Are morning routines just a load of crap?

Every personal or lifestyle blog typically at one point or another talks about morning routine, so why not me. I have one. The one I’ve been crafting with various experiments. I guess everybody has one, no matter how small; it may be habit based and thus you may not consider it a “morning routine.” Mine was like that for many years. It was basically the following:

That was it. The job forced a consistent timing during the week. On weekends, I typically start a little later, but work had me programmed for a certain wake-up time, and I’m not a very good late sleeper. This was my routine, and it’s hard to even consider this a morning routine.

I’ve always been into self-improvement. At least what I thought self-improvement was, and I believed it was all about getting tasks done. Knocking out the ToDo list, being organized, etc. Books and planners from Franklin Covey and David Allen the Getting Things Done (GTD) guy were my staples. However, I’d say the practice was inconstant. I had a list, or two, or three… And they followed me from paper to PDA to iPhone with a few mixes thrown in. At some point, I realized I still was not getting major things done. I mean, things were getting checked off (or if they were on the list too long, deleted), but I felt as though I was still missing or lacking something. I did transition my workout to the morning to get more consistency (too many day/evening changes and modes were causing me to miss or just produced weak workouts), but still not calling it a routine.

Then somehow, I think it was one of the other thousand lifestyle blogs, that someone describing their morning routine mentioned Hal Elrod’s book “The Miracle Morning.” I did some searching and reviewing and decided to purchase the book. What can I say… It really resonated with me. After thinking about it, I was already doing a lot of the routine just in different places and ways. So I thought what the heck, let’s give this thing a try and purchased Hal’s The Miracle Morning Journal. Best thing I ever did. I had this fear of staring at this blank page every morning, but this alleviated all that. Plus journaling gave me a system or structure for reviewing and reflecting on entries from the previous week, month, quarter and year; it supported growth, and I was willing to try the new things or adjust what I was doing. One of the best things I ever did.

Now two years later, I’ve got my own morning routine. It’s been twisted, tweaked and pulled from where it initially started. Different things tried and thrown out, reordered, areas shorten or lengthened to get to where I am now. It is fully my routine now. I even use a blank journal now; no more fear here…:) I’m not done either; I’m the constant experimenter always looking for improvements. So without further ado, here is my morning routine:

Seems a little long looking at it, but as I said it’s mine, and in all honesty, it brings me immense joy. Without counting the bathroom time, which I’d be doing anyway, it’s probably about 90 minutes. Yours can be shorter, time wise, or with fewer items if you’d like. I’ll provide more details in future posts on the Meditation (Get the Headspace App Breakdown here), Workout (currently T25), Coffee and Journaling (custom flow and tagging). If you’d like me to prioritize any of these posts to do first, let me know in the comments. They have all gone through multiple iterations of experimentation to make them better, for me that is, but I’m sharing in the hopes that some part may help others. I’m still playing with the Visualization aspects to support some of my goals.

So just to wrap this all up, for now, I would say that the most important points to take away about morning routines are:

Hope this leads to a positive step on your Rich Life Journey!

— Perry

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