Have you ever had an urge to complete an important task the next day? Maybe a deadline was approaching, or maybe you just had a sudden spur of motivation.

Or maybe you decide that tomorrow is the day you will finally go to the gym.

Yet the next day rolls around, and without explanation, you find yourself avoiding the task as if it is infectious. You tell yourself that you will go to the gym after eating lunch. Or you will complete the task after watching one more episode of your favorite show. Or maybe it’s some other arbitrary task that you have somehow rationalized is more convenient for you to complete first.

Yet, the sun dips below the horizon and you sit down to eat the last meal of your day. What have you accomplished? Not what you set out to do. Not even close.

This is a very common issue that many people face when they have to do a task that they don’t want to do. This behavior has been labeled as procrastination and is seen as a modern-day problem.

But as with pretty much all human behaviors, there are evolutionary explanations. In the hunter-gatherer era, ‘unenjoyable’ tasks were often also synonymous with ‘life-threatening’ tasks.

Therefore, in certain cases, procrastination meant prolonging the lives of many humans.

Clearly, though, unenjoyable tasks are rarely life-threatening in the modern world, so procrastination is more a hindrance than an asset.

I find that understanding the evolutionary reason for our behaviors makes it easier to control them since I can now think rationally through them.

That’s why we procrastinate.

But what’s the best way to overcome it?

It is called ‘mastering the morning’.

Choose the most difficult task for the day and complete that as soon as you wake up.

For some, that may be the work they have to complete or the intense gym session they have to power through. But for me, the first thing I do when I wake up is take a cold shower.

Even though I have been taking them for 2 years (you can read about my experience with cold showers here), my heart still races every time I step into the cubicle and shut the shower door. I dread them.

Yet I always come out of the cold shower feeling refreshed and triumphant.

This has little to do with the actual benefits of cold showers, and far more with the mental effect of completing the most difficult task as soon as you wake up. Choosing to not do anything else till you have completed this task will provide you with so much more motivation and more momentum throughout the day.

If you wake up, and before you eat breakfast, you have already done the workout that you were dreading, how much more likely do you think you will be to have a healthy and nutritious breakfast?

See, making progress is all about momentum. And the momentum for each day comes from the morning.

Even if that one task in the morning was the only productive or healthy thing you did that day, the day can still be considered a success because you moved closer to your goals.

I will always perform the most difficult task in the morning because the thought of putting it off till later is arguably worse.

During the day, everything I do would be underpinned by the fear that I eventually have to step into the shower cubicle, have that difficult conversation, or finish that arduous assignment due tomorrow.

I use the momentum from cold showers to transition into a block of deep work. During this time I complete most of my important work in the morning.

If I chose to skip cold showers, I’m not sure I would have the capacity to produce work of the same quality or quantity that day.

I am confident that the only time I use ‘discipline’, is in the first thing I do each day. After that, every difficult thing I do is simply a result of the momentum generated from the morning.