Quick intro
What’s the problem?
The alarm is ringing. You don’t want to wake up so you just snooze it. 5 minutes later the same. While pressing the button of that annoying device your half-awaken mind calculates the latest possible time to stand up which is often related to external factors such as the start of your working day, the first meeting or an appointment. Finally you make it. Just in time. Rushing into your day.
But mornings could also be something powerful and magical. It doesn’t have to be the time in your day where stress and rush are the main states of your mind. Mornings can be a big opportunity, especially because you might have less distractions compared to other phases during the day.
So why not use it to grow your business, exercise, practice mindfulness or do something you’re passionate about?
Own background
What’s my context/experience?
I’m a morning person. That might be an unfair advantage. I love the feeling when waking up early and knowing that there is a whole day waiting for me. It gives me inner peace to spend my morning with the habits I established over the last years. However, it can still be challenging to, on the one hand, wake up at the self-expected time and, on the other hand, really doing the things I want to spend my mornings with. The challenges I encounter when I think of my mornings are the following:
- Not waking up at the expected time (laying in bed and snoozing the alarm)
- Being distracted by all kinds of stuff (household, smartphone etc.) instead of focusing on the things I wanted to do
- Experiencing self-criticism if the morning isn’t working out smoothly or as expected
- Putting too much habits and things to do into my mornings
My approach
How do I tackle it?
In recent years, mornings have consistently been the time of day when I've regained a sense of self-awareness and clarity. Even when things are going crazy in life or business, it has always been my top priority to own my mornings. It’s like an anchor, like a reset, a consistency that gives me a foundation for all the uncertainty in life. And to make sure that the purpose of my mornings does not get blurry or evolves in a ‘wrong’ direction, I established some systems that I would like to share. Those systems also tackle the challenges I mentioned above. It’s what works best for me.
My morning system consists of three pillars and three rules.
The pillars define the structure and activities of my mornings. To avoid decision complexity I timebox my mornings including every activity I would like to do on a given day. The activities repeat every week and I refine them regularly, but overall they stay the same over months or years. Quick reference to goal setting: I strictly align those activities to my goals in life, the visions I have and to my values. This is a nice way to establish my habits and activities that significantly contribute to the life I want to live.
My calendar reflects the following three pillars:
Pillar 1: Baseline habits
Baseline habits are the habits that I want to do every morning. They mark the start of every day. They are the first thing I do in the morning, because I do not want to miss them. After establishing the baseline habits, you will almost automatically do them after waking up. My baseline habits schedule consists of:
- 20 minutes meditation
- 15 minutes of stretching / yoga
- 2 minutes of affirmations
Pillar 2: Flexible habits and activities
The flexible habits might be as important for me as the baseline habits, but they do not necessarily happen every day or at the same time. This can lead to more effort to establish them as you have to strictly follow your morning schedule otherwise you might lose consistency in doing those activities. My flexible habits and activities are:
- 90 minutes of writing every week
- 30 minutes of breakfast (including taking my supplements) every day
- Cold shower every day
- 45 minutes Calisthenics Workout three times per week
- 1 Run every week
- 3:30 hours of deep focus business work once a week
Pillar 3: Free time
The third pillar is blank space. It’s easy to pack the mornings with cool and productive stuff. Especially, after already establishing some habits it’s seductive to fill all the blank spaces in the calendar with timeboxes. I tried it out, but noticed that it can be counterproductive. Quickly the pace of such mornings doesn’t feel natural anymore and you kind of rush from one to another activity. For example, when enjoying coffee in our kitchen, I love to look out the window and to watch the birds in the backyard. This kind of wandering might exceed the time I scheduled for breakfast, but contributes to my inner peace and mood when starting into the day. Blank spaces in my calendar make the timeboxing feel like an inspiration rather than a schedule in which I have to rush from one to another activity. Free time gives me the feeling of control and freedom.
Rules are the second piece of my morning system. Similar to the mentioned pillars they make my morning simpler by defining a framework which I use to have less obstacles. While the pillars represent what I do in my mornings the rules set the how. These are my three rules:
Rule 1: No distraction
Distraction can destroy my whole system. I don’t want to get lost in things that are not part of my morning schedule. My main distractions in that sense are checking and responding to emails and reading my personal messages on Whatsapp. To avoid this I use an app that blocks distracting apps for a given time slot.
Rule 2: Schedule with Flexibility
Even though I do timeboxing I want to keep a certain degree of flexibility in my activities. Such flexibility gives me a freedom of choice that can easily be driven by my intuition and feelings. For example: I do not schedule the type of meditation I want to do each morning, but rather decide spontaneously whether I feel like doing a guided meditation or a free form.
It’s also important to me to consider flexibility on the time axes. There are days when I drag and drop my timeboxes and switch the order. This gives me more flexibility, for example to adapt to the time schedule of my girlfriend and have breakfast together.
Last thing to mention here is that scheduling the timeboxes a bit longer than intuitively planned is often a good idea to avoid stress and rush.
Rule 3: Do not expect to wake up at 5:30 when going to bed late
It took me years to come up and accept this rule for me. It’s easy to set the alarm to my desired wake up time, but it’s incredibly hard for me to actually wake up when I have not slept at least seven hours before. And as good sleep is crucial for my health, I gave up the fight. If I do not manage to get in bed on time, my morning will be shorter than planned. This results in the necessity to reduce the duration of my morning activities. Therefore, I think twice before going out late or doing some late night work.
An exception when it comes to mornings are my weekends. I tend to do similar habits and wake up at a similar time, but I do not schedule it. It’s important to me to keep the flexibility on the weekend to go out with friends or use the mornings for spontaneous stuff.
Tools I use for my mornings
Links and Tipps
OPAL App
Great app to schedule strict App-Blockers.
Notion Calendar
My go-to calendar I use for timeboxing and all other calendar stuff.
Headspace App
When doing guided mediations I usually pick a mediation course based on my current state-of-mind.
Tide App
Nice app for unguided meditation which I use to set a timer, sound scene and get a gong at the end of my mediation.
Nike Run Club
The running app I've been using for years.
Whiteboard and Sticky Notes
Before each Calisthenics workout I write down the exercises, reps and sets on a Sticky Note and take it with me during the workout. Nice way to avoid being distracted by decision-making on what to do next. (This does not exclude the possibility to do more reps than planned.)
Pomodoro Timer
Helps me to fully focus on my activities without having to check the time.
Inspiration I used for this article
Books, Podcasts, Articles, Quotes
- Cal Newport in Slow Productivity on tactics how to be productive without overloading yourself.
- Robert Rodriguez at Tim Ferris on the importance of creating boxes (limitations) in which you can freely be creative.
Community Space
Your comments, ideas, feedback
- What are things you build up leveraging your mornings?
- What are your habits and systems?
- How do you manage family time in your mornings?
- What are activities that work best for you in the morning?
- ...
Join the discussion below. Or write me an email to fabiano@40hourentrepreneur.com