. That makes it easier to tackle tasks that require focus and internal motivation ? more so than at any other point in the day.

If you get up early, you can start the day with big wins. That’s true with personal priorities like exercise, but it’s true for professional priorities too.

Debbie Moysychyn started a new job a little over a year ago building a division of healthcare education at Brandman University. But she soon noticed that her workday featured a lot of interruptions. Part of this was by design. She was trying to establish a collaborative culture and had an open-door policy with her team, so viewed from that perspective, these “interruptions” were the most important part of the day! The problem was that she had other things to do too and the disjointed nature of her schedule meant she never got far.

The solution to her dilemma lay in a quirk of her personal life. Her teenage daughter played water polo and needed to be in the pool before 7 a.m. So instead of going home after taking her to the pool, Moysychyn started going to the office to tackle a top priority for each day. By scoring a big win early, she could relax when colleagues visited her later on. “I can accomplish more before breakfast than I used to do in a day,” she told me. Well, maybe not quite, she relented, “but I am checking long-standing things off my to-do list.”

Charlotte Walker-Said, a history post-doc at the University of Chicago, works between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. on a book about the history of religious politics in West Africa. She reads journal articles and writes pages before dealing with her teaching responsibilities. “Once you start looking at email, the whole day cascades into email responses and replying back and forth,” she says. These early morning hours devoted to scholarship are key for staying true to her long-term plans. “Every day I have a job,” she says. But “in the morning, I think I have a career.”

If you’re worn out by the daily grind, waking up early to do more work can seem like a tall order. That’s why it’s important to choose professional projects that you actually enjoy.  People don’t do well long-term with suffering. And that means, the only way you’ll make popping out of bed a habit is if you want to do it. So pick something you love!

So what’s on your professional want-to-do list? Maybe it’s starting a blog, or doing the kind of art clients never demand in your graphic design job. Maybe it’s working on a book, or even laying the groundwork for a new career. Feeling inspired yet?

The hours before most people are eating breakfast are available to all of us if we choose to use them. Successful people do just that.

Live Chat: Join Laura Vanderkam and WSJ’s Careers and Management deputy editor Francesca Donner at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday for get-up-early success strategies.  Ask your questions now.

Laura Vanderkam is the author of the new e-book “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast.”