As I was sitting down at my laptop this morning, it occurred to me that I pretty much follow the same routine every morning to get my day started. While it's a bit of a mundane thing to write about, I felt like it might be somewhat interesting if you are a OnePlace user or are thinking about giving OnePlace a try.

My day begins with a task that I suspect most everyone does in the morning, to process any email that found its way into my inbox overnight. If possible, I like to head into my day with an empty inbox. I then open up my blog reader, and peruse the headlines looking for a blog post or two to read.

After that, I sign into OnePlace, and head over to my Home page. This is where I personally get caught up from the day before, and plan out what I'm going to do today.

The first thing I do is look at the "New Notifications" panel to see if OnePlace left me any notifications since yesterday. Sometimes a teammates will work into the wee hours of the night, and I'll see evidence of that in this panel, alerting me to new files that were uploaded, work that's been assigned to me, etc. I like to process these notifications until there are no more.

I then look at the "Discussions with New Messages" panel to see if any of my teammates posted to any of the discussions I belong to since yesterday. OnePlace Discussions are one of the primary ways that my team communicates with each other, so quite often there are new discussion messages for me to process in the morning. I'll go into each discussion and respond to the new messages as necessary.

After that I like to review my "Scheduled Tasks" panel to see what work carried over from yesterday that I didn't get done, and to see if the work I am planning to do for today makes sense. Sometimes a task will ride on my schedule for some time, and for whatever reason I never get to it. So, I may decide to remove something from my schedule, or perhaps shift it to later in the week. I like to have a reasonable amount of work scheduled for the day that I feel like I can accomplish barring anything unforeseen that may pop up during the day.

I then perform a quick scan of the projects and tasks listed in the "My Deadlines" panel. I want to make sure that nothing with a deadline sneaks up on me, and that I've got tasks with deadlines slotted well ahead of time in my schedule to be worked on.

After that, I like to review the Upcoming Calendar on my Home page. This is a great way for me to see at a glance the events, projects and tasks that are coming up over the next six days. For example, this morning I can see that several of my teammates are planning to be out of the office on Thursday and Friday of this week. I also see that I have a task on Friday to perform the weekly back up of my laptop.

Lastly, I quickly scan the Teammates panel on my Home page to get a quick sense of who's in, who's out, and what everyone's status is.

And that's it. Now it's time to start working my plan, and get some stuff done!

If you have any special things you do in OnePlace as part of your daily morning routine, I would love to hear about them. Please feel free to leave your comments below.