Morning routines are for losers (except for my one) – how normal people can create a morning routine that works for them

All the cool kids have a morning routine right? It seems like the advice from CEOs, celebrities,athletes – in fact everyone who is (or wants to be) successful – including the girls and boys of the FIRE world – is to have a morning routine.

Until the start of the year I didn’t get morning routines. More to the point I didn’t get how people manage to find the time to do them.

How do they do it? Seriously. How?

Who are these people that get up the morning and manage to meditate, and do morning pages (and gratitude pages for luck), and exercise (including yoga), and read a chapter of an improving book and podcast, and eat a slow breakfast as quality time with their loved ones, and do all of their work on their side hustle before they even leave for work?

Also who are these freaks who wake up at 4 in the morning? What the actual?

I got how people can do it when they are retired. I would be completely up for doing a full-on morning routine then. But before then? I didn’t get it.

Cards on the table. I was actually just jealous. If only I could be like those people. I could see how it would leave me feeling calm and fulfilled. How I would feel like I had won the day before it had even really started. But, the way I saw it, the only way to do that would be to wake up earlier (and as I already don’t get enough sleep that wasn’t going to happen).

This whole thing bugged me for a quite a while. In fact it left me feeling a bit inadequate. If other people could do it why couldn’t I?

It kept niggling at me. I wanted to start the day with more purpose. So, instead of feeling victimised by it, I decided to see what I could do.

Let me share my old ‘routine’ (and I use the word routine there really loosely) and then show you what I do now. Then I’ll go through the changes I made, and how and why I made them.

Hopefully it will give you some ideas that you can use.

My old morning ‘routine’.

06.40: Alarm goes off. Shower, shave, teeth, get dressed, quick check of email and social media, and say goodbye to the family

07.12 – 07.18: Leave the house and walk to the station

[07.33: More often than not realise that the train is already pulling into the station and leg it to catch it]

07.35: Arrive at the station and get on the train. While on the train: snooze; flick through my work and personal emails on my phone; check social media; read the Guardian newspaper on my phone; possibly play Candy Crush or Clash of Clans; possibly read a book, sometimes get my laptop out and do a bit of work; sometimes just sit and look out of the window.

08.26: Arrive in London, take the tube to the office

08.45: Buy a coffee

08.53: Arrive at the office and start work

That’s pretty normal right?  I certainly see a whole bunch of my fellow commuters doing similar every day.

It also wasn’t terrible. My commute may be on the long side but it’snot a bad as some peoples. I usually get a seat. I got some exercise, I had a bit of time to do some stuff. It was fine. But it wasn’t good.

My current morning routine.

06.40: Alarm goes off. Shower, shave, teeth

07.05: Put kettle onto boil then get dressed

07.10: Put coffee into brew then go to say goodbye to the family

07.14: Plunge coffee and leave the house and either ‘mediate’ or listen to a podcast on the walk to the station

[07.33: realise that the train isn’t pulling into the station so I can carry on walking…most of the time]

07.35: Arrive at the station and get on the train. While on train, write (and I’m drafting this post on the train right now!) or read a book while drinking my coffee

08.20: Check work email and Guardian app (possibly also social media)

08.26: Arrive in London and walk to the office while listening to another podcast and/or mentally running through what I have to do that day.

08.55: Arrive at the office and start work

What hasn’t changed?

When I looked at my old routine I didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are the things that I didn’t want to lose or that I didn’t want to change. They’re part of what make my day manageable or pleasurable.

Firstly, and most importantly, this routine doesn’t need me to change when I get up. Stuff that for a laugh.  I tried that to go to the gym and it really dragged me down. Compromising sleep for anything just doesn’t work for me – and as I’ve said I still don’t think I get enough.

Secondly, I get the same train into work that I always have and I still get into work on time (if not exactly the same time).

Thirdly, coffee. Mmm coffee. I love coffee. I still get my coffee in the morning. There’s not enough space on the internet for me to tell you how much I love coffee. Not giving up my coffee in the morning. Have I mentioned that I love coffee?

Finally, I still get to fiddle around with my phone. I would love to say that I was one of those people that was excellent at using their phone as a tool, not a toy, or who didn’t engage with social media but that’s not actually true. I also quite enjoy it.

What did I want to change?

Was it Decartes (?) who said. “I think therefore I am”? In any event it was definitely Grant Nicholas of Feeder who sang “I think we’re gonna make it” (I know that you know this already but in case one or two of you younger folk were wondering that’s from the track Buck Rogers from their 2001 album Echo Park. You’re welcome).

That means that two of the greatest philosophers of all time who were encouraging me to think more I wanted to build some thinking time. I have rather grandly overplayed it by calling in meditation. What I mean by that is that I realise that I need time when I can just think. No input from music or podcasts or conversation. Just time when I can let my thoughts do what they will.

A lot of people had been telling me how much they were loving podcasts so that was one thing that I wanted to add to my day. I wanted to feel like I was using my time on the train. Ideally learn a language or read “proper” fiction or non-fiction. 10,000 steps a day is the magic (albeit disputed) number and wanted to see if I could do more exercise. I was *almost* but not quite getting to 10,000 steps every day so if I could slip in a little more that would be perfect. Finally I thought that if I was going change things up then I really wanted to stop running for the train. I’ve been commuting for decades – I’m too old not to be able to get it right.

What has changed and how did I do it?

So did I manage it? The answer is yes to almost everything. As you can see from my new routine I’ve kept everything that I want and I’ve added in pretty much everything that I wanted. The big thing for me in doing this was trying to be more intentional about what I did. In reality almost everyone actually has a morning routine whether they call it that or not.

Most people have a time that their alarm goes off and a time that they need to get into work, or to get children to school. The only question really is what are you going to do between those two fixed times. It would be far too exhausting to do something different every morning so we all slip into habits. I know that I’m a sucker for a habit. And habits are what I am looking for from a routine – healthy habits rather than unhealthy habits. So I looked at the things that I wanted to keep and to add and then looked at what I was doing. My key things were:

• Deciding not to check my phone until the end of my journey to work. It was tripping my mind into thinking about things that were unnecessarily distracting
• Choosing to make a coffee rather than buying one. I should be clear that this is not that old FIRE canard about not buying a latte. This wasn’t about money (although that’s a side benefit). My realisation was that I was buying a filter coffee anyway and that a) I preferred the blend I had at home and b) I was wasting time in the queue, the slight diversion that I took to get to my preferred coffee shop, and walking more slowly because I had a coffee in my hand. This also involved finessing my time at home as I realised that the big slug of elapsed time in making coffee in a cafetiere is in boiling the kettle and allowing it to infuse. As a result I intersperse it with other activities so the actual additional time required is much less.
• Realising that if I walked to work rather than taking the tube then, with the coffee time that I saved, I could get in only a few minutes later. This means that I average more than 12,000 steps a day (rather than just under 10,000).
• Related to this was to choose to use my walking time actively…even it’s not what people think of as active. I started off doing a language course, but it was making me twitchy as I realised as it was taking up too much mental energy and leaving me down. So I stopped that (for now) and put in some time just to think and when I was done with that to discover the AMAZING world of podcasts
• Reorganising my time on the train itself was also really important. This was by far biggest one as I felt that I should be able to be more constructive with it. Drinking coffee really helped with that as it helped me to wake up – and had the side benefit of making my walk to work faster. The other bit was deciding on a limited palette of things to potentially do and I decided that I would either read or write – nothing else until the very end when I got my social media/email time.
• Leaving at a specific time in the morning. This means I know that I will actually get the train without having to run…

Did intentionally curating a morning routine make a difference?

Does my routine do everything that I see other’s able to manage? No. Is my life better than it was? Heck yeah! One key thing for me was that I made the changes one at a time rather than throwing everything up in the air at once. I started with train journey and social media (including deleting all the games off my phone) , moved onto the coffee, then changed my tube journey into a walk. Each step made my life incrementally better.

I also didn’t/don’t have a master plan. For me this is a good things as I don’t see this as something that is ‘done’ so I’ll continue to refine this as I go along. In fact my taking out going to the gym in the morning and the language course I’ve already done that. However, overall, I wanted to start the day with more purpose and I feel like that is the case. No matter how busy my day is I feel like I’ve done something for me. And it’s not perfect, but it’s better that it was.

As always this isn’t about my creating a template for people to follow. Everyone will have different journey to work, or different food/drink needs (I don’t need to eat anything first thing for example) or have different caring responsibilities (kids, pets, parents etc). My routine won’t be, can’t be, right for you. My main purpose with this was to show how thinking about your morning in an intentional way can yield massive benefits from incremental changes. I hope I’ve managed to trigger some thoughts.

Thoughts?

What’s your morning routine? Have to tried to optimise it? How did that work out? Where do you stand on coffee? [There’s only one right answer to this]