I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who over the past several years has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. The result is our new

podcast McCartney A Life in Lyrics. Listen to McCartney A Life in L lyrics on the I-Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is to do whatever you want.

After you complete, your must do.

So it is amazing how much stuff we can come up with to do

when we are avoiding something else. Plenty of hardworking people clean out

their inboxes, reorganize their files, update their calendars,

or throw themselves into administrative tasks as seemingly legitimate work when they're trying

to push off a challenging project. Of course we all know it's a bad

idea to delay what's most important even if we procrastinate by filling our time with

work tasks like filing or processing email.

We all know that we just need to eat that frog as the saying goes.

Do right away what's hard and perhaps unpleasant, essential. Still despite knowing better we

often delay the must do while doing the not-so-important stuff. Human nature, right?

But today I want to offer you an additional mental incentive you can give yourself to simply do your must-do first thing.

Once you've done it, you can do whatever you want.

In other words, if your top priority for this morning

is to draft an article for the monthly newsletter,

...