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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

Today I'm talking with Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of The Best Place to Work,

the art and science of creating Best Place to Work, the Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace.

He's also a regular contributor to HBR.org.

Ron, thank you so much for talking with us today.

My pleasure, thanks for having me.

So Ron, a lot of your writing for HBR has focused on becoming more productive and especially around some smart ways to structure our daily routines.

And I thought we could just start at the beginning, you know, it's first thing in the morning,

you've just arrived at work. What do most of us do wrong at this point in our day?

Well, in many cases, most of us start our day by checking our email or listening to our

voicemail.

It's kind of a default.

You know, I think we do it for some really well-intentioned reasons.

We want to be responsive to our clients, we want to be responsive to our colleagues,

but being responsive first thing in the morning is really cognitively. to our

responsive first thing in the morning is really cognitively expensive and for one thing it's because it prevents us from leveraging our best hours.

You know typically we have a window of about three hours where we're really really

focused we're able to have some strong contributions in terms of planning in terms

...