Once upon a time, I used to work in an office with a strict 9 am start time.
This was when I lived in a fairytale kingdom that had decent public transportation but a cost-of-living / housing crisis so dire, it made more sense to pay higher rent and live centrally than to pay less but spend forty-five minutes to an hour on a stuffy, damp bus commuting for aforementioned strict 9 am start time.
Instead of the forty-five minute bus ride, I had a twenty-minute walk each day, rain or partial cloud cover (shine rarely factored into the equation in this fairytale kingdom), to get my keister to the office. Same thing on the way back, whether I was walking home in late summer daylight or bleak winter night.
My walk was the fulcrum of my day. It set me up with fresh air, movement, and time to listen to music or think deeply before logging on, and in the evening, gave me an opportunity to work through any office-induced stress and reset before walking in the door.
With regards to the rent, perhaps I could have been more discerning financially. Emotionally, this was one of the best investments I ever made.
Yes. Welcome to a morning routine essay.
I have long been obsessed with how people spend their time. I know I’m not alone. From YouTube vlogs to podcast interviews and Vogue profiles, we are endlessly curious the ways people start and finish their days. And, as with nearly all content we consume in our modern world, the central theme in so many of these videos and interviews comes down to productivity.
In a culture that champions constant optimization, we’re desperate for the secret of the one 4 am alarm, the singular guided meditation, the specific red light therapy mask that keeps us from our dream career, partner, house, or bank account. The years of hustle, boundary-setting, and risk that our fave celeb-preneurs and CEOs have under their belts surely can’t be the difference between our success and theirs, right? It must come down to an easily replicable routine I can slot into my own dawn hours.
I’ve been working on reframing cost, value, and worth. Maybe you’ve seen my social media series What I Spend in A Week (Except My Attention is Currency). Here’s the premise: instead of highlighting what I swiped my credit card against over the course of 7 days, I log the activities that ate up my attention budget. On good weeks, I spend my attention span on movies, reading newsletters, picnics, trying new restaurants.
Time, like money, can be either a limited or limitless resource, depending on any number of things (the state of the economy, the state of my mental health, to name a few). And, like money, time can be invested. There are equations where these figures overlap, such as spending time studying for a course that will certify me in a new skillset I can pass along to potential clients, who will then (hopefully) pay me for these skills. And then there are moments when time investment doesn’t have an ROI.
Interestingly, my non-billable time is driving the largest profit, and nowhere is that more apparent than in my morning routine. However, that’s not always been the case.
In a perfect world, my morning looks like this:
6:15 am – Alarm goes off
6:17 am – AirPods in for my daily 3-minute personal affirmation meditation
6:20 am – Journal + extremely specific blue pen out for morning pages
6:47 am – Out of bed for a mug of warm lemon water with iodized sea salt
6:55 am – Reading, more journaling
7:35 am – Athleisure on
7:42 am – Walk around the neighborhood, to soak in fresh sunlight and greenery
8:15 am – Check phone
5/7 days of the week, my morning looks like this:
6:15 am – Alarm goes off
6:15:24 am – Check WhatsApp
6:15:45 am – Check Email
6:16:10 am – Check Instagram
6:17:00 am – Check TikTok
6:54 am – Out of bed still clutching my phone, rapidly blinking my way to the kitchen because my field of vision is so fucked from laying on my right side with one eye closed to maintain some semblance of depth perception whilst watching women perform morning routines from Pennsylvania to Paris for the better part of an hour
6:58 am – Mug of warm lemon water with iodized sea salt
7:02 am – Sit on couch and scroll more, periodically rechecking email
8:15 am – Start work
8:22 am – Rapidly swap between client tasks and personal creative work because I can’t quite seem to focus on either
10:10 am – Brush teeth
11:43 am – Get dressed
2:45 pm – Burn-out nap, but actually, just more scrolling
Why does my morning routine so frequently extend into late afternoon, you ask? Because my days before days impact the hours far beyond A.M.
Night-time, on the other hand, is easy for me. I’m a good sleeper, which I chalk up to a combo of good genes (thank you mom and dad), plus the almost religious devotion I have to my evening routine. In this regard, I could write novels extolling the virtues of the night-shower over the morning-shower. I could give you a by-the-hour play-by-play of my cycle from couch to shower to lotion to sweats to tea to gratitude journal. But if I’m being honest with myself, the only difference between the success of my evening routine vs. the near constant failure of my morning routine is one simple aspect: I’m not worried about other people at night.
My impulse to immediately CHECK PHONE is directly related to my fear that I’ve missed out on something. Maybe the missing is as simple as a good meme. Maybe it’s as desperately anxious as feeling like a client has been up for hours before me and there’s a mission-critical email in my inbox that, if left unaddressed for a minute longer, will ensure the financial collapse of my career and family. It always boils down to the same piece: the world around me matters more than the one inside me.
For years, I’ve told myself that the soothing of the anxiety is more important than the working through it. Perhaps a quick peek at my text messages will soak up the sure-fire flood of cortisol that would drown me should I leave my phone on the nightstand for an extra 45 minutes. How could I possibly enjoy a sunlight walk around the block knowing there are EMAILS?!?!??!!
The fallacy of the quick fix, because one text leads to another open tab leads to another email automation series.
“Sitting with difficult emotions”, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, seems to be reading a good book with a hot cup of coffee instead of doubling-down on group chat updates. The difficulty is putting myself first. It has nothing to do with Steven Bartlett levels of productivity. It has everything to do with allowing myself rest and peace before giving my attention – emotional, mental, commercial – to anyone or anything else.
My days-before-days will not always look ideal, and that’s okay. I’m embracing consistency, not perfection in this regard and importantly – focusing on the outcome. When I offer myself time to rest and reset, the rest of my day is calmer, more aligned, and yes, more productive.
ELEMENTS OF MY MORNING
Because at the end of the day (or the start of it?), I am desperate for the nitty-gritty behind how others spend their time, some thinking behind the core of my days-before-days:
PERSONAL AFFIRMATION MEDITATION: On waking, our brainwaves are in theta, ideal for processing information. There is another essay in here somewhere about how cringe I feel doing affirmations, so I’ve MacGyver-ed set of pre-recorded affirmations in my own voice, which I plug in immediately after turning off my alarm.
MORNING PAGES: More on this soon, but this is artist Julia Cameron’s calling card practice, whereby the morning begins with a 3-page, stream-of-consciousness brain-dump. This gets all of the sticky stuff out of my head and onto the page, freeing me from morning ruminating.
WARM LEMON WATER + SEA SALT: I’ve recently ditched caffeine point-blank, but especially first thing in the morning without eating. Instead, I’ve swapped in warm lemon water and sea salt for hydration and digestion. Look. It just works.
READING: It’s kind of a “no shit Sherlock” thing that I read a lot. But as the host of a podcast about books, I try to keep mornings / evenings to just-for-me reading, whether that’s a Substack fave or lit fic.
WALK: I’m lucky to live in a state with 360 days of sunshine. I take advantage of it with a morning walk before sitting down at my computer to burn off some mental energy, and get first dibs at my local Little Free Libraries before the day begins.
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