Designing my Morning Routine
By: Sathyanand S
Tags: Morning Routines, Habit Building, Mind Mapping

Designing my Morning Routine

The importance of routines cannot be overstated. Particularly starting the day well can mean how you set the tone for the day.

With mix of lucks and some will power, I am able to bring myself to ingrain few behaviours at the beginning of the day, that is proving to be quite useful.

I thought I should now scale up and decided to create a mind map on what and how I was thinking about it.

Designing my morning routines and the variety of options available

Plethora of options

The more I researched, the more inspiration and choices I found on routines — not just for the morning, but also the evening & night routine or daily and weekly.

After all struggles and suiting my needs, only 3 habits seem to stick to my morning routine:

Drinking a cup of water: I do this almost immediately after I wake up. It refreshes, it wakes me up

I do this almost immediately after I wake up. It refreshes, it wakes me up Yoga/ stretching: No, I am doing an 1 hour yoga session. It is just a 5–10 minutes of stretching that I do, based on minimum yoga that I learnt during my school/ college days. I found a combination of yoga/ exercises that works for me, like Surya Namaskar that increases my strength and helps my back pain; few joint exercises that relieves pain and increases my energy level.

No, I am doing an 1 hour yoga session. It is just a 5–10 minutes of stretching that I do, based on minimum yoga that I learnt during my school/ college days. I found a combination of yoga/ exercises that works for me, like Surya Namaskar that increases my strength and helps my back pain; few joint exercises that relieves pain and increases my energy level. Writing morning pages: The first thing I do when I open my laptop is to do a version of morning pages (inspired by Julia Cameroon’s ‘An Artist’s Way’). It is sort of a brain dump that clears my head.

Find what suits you and works for you!

Inspiration

Clearly, there has been quite lot of literature written on habits and habit formation. I must say, my first inspiration comes and still is by Stephen Guise of Mini-habits. He isn’t that well-known in the productivity circle, but his ‘1-push up challenge’ is how I motivate myself to get started in my morning routine.

For me the issue with building a routine is maintaining consistency and the feeling of overwhelm that I always get. If you have already read ‘Tiny Habits’ and ‘Atomic Habits’, you would know that success lays in starting small — ridiculously small. This evidently works so well for me. That it has been more than a month since I have been keeping up with this routine.

Tracking

I was a big fan of tracking earlier, where I either used a big chart in my bedroom or a mobile app, to track my routines. However for the past 2 years, I have completely failed in maintaining the tracker. I even tried a version of it in my notebook, inspired by so many Bullet Journal enthusiasts who suggested creating a ‘Habit trackers’. I simply couldn’t keep up with it.

I still don’t have habit tracker.

However, when I saw the video by David Hawkin’s on how to leverage Heisenberg principle to our advantage, my interest in it have piqued.

“Attention diminishes a thing automatically.” — David Hawkins

I have recently started using a Time Tracker — in my notebook and using an app called Boosted.

Will keep you posted on how it goes.

Stop doing list

It could have been a surprise that a post on designing routines should have such a list. But evidently, it pays off nicely.

Inspired by the likes of Tim Ferriss and Jim Collins, it might make sense to create your own ‘Stop doing list’ and track it just like you track a ‘Habit’ in action. I have been successfully able to avoid tea/ coffee/ milk based products for more than 2 years and now I am trying to let go off meat as well completely. I suggest you can create similar such list to see how it works for you.