Morning check-ins make work better

I have a (stupidly) simple thing I can do that makes me much less likely to procrastinate and more likely to feel excited to do my work. I schedule a recurring 1 on 1 meeting with another person for 10 minutes around 10AM. In the meeting the other person ask me what I am doing today, and I update on what I did the day before. After this meeting I usually feel excited to start and excited to get the work we decided I could do done.

It doesn't seem to matter who does this meeting with me. I can even set it up with my partner even though she has little insight into what I'm working on.

To me this is a huge deal. Having days where I fail to start work, or am very distracted and unmotivated is the biggest source of discontent and frustration in my life. With these morning meetings frustratingly unproductive days seem to largely disapper.

I usually start working around 8 in the morning. The meeting is not the very first thing I do. This is nice because I often have some left over goals from the day before I can try to squeeze out before the meeting starts at 10AM. This motivates me to start, and I ofen have good work sessions before the meeting.

My guess for why this works is twofold: first it helps me set a clear goal for the day, and second that I want to show up to the meeting having finished what I planned the day before, or at least with good progress. I'm wondering if the second reason works so well for me because I value and get motivated by praise and feedback from others (I think I am quite extrinsically motivated). For this reason I have always tried to go into the office and noticed I work better there.

I used to think that remote work does not work well for me, because I would have trouble focusing and getting good work done from home. With this meeting the problem has largely evaporated, and I can enjoy working from home. I could even imagine working in a remote only role now, whereas previously this is something I avoided.