The idea of having a morning routine to increase your productivity is not new, but since 2020 I feel like its number of devotees has skyrocketed.
Morning practices are credited with everything from increasing productivity to grounding your emotional state. Most routines include some mix of meditation, journaling, and physical movement. Some techniques get more specific; The Miracle Morning, for instance, prescribes affirmations in each area of your life, and reading 10 pages of self-help each day.
Popular opinion seems to be that sustaining a morning routine consistently over time can be effective at helping you maintain focus, achieve your goals, and establish an overall healthier mindset.
But in practice, what does this look like?
Does having a morning routine really work?
The biggest problem with morning routines is, unsurprisingly, the time that they take. The Miracle Morning “Life SAVERS” routine is a recommended 60 minutes. Which seems entirely doable; it’s not that hard to get up an hour earlier.
But what I’ve found is that for a morning routine to be effective, it takes a lot longer than an hour.
My morning practices for most of 2020 looked something like this:
Brew coffee
Draw a tarot card
Meditate
Journal
Exercise
Some popular morning practices say you can spend 5 minutes each on meditation, journaling, and initiating a positive internal monologue for the day.
Here’s where it starts to fall apart for me.
Five minutes of meditation sounds about right. But when it comes to journaling, I don’t find 5 minutes effective.
Journaling is intended to reflect upon your meditation, or aid in your visualization, or even to help you gain clarity around an issue you’re having. Five minutes feels wildly insufficient to gather thoughts and let the ink spill.
Which is another point that has to be made. Most proponents of morning practices will tell you that the physical act of writing (not typing) is very powerful. I happen to agree with them. But I can type 100+ words per minute. I have no idea what my handwritten rate is, but obviously it’s nowhere close.
That 5 minutes of journaling starts to feel less and less sufficient.
Two years ago, I would find myself meditating and journaling for about an hour. According to most morning practices, that’s time up.
But physical exercise has also always been a priority of mine. My home weightlifting and cycling routine averages about 90 minutes.
And I still have to shower and put myself together for the day. Assuming that those activities and a quick breakfast total another hour, I would need to get up at 3:30am for my morning routine and personal hygiene to be completed by my 7am start time.
I know there are individuals who are massive proponents of that lifestyle, but it’s not for me.
I eventually started to feel like I was sustaining a loop of scribbling, breathing, and working out, without really achieving anything. In fact, it became overwhelming. Time slipped away from me each morning, making me late for work. Hours of real productivity lost to. . .thinking about being productive?
I’d been hoping for improved focus, increased clarity, and massive acceleration toward achieving my goals. But a whole year passed and I hadn’t made any headway. I was still meditating, affirming, and holding a clear vision in my mind of what I wanted to achieve. I was consistently exercising. I read dozens of personal development books. But by the afternoon each day I found myself worn out, fed up, and those affirmations started to sound like silly clichés.
How was any of this supposed to be helping me make strides?
When I looked at it analytically, what I started to realize was this:
I personally don’t find mornings to be the time of day when I most need to ground myself, find some gratitude, and have a moment of silent meditation. First thing in the morning, no one has derailed my day yet; I don’t have any fires to put out at the office; and that one deliberately obtuse co-worker hasn’t asked me the same question for the fourteenth time yet.
Most of that happens sometime before lunch.
Why not move meditation and journaling to the lunch hour? And take a moment for gratitude during your breaks throughout the day? What if instead of visualizing your success in the morning, and then leaving it forgotten with the last dregs of your morning coffee, you learned to use adversity as a trigger for visualizing how to be successful?
Morning practices are supposed to equip you with the tools to succeed throughout the day while you’re still in that pre-dawn bubble. But days can be trying. And grounding yourself in a quiet cocoon is not the same as being able to find your center when things get intense.
But maybe if we can learn to employ the same kind of practices at intervals throughout the day, when we need them most, we’d be on to something.
To that end, I propose the following daily practices for increasing productivity, staying grounded, and sustaining laser focus on your priorities.
And I enjoy acronyms, so I present to you my practices for getting RIPPED.
Reflect
Internal monologue
Plan
Physical movement
Execute
Develop
The idea of reflecting is often associated with looking back on things. But another definition of reflection (God bless the English language) is to mirror something, or project an image of something else. So when I say reflect, what I mean is that I like to hold in my mind the image of myself I want to project throughout the day, and I set myself up to reflect that in everything I do. I sometimes use trigger words that help me hold that image in my mind.
This is my version of affirmations. Affirmations have never worked for me. After a few days they become platitudes that are read aloud in a mirror and then forgotten. Eavesdropping on my internal monologue is clearer to me; it’s not something I do once a day, it’s something I tune into all the time. I listen to what I’m saying to myself, and correct course whenever I have to.
I plan my day.
It’s that simple. There are thousands of tactics for doing this. Time blocking, bullet journaling, connecting to your “why”, or breaking things down into steps that need accomplished. I’ve developed my own combination of these over the years.
Each week, I look ahead to my deadlines so I know what’s coming each day. Then each morning, I prioritize items that need done for that day and brain dump everything else I’d like to achieve into a list. If I know it’s too much for one day, I push things to the next day where I can and prioritize based on the “alligator closest to the boat” theory. And if when all that is done I look at my list and it doesn’t feel good to me, I ask myself whether what I’ve prioritized is in alignment with my core values, which motivate everything that I do. If I’ve prioritized something that is out of alignment with what’s most important to me, I re-evaluate.
I move throughout the day, but I feel best when I get my primary workout done in the morning. It keeps my internal engine firing and keeps sluggishness at bay. If the weather is nice, I like to walk at lunch or go for short hikes in the evenings. Any activity you enjoy that gets you moving is ideal. Figure out what feels best for your body and commit to it.
The key here is MOVEMENT. Prioritize moving over “working out” or “exercising” and you’ll get a lot farther.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to go for a run every day or hit the yoga mat at 5am.
This one seems obvious, but is probably the single most overlooked part of a daily practice. You can meditate and journal every day, but if you aren’t executing on what you visualize, you’re just daydreaming. It became my motto to think less and do more wherever possible. If you have a clear vision of something you want to achieve, but you’re passing up opportunities to do something to get it, you aren’t executing. No morning practice in the world will work for you unless you’re doing something to make your visions a reality.
I do believe that taking time for some personal development each day is key. This can take the form of reading some PD books, listening to insightful podcasts, educating yourself on finances, or something else. I believe that this impacts my internal monologue by giving it something to occupy itself with that is productive and beneficial. It also gives me ideas for my daily planning and executing, so all of my practices are tied together.
This is more or less what I’ve been doing without realizing it for the last several months. I feel more productive and focused than I ever did after an hour of meditation and journaling. I’ve taken real action on things that are important to me, instead of just daydreaming about what it might look like if I did. And I’m a million times more conscious (technical measurement) of the way I speak to myself and internalize the criticism of others.
What are some of your experiences with morning practices? Do you find them effective? If so, why? If not, what do you do instead?
Reading Time: 7 minutes This post contains affiliate links. If you use the links to make a purchase, I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to
Reading Time: 7 minutes This post contains affiliate links. If you use the links to make a purchase, I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to
Reading Time: 7 minutes I learned a big lesson in chronic stress and slowing down last week. I talked in my last post about acknowledging my chronic stress as
