Why and how to create a workday startup ritual

Think of ‘the zone’ (aka ‘flow’) as a physical place. Picture it, if you will. When in this real, plottable space, you work more strenuously, producing greater value than when you work elsewhere, and yet—the wonder of it!— the effort is somehow less onerous. You do difficult work here. But the wind is at your back, and you feel as if you could go on and on. Your sense of satisfaction at day’s end is as sweet as a plump, ripe peach. The rub of the zone is that like any of the most sought-after locales, it requires a fair bit of travel. That, friends, is what a workday startup ritual is; it’s your journey to the zone.

If you’re not sold on the concept of ‘the zone’—and who could blame you? it’s not a utopia; hard work is still hard in the zone; meetings and budget constraints and moving targets exist there too—know this: Even if you never enter a state of flow at any point in your career, a workday startup ritual is easily worth the effort.

What can a workday startup ritual do for me?

Assuming you work forty hours a week beginning at around twenty years old and continue this pattern until the age of sixty-five, you will spend roughly 93,000 hours of your life working. That’s… a lot. If work is going to take up approximately a third of your lifetime, shouldn’t it be rewarding? Let the influencers talk about following your bliss and the recruiters about compensation; we’re talking about something that’s both less and more, something personal that no supervisor or job coach can give you (though bad management can snuff it out with relative ease). It’s a sense of having used your time well, on the whole. Not perfectly, mind, but worthily. Satisfactorily. Together with other mindful work practices like the shutdown ritual, a workday startup ritual can help you make those 93,000 hours well spent, one eight-hour chunk at a time.

3 benefits of using a workday startup ritual:

1. Get into work mode without struggling. Imagine a freeway with no on-ramp. The acrobatics necessary just to get yourself from street level to highway would be costly and stressful. And the strain of acceleration! But this is what we demand of ourselves when we try to go from breakfast with the family or riding the subway to flat-out focus using mere force of will.
   
   Look, context switching has a price. We all know that now, and yet rather than simply accepting the cost as a natural part of life and paying it peacefully, we wring our hands about waste and concoct increasingly unsustainable schemes to avoid something we could be using to our advantage. Isn’t it around twenty-five minutes to transition from one context to another? There. That’s your startup ritual. That’s all it takes. The reward is a smooth, easy shift into concentrated focus.

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

— Amos Tversky, Decision Researcher

2. Accomplish more of what’s most valuable. The workday startup ritual is, at its core, a proactive work habit. By employing it before diving into the day, you can make thoughtful, deliberate choices about where you dive in, what you hope to accomplish, how you’ll proceed, etc. It’s the difference between working towards hard-to-achieve, high value goals and working reactively, realizing little to no ROI.


3. Enjoy more efficient, less chaotic days. Consider the professional chef: She assembles her ingredients and tools, chopping and dicing and measuring until her kitchen is properly set up to prepare her menu without distraction. This is mise en place—translation: put in place—and only after it's complete does the chef begin to cook. The workday startup ritual is the mise en place of knowledge work. It’s your time to look over your plan for the day (which you sketched out in your shutdown ritual the evening before), consider it afresh, make adjustments if needed, and gather the resources and tools you’ll need to execute it.

Ultimately, the reason to use a startup ritual is to set yourself up for success, whatever that means to you.

“When I first created my startup ritual, I had one goal—create a path to work mode and, in doing so, give myself a path back out of it. I was brand new to remote work and struggling to keep my personal life from being thoroughly eclipsed by my job. It worked. So well in fact that these days my startup ritual is no longer about that. I don’t need it for that. Now it’s about optimizing my chances of having a useful, productive workday.”

— Holly H., Marketing Director

How to create a workday startup ritual

A startup ritual is a series of tasks performed at the beginning of every work session in the same order. There’s no one-size-fits-all sequence of activities that’s optimal for everyone; you’ll have to build a startup ritual that works for you. Here’s how:

1. Consider your needs. What are your current frustrations with your workdays? Maybe your mornings are filled with meetings that you find largely pointless and that leave only the afternoons for focused work. Assuming you can do nothing about that, accept it, schedule your startup ritual for the beginning of your focused work time, and incorporate tasks that help you slough off meeting vibes. That may mean physically locking notes in a drawer or taking a ten minute walk. Or both.
   
   Or maybe you have no trouble getting into the zone, but your workspace is noisy and, once interrupted, you’re easily distracted. Part of your startup ritual might be to block out chunks of time to wear noise cancelling headphones and let your coworkers know when they can expect you to come up for air (and some good, old fashioned distraction).
   
   Your workday startup ritual should address the rough spots in your unique situation, so start by pinpointing those.


2. Make a list. Once you’ve identified areas you’d like to improve, brainstorm ideas for doing that. (Need help? Email us. We love helping people get more from their workdays.)
   
   Some common workday startup ritual activities include booting up your computer, checking messages and email, reviewing your day plan and making any necessary adjustments, and making sure you have what you need at hand.


3. Try out your list. Think of your startup ritual as part of your work. Create an item in your day plan for it, and try to execute your ritual… well, ritualistically. With something of a ceremonial air, at least at first. And if you feel silly powering on your laptop in a purposefully hushed, sacred manner, think about the 93,000 hours total you’ll spend working. Optimizing those hours isn’t silly. To do so, notice what helps; notice what doesn’t. Notice why.


4. Tweak until you’re happy. Rearrange the order of your tasks, add new ones, ditch the ones that aren’t useful.

For best results, bookend your workdays with startup and shutdown rituals.

It’s your day. Own it.

Regardless of where you work or what you do, whether you’re passionate about it or not, by taking a more mindful approach to these daily eight-hour chunks of your life, you increase your chances of deriving genuine satisfaction from them—this is above and beyond salary and benefits. If you’re a knowledge worker, mindful, proactive work habits can help you spend more time in the zone. Whatever your situation, the fact remains: No matter who signs your paychecks, the time you spend working is still your time. A workday startup ritual can help you use it optimally.

Photo by Matt Howard

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