For the past ten years, I’ve been obsessively honing my morning routine. That may sound strange because we all repeat similar activities as we start our mornings, be it showering, eating breakfast, or watching morning TV. However, I began to think about my mornings differently ten years ago after hearing Tim Ferriss talk about how a good routine can help people “win the day” (Ferriss’s morning routine worksheet). By starting the day well, people can gain positive momentum to take into the following hours.
Though initially skeptical, I decided to experiment. In thinking through what to change, I had two realizations: first, my mind is freshest in the morning, and, second, I would like to read more. At that time, I tried to read in the evenings but my attempts were met with limited success. I felt mentally exhausted after work, so I rarely overcame the energy barrier to open any book, let alone a dense one. And when I did manage to sit down with my book, I read slowly and comprehended little.
Thus, my first tweak was to try reading in the morning before work. And I immediately loved it! Reading while my mind was fresh, I zipped through dense books. The downside, however, was that I would get caught in rush hour traffic, increasing my commute by 20 to 30 minutes.
So for my second tweak, I tried leaving my apartment before rush hour at 6:30am and did my reading at a Starbucks near work. Success! Although I had to wake up earlier, I increased my usable morning time by 20 to 30 minutes!
Those two tweaks increased my reading capacity to 25 books a year.
Encouraged by those successes, I’ve continually honed my morning routine.
First, I shifted more activities to my morning and created a morning “habit stack,” in the style of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. When I began meditating in 2015, I found that I could be most consistent if I included it in my morning habit stack. In 2020, I added a 5-minute morning journaling exercise in the style The Artist’s Way “morning pages,” writing freeform to get the thoughts out of my unconscious mind. (Note, all Amazon links in this post are my Amazon affiliate links.)
In 2023, I felt inspired to push myself harder after learning how productive legendary author Toni Morrison was with her mornings. In Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday writes about how Morrison wrote her early masterpieces as a single mother raising two boys while working full-time as a book editor. (chapter “Attack the Dawn”) How did she do it? She woke up incredibly early each morning and wrote for 2 hours until her kids woke up! Amazing.
“How could I better maximize my mornings?” I asked myself.
I started with extending my mornings. To do so, I needed greater sleep discipline, namely going to bed on-time and waking up earlier. My ideal sleeping hours are now 9:30pm to 4:30am, quite the improvement from my unhealthy grad school sleeping hours of 2:00am to 8:00am.
To further extend my mornings, I’ve subtracted morning activities. I’ve moved mindless chores, such as packing my lunch and gym bag, from the morning to the evening when I’m mentally useless.
Recently, I’ve changed the order of my routine by delaying my morning coffee. Instead of drinking immediately upon waking, I drink it after I meditate. I made this change based on neuroscientist Andrew Huberman’s advice that we can avoid a “caffeine crash” in the afternoon by simply waiting 20 to 30 minutes after waking up to drink coffee. The science behind this advice takes some explaining. Adenosine is a naturally occurring chemical in our bodies that, among its other functions, makes us feel sleepy. Throughout the day, adenosine builds up in our bodies, creating “sleep pressure” that eventually causes us to find sleep irresistible. We can temporarily counteract the sleep pressure by ingesting caffeine, which blocks our brains’ adenosine receptors. But when caffeine’s effects wear off in the early afternoon, the remaining adenosine rushes into our brain receptors, which we experience as a “caffeine crash.” By delaying our morning coffee, we give our body time to absorb the remaining adenosine, thus avoiding the caffeine crash.
Over the past ten years, I’ve come to appreciate several additional benefits of having a morning routine. These apply equally well to routines and habits generally.
First, my routine mitigates decision fatigue by eliminating a series of decisions. Decision fatigue is a phenomenon where the quality of our decision-making goes down as we make more decisions. By turning regularly performed activities into a routine, I don’t need to make individual decisions to perform them. Also, pre-deciding my responses to situations by creating rules and principles can eliminate many decisions, in the style of Ray Dalio’s book Principles: Life and Work. A principle is, as Greg McKeown writes in Essentialism, “a decision that settles one thousand later decisions.”
Second, my routine allows me to increase my skills on various activities through repetition. I find repetition to be the best, and perhaps only, way to develop my tacit knowledge and muscle memory. It also allows me to experiment with minor variations over time. If I want to improve my skills on anything, I ask myself, “What is the smallest action I can take to move in my desired direction on this skill? And how can I incorporate that into my routines?”
Lastly, I’ve found a certain beauty in my morning routine. There’s a Zen Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” It implies that there’s no grand change to our daily lives on the other side of becoming enlightened. Similarly, many people discover that upon becoming wealthy they still have to deal with the same mental and physical health issues and family problems that they had previously. Rather than denigrating our chores and habits by thinking they’re beneath us or somehow detract from our freedom, we can find beauty in performing those tasks well and in a mindful way. By doing so, perhaps we can gain insights that take us down the path toward enlightenment. In this sense, I’ve begun to appreciate the aesthetic element to my routine.
Though I expect my morning routine to continue evolving for the rest of my life, I’ll share my current routine with you:
- Wake up habits (ideally this starts at 4:30am)
- Get out of bed
- Check sleep quality on Fitbit
- Use bathroom
- Check weight on Bluetooth scale, record on phone app
- Meditate for 20 mins
- Stretch for 2 mins (Foundation Training breathing, Athlean-X morning stretches)
- Morning productivity (ideally this starts at 5:00am)
- Make coffee, have a small snack while checking email (15 mins)
- Write morning pages (5 mins)
- Shower (10 mins, turn on hot tap and stand under cold water until warm water comes out – my mini cold plunge, though I don’t know if it actually does anything except wake me up)
- Write or read (45 to 75 mins, ending when my kids wake up)
- Briefly review daily calendar and tasks (5 mins, let my unconscious mind turn it over)
- Prepare kids for the day (1.5 to 2 hours, generally starting 6:30am)
- Make breakfast for kids
- Make lunch for my infant son
- Feed kids
- Pack my lunch
- Eat breakfast (Greek yogurt, berries, honey)
- Clean up kitchen after breakfast
- Brush kids’ teeth, get them dressed
- Get ready for work (brush teeth, wash face, shave, get dressed)
- Sally forth unto the day! (ideally 8:00am, but inevitably 8:30am to 8:45am)
I’d love to hear your thoughts and learn about your morning routines.
Published on 7/27/2024