I recently started working on the biggest task of the day first, and it has made a huge difference in my productivity. I used to go through my emails, then check on my portfolio, etc., before I started to tackle the big task for the day, usually work for a client or working on my business.
I have a daily to-do list I work on, and without going into lengthy details, I created an algorithm that reordered the list into putting the biggest tasks on top, and stuff that I do everyday like checking email, journaling, and cleaning at the bottom. If I had to sum up the one factor the list should be ordered by, it is "most creative tasks to least creative."
This one change has really changed my day, and I am much more productive.
More mental energy in the morning: I am a morning person and I realized I'm using up a lot of my brain's gas tank on trivial tasks, and then when I get to the important stuff, I'm at a quarter tank. Checking email I can do at any level of mental energy because, for the most part, it's just low-level decision-making and no creativity.
Getting a huge task done in the morning really gets the dopamine train running and makes you excited to accomplish big things. Before I started this method, I had a few things that had been on my to-do list for over a month. Every time I came across them, I skipped them as they just seemed like too much of a pain to work on at any given time. By starting that task first, the feeling of checking something off my to-do list that had been as stubborn at getting off as this, got me excited to chip away at other things that I had been putting off working on.
Trivial tasks can be done waiting in lines or on the bus. There is a ton of stuff that can only be done on your phone, and everything that can be, should be. This allows you to take care of that stuff during a bus ride, waiting in line at the grocery store, waiting for your next set at the gym, etc.