Ethan Marcotte, the always brilliant responsive web design guy:
My day starts in earnest around 9AM, or as close to it as I can get. I’ll open up both email and Slack briefly to see if anything important’s come in, and reply to anything pressing. After that, I’ll close both2, look over my calendar, and plot out my morning. There might be a few meetings dotting the schedule, but mornings are the time I’m most awake and active. I try to reserve the pre-lunch hours for designing, writing, or detailed planning. In other words, the morning’s for the tasks that require my best brain.
If I remember to close my email client I’m always happy that I’ve done so. I need to do the same for Trello which sends me pings regularly as well.