Success in life is primarily about leveraging our advantages and one easy but powerful way to do this is to get to work significantly earlier than your scheduled time.
Many people arrive at work 5 or ten minutes early, but to truly give yourself an evolutionary advantage, you should arrive a minimum of thirty minutes to an hour before your scheduled time. There are several advantages you can gain from this practice and it’s not to make the boss think you are a super star employee – although that will happen organically.
You can gain an early psychological edge by getting to work before your colleagues. In much the same way as making your bed first thing in the morning gives you a boost with the easy completion of your first task of the day, arriving at work well before your duties begin gives you a similar boost. You can take your time and settle in to the work environment before you have to actually start working.
You won’t have to fight traffic so your stress levels will be lower. One of the primary causes of workplace stress actually involves the commute both to and from the work location. Eliminating the stress about making it to work by your scheduled time takes a heavy weight off your shoulders. It also gives you a chance to grab a cup of coffee or something to get your day started right.
Once you are at your workplace, you have an automatic advantage over those who arrive “on time.” They come in and have to shake the cobwebs off and get warmed up, while your engines are already fired up and you’re all ready to go.
You can also be productive in those early periods before work. Clear out your emails and send or respond to the important ones. A Yesware study of over a half million emails showed that those sent between the hours of 6 and 7am were far more likely to be responded to than those sent at any other time of the day. The reason was simple: there was no competition because nobody else was sending emails at that early hour.
Developing a reputation as someone who arrives to work early can indeed improve your prospects for upward mobility. A Journal of Applied Psychology study of worker reviews by supervisors discovered that all else being equal, workers who consistently arrived at work early scored higher.
Lethal Focus 