"I'll start when I'm ready"

You look at the week ahead and see that Thursday has nothing in it. Thursday, then. A clear day, a clear head and a proper run at it. This feels responsible, because it's a plan with a day attached. Thursday comes, a meeting lands in the morning, and by the time you sit down at two the clear day has become a ragged afternoon. That isn't what this work deserves, so you look for the next clear day.

Readiness comes in several versions. The clear day is one. The right mood is another, where you wait until you feel focused and a little inspired. Then there's more preparation. There's one more report to read, a better template to find, a desk to tidy, a new app for notes. Preparation is the most convincing of these, because it looks like work and sometimes is.

The belief behind all of them is a decent one. Work that matters seems to deserve your best hours, and giving it a scrappy twenty minutes between meetings feels like disrespect.

I think the belief has things the wrong way round, in three ways.

Mood follows starting more often than it leads. Interest in a piece of work mostly turns up once you're inside it and have a specific problem to chew on. I can't point you to a study for this, so check it against your own last night. The focus arrived after you'd begun. It wasn't there at five to eight.

The clarity you're waiting for is made by the work. Before there's a draft, you don't know what the proposal's problems are. You have a general fog, and you can't think your way through fog in the abstract, because there's nothing specific to think about yet. Twenty minutes of bad drafting turns the fog into a short list. You don't have last year's figures. You don't know what the second aim is. The budget depends on a question only the finance office can answer. Those are answerable, and some of them take other people days to answer. That's a very practical reason to find them in week one.

And preparation needs a test. Real preparation answers a question the work has asked. You've started, you've hit a gap, and you go and fill it. Preparation done before the work has asked you anything is usually the swerve in respectable clothes.

There's a serious objection here. "My ideas need time to develop. I'm not doing nothing. It's percolating." There's something in this, and the research is interesting. In 2009 Sio and Ormerod reviewed the experiments on what psychologists call incubation, where people set a problem aside and come back to it. Setting it aside did help, on average. But look at what made it help more. The benefit was larger when people had spent longer working on the problem before the break. My reading is that the mind goes on turning over a problem it has properly got hold of. If all you've done is read the brief and wince, it has nothing to turn over.

So the percolating argument turns out to be an argument for starting early. Make a rough attempt in week one, and your walks and showers for the next ten days have something to work with. The person who starts on the last night gets no incubation at all. If a good idea would have arrived on day six, they never meet it.

I'd put it this way. Readiness isn't a condition for starting. It's something starting gives you.

One practical point follows. Work that matters doesn't need your best hours for its first session. It needs them later, for the second and third pass, when there's something on the page worth your best hours. The first session can be short, scrappy and squeezed in. Oddly, a poor slot suits it. Nobody expects greatness from twenty minutes before lunch, including you.