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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that there will be time to clear the decks later.

Don't try to finish all the little things before starting in on a big project.

You can trust that you will have time to get to everything if you go in the right order.

Last week I shared a tip about mapping out your focused work time.

On a recent week, knowing I had carved out 8.15 a.m. to 2.45 p.m. on Thursday for a big project,

made this time seem real and made me more motivated to protect it.

It also kept me from feeling too unhappy about

seeing my afternoon chopped up to do some required driving for the camp schedule. I think seeing the actual

deep work time that is available can help lots of people. It may not be six and a half hours,

but it is probably something. Of course,

when I talk about this, people ask, well, when are you supposed to do all the other things you

need to do on a day like that? And when do you deal with the things that come up during the day?

Good questions. But here's what I promise. If you do the big stuff first, there will be time to clear the decks later.

If you start with all the other stuff, though, during your open time, that is, if you try to clear the decks first,

it's quite possible that you won't get to the big things or at least won't have as much time for the big things.

And given how hard it is to come by open time, that would be a shame. In my case, on that particular

Thursday, what I did is that I knew the emails and tasks were going to be stacking up. But when I came

back from camp driving at 3.30 p.m., I was able to spend about 90 minutes dealing

with all those things, amid the various interruptions that kept happening. That was okay. Those

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