The massively important 'first hour' strategy

Here's the most important and valuable habit you can set:

Claim the first hour of every day for yourself.

Let me explain what this means:

When I say 'for yourself', I mean that first hour is dedicated to boosting your financial security. Doing whatever you need to do in order to increase your income potential, expand your options for employment, and generally position yourself to get paid better for the kind of work you most want to do.

Some of the concrete things this may include:

• Writing blog posts or articles.

• Studying a new technology that will improve demand for your services.

• Creating a project on GitHub that will signal your expertise well.

• Designing a 15-minute presentation you'll give on a technical topic.

• Setting up a professional Youtube channel, where you can upload recordings of your presentations.

• Practicing to improve your communication skills (lots of options here).

• Learning some basic business or marketing skills that will let you create alternate income streams.

I am sure you can think of other examples. But the common thread is that the first hour of the day is dedicated to improving your situation, context, potential and options, and developing the life you want.

You can think of this in purely financial terms, and I think that's actually a really good way to approach it. Though you can think of it in other terms if you like.

Regardless, that first hour is for you. NOT for your employer, NOT for your boss. For you.

It's so easy for your attention to be distracted into other things that serve and benefit others, at the expense of what serves you best. They are basically leveraging your life energy for their own purposes. Like the boss who guilt-trips you into working long hours, or the client who maneuvers you into doing unpaid extra work.

The 'first hour' strategy is the antidote to this. And it's so important, it forms a key piece of the Boosted Code curriculum, that I teach you in the very first module.

I introduce it with a 3-minute video (literally the first video you watch), explaining the idea a more than I have above.

And then, you listen to a special 19-minute audio recording that puts it in an even greater context, motivating you to truly prioritizing yourself and your future. For some of you, maybe for the first time in your life.

You may wonder what this has to do with engineering.

Well, in this age when everyone seems to be trying to cut your job and replace you with an AI...

I think it's high time we got a little more positively selfish.

The entire Boosted Code curriculum, community, and process is 100% dedicated to you, the individual engineer/tech pro/whatever you call yourself. I care naught about your employer's interests, and care greatly for your own.

With this in mind, read about Boosted Code here: