1.1 – Morning Routine

A lot has been written about morning routines. You don’t need another “top 10 things to do in the morning”. Instead, this series of posts focuses on the practical implementation of a sustainable morning routine. Not just “what to do”, but “how to get yourself to do it, consistently”.

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Recap: Morning Routine

After nearly 50 posts about morning routines, we’ve reached the finishing line! Next week, we’ll move on to the interesting psychology involved in getting genuine control over your mind and body. 

But first, let’s formally wrap up the critical topic of maintaining a proper daily morning routine. 

Before we get to the checklist, I just want to reemphasize that a morning routine is much more liberating than restrictive. Being disciplined in the first and last hours of the day gives you much greater freedom and control over all the hours in between.

Please keep this in mind if you still have doubts about committing to a proper morning routine. 

But now, let’s move on to…

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 of of implementing and maintaining a good morning routine:

  1. Commit! Any halfhearted attempts at building a morning routine will fail. 
  2. Decide which elements you want to include. The recaps of the different options covered on this blog are linked below:
  3. Experiment. Everyone’s situation is unique, so you’ll need some trial and error to find your ideal routine. 
    • Have a plan for those inevitable difficult mornings.
    • Make sure you give yourself a fair chance at making this work by prioritizing sleep. 
    • Try to incorporate a lovely flow into your routine. Mine is detailed here as an example.  

So, that’s it. The topic of morning routines is officially done and dusted!

If you have any feedback or suggestions that can help me improve these morning routine guidelines, please use the form below.

Your message will not be publicly visible, so please don’t hold back. Having gone through the scientific peer-review publication process about 100 times, I’m used to critical feedback 🙂

The Supermorning blog will run on an annually repeating basis, so this time next year I will present an improved version of these morning routine guidelines. Your feedback is important to make sure that next year’s version really offers a clear improvement.

Thanks in advance!

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My Evening Routine

The idea of an evening routine is to calm the mind to facilitate a night of longer and better quality sleep. This makes it so much easier to master the next morning (and the next day). 

My evening routine has five relaxing (but still useful) steps.

It all starts with turning on my evening playlist and reading something technical for 5-10 minutes. I try to time it so that I’m done roughly at the end of the first song on my playlist (below). 

Candidates for this reading session fall into the category of “boring but important.” For example, this habit helped me read all 600 pages of the 2018 World Energy Outlook – not exactly riveting reading material, but vital for my research. 

Then I do a final check over my to-do list. This just takes a minute and usually gives me a lovely sense of completion, putting my mind at ease for the night. After that, I put my PC to sleep and turn off the lights as an official gesture that all productive activities for the day are now done. 

Then comes a relatively new addition to my evening routine: 10 minutes of guided meditation using Headspace. Despite some initial skepticism, I was quite impressed with the product and had no problems maintaining this habit for almost 50 days now. 

I end with a 5-minute Rodney Yee PM yoga session (which I do from memory), followed by a 15 minute session in my luxurious massage chair. During this 20 minutes, I do something interesting with my mind called an “emotion safari”. We’ll get to that in a couple of weeks. 

In total, this whole routine takes just a little over 30 minutes. I’ve been doing most elements of this routine for a long time, but only properly formalized the whole package a little over a month ago. Since then, I’ve actually seen a clear increase in my sleep quality from about 70% to about 80% (see the jump from the blue dots to the red dots in the graph below).

So, I hope you can get around to building a nice evening routine of your own. It’s proven to be quite valuable in my case. 

See you tomorrow for the final morning routine post!

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My Morning Routine

The routine outlined below has done the impossible: turn me into a true morning person. After almost a year of daily practice, it’s now so ingrained in my life that it requires no willpower whatsoever. 

So, here we go…

Normally, I wake up naturally somewhere between 4 and 5 am. After getting out of bed, the first thing I do is to put on the bright living room light and fire up my wake-up song (below).

During these three minutes, I do the morning bathroom run, wash my face with cold water, swirl some strong-tasting mouth-wash, make my bed, put on some deodorant and weigh myself. This 3-minute sensory assault always leaves me wide awake 🙂

I time it so I’m done just as the next song on my morning playlist starts. This is my cue to smoothly glide into my constitution. 

Two minutes later, I’m totally psyched for the day. The next inspirational song on my playlist then automatically queues me to fill in my Graph of Life. Seeing my streak of good days grow offers another little psychological boost every morning 🙂 

Then it’s time for some morning exercise: one of seven different Rodney Yee Yoga routines (one for each day of the week). I do the sacrilegious thing of taking it double speed. Otherwise it takes too long and gets a little boring for my taste.

Following this, I put on my favorite blended rain and fireplace noise courtesy of Noisli and settle in to read a couple of interesting or inspirational pages (currently, I’m reading The Art of Happiness). 

Next, it’s time to set up my to-do list for the day. Given its importance, this task is strategically positioned for when my brain is totally awake and inspired. 

After this, I work on my first to-do until 6:15. The length of this session is flexible and depends on when I woke up that particular day. 

At 6:15, I have a highly nutritious, tasty and convenient breakfast combined with two sets of light weights and some more inspirational music. In the summer this happens on my east-facing balcony, but I move inside for the cold, dark winter. 

Breakfast is done just in time for two back-to-back Skype sessions with my accountability buddies. 

Following some fun and positive exchanges, I dive into the next item on my to-do list, already with a huge head start on the rest of the world 😎

Time commitment

My rather spartan lifestyle gives me the ability to maintain this pretty extensive routine with near-perfect regularity. Most people will prefer something simpler (which is totally OK). But just to illustrate how efficiently this can be done, here’s a breakdown of the time commitment: 

  1. Wake-up song: a little over 3 minutes
  2. Constitution: a little over 2 minutes
  3. Graph of Life: about 2 minutes
  4. Yoga: about 10 minutes (short version: less than one minute)
  5. Reading: about 10 minutes (short version: about one minute)
  6. To-do list: 5-10 minutes
  7. Breakfast: 15 minutes
  8. Accountability buddies: 30 minutes

Items 1-6 take a little over half an hour (or less than 15 minutes if I must revert to the short versions). I’d venture to say that almost everyone could find 15 minutes in the morning for something this valuable. 

Breakfast is something most folks do anyway. It can be intelligently designed for maximum convenience to focus nearly all your breakfast time on enjoyment rather than preparation. 

Half an hour of accountability buddy time is something of a luxury. You can certainly get most of the benefits with far less than 30 minutes. 5-10 minutes will do just fine.

So, there you have it. Please put in some time to design something like this for yourself. This routine has been a life changer for me and I cannot recommend it strongly enough! 

Tomorrow, I’ll share my (much simpler) evening routine. See you then!

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Making Morning Routines Work

Yesterday, we put together a clean list of morning routine items. Do this and you can experience many hours of freedom and control facilitated by one hour of intelligent morning structure.

But a perfect morning routine does not happen overnight. Start with the list you made yesterday, but keep your mind open to any possible improvements along the way. 

Also remember last week’s discussions about those days when life just gets in the way. Make sure you have an embarrassingly easy short version of any item that takes more than a minute or two and commit to always doing at least that. 

But the short version should really be the exception, not the rule. Things like morning exercise, inspirational reading, and having a super breakfast should get the full treatment whenever possible. 

To make this happen, it’s important to make these activities as fun as possible. Pick a morning exercise you enjoy, invest some time to select a fascinating morning read, and design a great-tasting breakfast. 

Another crucial aspect of a successful routine is to incorporate a clear sense of flow. Each item should smoothly and naturally blend into the next. Doing your morning routine to a fixed music playlist is a great way to create this flow. 

As a practical example, I’ll share my tried and tested morning routine tomorrow. See you then!

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Morning Routine: Putting It All Together

The time has finally come: after 11 grueling weeks of morning routine theory, the finishing line is in sight!

This week, our job is simply to put everything together into a system that will stand the test of time. 

But first a little bit of a pep talk… It’s natural to experience some resistance towards the idea of routine because it sounds restrictive and boring. But if you do it right, just the opposite happens. 

The whole idea behind a good morning routine is to gain increased freedom and excitement during the rest of the day. Master the first hour of your day and you’re ahead and in control from the start. Screw it up and you’ll probably be rushed, reactive, constrained and inefficient all day long. 

It’s critical to keep this in mind while you’re building your routine. 

So, from this mindset, let’s get to today’s… 

Monday 5-minute action Clearly list the items in your morning and evening routines

 

In my experience, the best way to implement this is as recurring to-do’s in Google Tasks. But if you want to put it as your desktop background or frame it on your wall, go right ahead 🙂

The important thing is to create a real, tangible list that will automatically be in front of you every morning. 

Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at the practicalities. See you then!

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Recap: Morning Routines in the Real World

Win the morning, win the day. 

Actually, it should be: build a bulletproof morning routine, win the morning, win the day. 

The bulletproofing part is very important. The bullets can come flying from any direction. Maybe your child cries the whole night, maybe your best friend had a bachelor’s party, maybe your company booked you into a crappy hotel. 

All of these obstacles can easily derail a budding morning routine. Your job is to nurse it through this trying time until it truly takes root. If you reach that point, you’re home and dry 🙂 

The checklist

So, let’s summarize how to make this happen:

  1. Make sure you have a short version for the elements of your routine that take more than a minute or two.
    • Short versions should be so easy that it would be downright embarrassing to skip them. 
    • Make sure to do at least the short version every morning to form a strong habit. 
  2. Anticipate when your budding morning routine could come under attack.
  3. Ensure that you have a clear reason for maintaining a world-class morning routine. 

These simple tips will give you a strong and loyal morning routine that will serve you faithfully until the day you die. Get yourself one of those! They are a man’s (or woman’s) best friend 🙂

See you tomorrow!

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Value the Morning

Early morning is a sacred time. For most of us, it really is the only time of day when we are completely free with nothing else baying for our attention. 

Recognizing this tremendous value is key to forming a routine that will stand strong through the ups and downs of life. Without this understanding, you’re likely to stumble over the first serious obstacle. 

And there will be obstacles aplenty. Your sleeping window and morning routine will face regular attacks from professional and personal responsibilities, friends and loved ones, and natural changes in your emotional state. 

Handling these attacks with a cool and positive head requires a deep understanding of the value of the morning:

  1. Everything is connected. Getting ahead early in the day makes it much easier to stay ahead. Fall behind in the morning and the rest of the day is likely to be a mess (probably spilling over to tomorrow).  
  2. Strategic importance. These days, working smart is more important than working hard. Since the morning is so conveniently positioned before the day happens, it offers an ideal opportunity to map out some smart actions. 
  3. Start your engines. Things like morning movement, excellent nutrition, inspirational reading and an early morning chat help you gain speed quickly and maintain momentum throughout the day. 

See you tomorrow for the wrap-up!

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Those Difficult Mornings

Yesterday, we talked about making short versions of your key morning habits. These short versions will really help you out on those mornings when things are not exactly going to plan. 

The example of a morning disrupted by small kids was mentioned yesterday. But there are other challenges for all of us without kids as well. Let’s take a look at those. 

The late night out

It’s good and healthy to have the occasional late night out with friends. Much like the drinks you enjoy on those late nights, these are all good in moderation. 

The key here is to avoid long-term disruption of your sleep pattern. Doing this requires that your late night does not become a ridiculously late night so that you can still get up early the next morning.

An early rise after a late night can be a drag, but your morning routine will make it easier. It also makes going to bed early that following evening so much more satisfying. Try it 🙂

Late night Netflix or gaming binges should be avoided. Such super-convenient addictive entertainment can turn into a self-destructive long-term habit before you know it. 

Travelling

If you’re travelling for business, sticking to your morning routine in the hotel shouldn’t be too difficult. It will also strongly benefit your business meetings, making your boss happy. 

If you’re travelling for holiday, I think it’s best to just do what comes naturally. If your morning routine is so deeply ingrained that it happens automatically, let it help you to beat all the lazy tourists to all the best spots and watch a few lovely sunrises. If you feel like being a lazy tourist, that’s cool too 🙂 

Sleepless night

Sometimes we simply don’t sleep well. Such nights can easily send you into a vicious spiral where you sleep in, fall behind on your day, become more stressed, and have another bad night. And then another, and another…

Here, the critical thing is be break the cycle ASAP. There are two key steps: 1) getting up early even if you’ve slept badly and 2) going to bed early that evening to give yourself enough hours to win back the lost sleep.

Step 1 is the most challenging and the most critical. Those few seconds of discipline can make or break the next couple of days (or even weeks). 

When you just don’t feel like it

Sometimes we’re just lazy or demotivated for no apparent reason. The first thing to do in these cases is to honestly assess whether you’ve been pushing yourself too hard.

If so, give yourself some well deserved downtime even if you feel like you can’t really afford it. Just be very careful that this relaxation does not turn into a self-destructive late night. 

If there really is no excuse, doing your morning routine with increased gusto can often change your mindset. Give it a go. Just get started and see what happens 🙂 

All this becomes much easier if you understand the value of the morning on a very deep level. That will be tomorrow’s topic.

See you then!

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The Short Version

Over the past two months, we’ve covered several awesome morning habits. Some of them take just a minute or two. Others, like morning movement, inspirational reading or chatting with your accountability buddy, take a bit longer. 

These habits can be challenging on those mornings when life just gets in the way (shout-out to parents with young kids).

For those mornings, we need today’s…

Monday 1-minute action Create short versions of these three morning habits

 

Aim to make it embarrassingly easy so that there really is no excuse not to do it. A quick “have a great day” SMS to your accountability buddy, one sun salutation as morning movement and one page of reading will do just fine. 

The short version is a powerful tool because habits are formed by the number of reps, not by the amount of time spent on each rep. This truth is particularly valuable in that difficult habit formation phase. 

Deciding on some clear short versions will strongly increase your chances of getting through this phase and establishing a world-class morning routine. It just takes a minute!

Tomorrow, we’ll dissect some other scenarios that can disrupt your morning routine. See you then!

 

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Recap: Getting a Good Night’s Sleep

Having a Supermorning is key to having a great day. And a good night’s sleep is key to having a Supermorning. 

Sadly, the world is in the midst of a sleep-deprivation epidemic. Some are too busy to sleep, some are too stressed, others just lead lives that are too chaotic.

Whatever your reason is, better sleep can probably help to fix it (ironic, isn’t it?). You just need to break the cycle. 

So, let’s do just that…

The checklist

Here is the simple 1-2-3 to getting a good night’s sleep:

  1. Give sleep the respect it deserves.
    • Recognize the central importance of sleep by watching the TED talk below.
    • Install the Sleep Cycle app on your phone as described on Monday. 
    • Commit to giving yourself enough time in bed.
  2. Establish an evening routine in the hour before bed.
    • As discussed in Tuesday’s post, it works to go all in! 
    • Things to include: soothing music or other audio, slow yoga and/or meditation, light reading, taking a hot bath or shower. 
    • Things to avoid: working or other mentally stimulating activity, any type of screen-time, eating or drinking, bright lights and loud music. 
  3. Get your mind out of fight or flight mode.
    • Commit to a proactive personal development journey as described yesterday.

I wish you an active and exciting day followed by a deserved night of peaceful sleep 🙂

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