Confessions of a Morning Person: upping my game

For the past two months, I’ve made a radical change to my morning routine. I started getting up nearly two hours earlier than I was before, committing that time mostly to journaling and working on my (for now) fledgling software business. This has worked extremely well so far. Besides the productivity gain, simply looking forward to getting up, rather than treating it as a chore, has made a tremendous improvement in my sense of well-being.

But I think I can do better than this. So some changes are in order.

The first change I have planned is to move my wake-up time from 6am to 5:30am, buying myself another half hour of this excellent time. I know from sleep tracking that this shouldn’t badly upset my sleep. I actually wake up before my assigned time fairly often. And I need less sleep than I thought I did. I’d been giving myself an 8 hour sleep window, but I almost never sleep that much — my average is more like 6.5–7 hours. I will need to make sure I’m going to bed on time and not let myself slack (especially useless slacking, like late-night doomscrolling). For now, my morning routine time generally has a hard stop at 8am, which is when my dayjob starts. Another half hour of morning routine is a 25% increase in available time.

As an aside, I’ve noticed some excellent productivity on weekend mornings, when I can easily stretch my morning routine to as late as 10am. I get lots of great work done!

So what are some things I can do with the extra time?

• Exercise. Even a five minute routine would help my body get moving, and have knock-on effects to my ability to do other things.
• Meditation. I don’t have a real meditation habit. I could take advantage of the Apple Fitness+ app (which I’ve been using for workouts) to do guided meditations in the morning.
• Reading. When I started my morning routine two months ago, I started with reading “hard books”. I soon handed that time over to working on my software project instead, but it’s still a goal, and I’m not reading nearly as much as I should.
• Shower. Right now, I just slip showers in wherever they fit in my schedule, and it’s easy to go too long without one. A daily shower schedule might help.
• Better breakfast. This might not really be a time thing. These days, I’m eating cereal for breakfast. But cereal isn’t necessarily great health-wise. I could do something with less carbs and more protein. (Unfortunately, I hate eggs, so I can’t eat them as a solution.)

One thing I’ve learned, though, is to make just one change at a time to the routine. I don’t want to destabilize it. As of this morning, I altered my alarm to go off at 5:45 instead of 6am. Once I’ve adjusted to that, I’ll move it to 5:30. I plan to add an exercise routine as part of that extra time. I may use Fitness+, or just something of my own devising.

I’ve also ordered the Five Minute Journal that Tim Ferris recommends, as well as the Productivity Planner sold by the same company. I’m hoping the Five Minute Journal will simplify, focus, and speed up my morning journaling routine, and I’m also hoping the Productivity Planner will mostly replace my daily bullet journaling to-do list (and especially my poorly managed weekly bullet journal planning).

Progress, in small steps.