Productive, talented, and successful people often create habits and rituals that they believe are the secret to their high performance.
The daily consistency of these habits and the precision of executing the steps involved often border on the religious for these high achievers.
These rituals often serve as the foundation for how they approach the many challenges and opportunities they face during the day.
Well-known rituals, such as early-morning exercise, meditation, journaling, time blocking, digital sunsetting, light exposure, and hydration routines have been well-documented by many experts and scholars.
Most of the common rituals include the many habits high performers use to organize themselves for productivity. To begin the workday, they naturally list out the priorities and tasks they want to achieve, the relationships they want to touch, the conversations they want to have, and the decisions they need to make or prepare for.
But the best of the best add a unique wrinkle to this list of daily objectives.
In addition to articulating their goals for the day, they register the one question they want to answer during the day. This question remains ever-present throughout the day, linking curiosity with productivity, and performance with exploration.
Whatever question is most important to answer that day becomes the frame from which they organize their other priorities. The question may involve a decision, a dilemma, a strategy, a response, or an approach.
For instance, a leader might ask: “What is the best name or title for our new product or service?” or “How should I respond to those colleagues who want more clarity about our financial results?” or “Who should I include in the discussion about our long-range plan?”
The job for the day is to find or formulate an answer to the question they posed. There are no “right” or “best” questions, but high performers ask the most important one to start the day.
Research in performance psychology confirms that asking a meaningful daily question engages metacognition—the process of thinking about one’s thinking—which helps to clarify what truly matters most.
Some readers might suggest this is just a clever way to identify the highest priority, but it actually serves a bigger purpose. It places the leader or high performer immediately into learning and exploration mode.
It requires them to identify the one thing they need to know, understand, and conclude about that day. The ritual focuses their attention on the question, not the answer, which sets into motion what they need to learn in order to reach a conclusion.
The ritual of starting the workday with a question to be answered transforms the day into a laboratory for growth and inquiry.
Underlying the many other tasks and priorities of the day, the question becomes a stake in the ground that centers their thinking and requires them to maintain an inquiry-based approach in pursuit of an answer.
What’s the most important question you need to ask and answer today? Make it a ritual to find a question to start every day and see what it does to create clarity and ensure productivity.
Avoid the generic and easy questions (like “What can I learn from today’s challenges?”) and go for the meaty questions that require you to hunt down a hard-to-find answer. You might find that it changes for you what it means to have a productive day.
