Tim Ferriss: "... having a boot up sequence which didn’t require any thought. I’m not deciding what to eat for breakfast. I’m not deciding what step number one is. Do I do A, B, C, D, or E first? No. I’m always going to be doing B or A, whatever it might be, has been very helpful."
Ramit Sethi: "I scroll Instagram first, literally the first thing I do is I get on Instagram while I’m in bed. It’s the worst possible thing, but I’m like, I like it."
I have a history of solid morning routines that I’ve found very useful I feel amazing after doing them. I’m a fan of Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss and they feel opposite about having a specific morning routine.
I’ve certainly gone overboard by having too many things in my morning routine. Eventually, I've learned to pair it down to about 45m to 1 hour. As much as I’ve loved 1.5hr routines, they nearly all became impossible to continue over the course of more than 3 months.
Currently, my routine is about 45minutes. The most important part of my routine has been making sure I don’t take in any input from my phone. I’ve found a good meditation, then a round of journaling on my Most Important Question(MIQ) has been the best way to clear my head of all weird dreams and help me reset into moving forward with the life that I want to live.
It’s easy to wake up and check the news, or a text from someone, or even begin to start communicating with others and suddenly you're reacting to outside input rather than steering your ship calmly in the most thoughtful direction. This is actually the thing Ramit Sethi and Tim Farris disagree with as Mr. Sethi loves to just get on instagram when he wakes up, but Ramit also has said he loves having his work planned out for him way ahead of time so I imagine he’s not reacting to things once he’s up because he already knows exactly what he’s doing after his instagram session.
Perhaps I should say here that I’ve always been someone who wants more. I love adding things to my morning list and hate taking them away. I’ve only recently realized that deeper concentration on less things can help me spend my attention and time more enjoyably and get a more satisfying outcome.
So here it is my morning routine:
8am
-do one of these exercises for like 6minutes:
a)walk/jog down and back the street barefoot(see Dr Kelly Starret)
b)up and down the stairs like 7 times
c)pushups/pullups/stomach exercises
d)bulgarian split squats with 50lbs
-pull a cold espresso(made the day before) out of the fridge and start a big glass of water
-water my broccoli sprouts (a la Rhonda Patrick)
-meditate 10m with eyes open on my bedroom floor(using Sam Harris' Waking Up app)
-1 of these things:
-freestyle rap and post on this website
-write crappy poetry with parallel pen(i’m practicing calligraphy sorta) and post to website
-begin journaling on Most Important Question(MIQ) (see Josh Waitzkin).
lately thats been on my Attention Investment Cycle but sometimes it is simply “What is my MIQ?”
-Check calendar Time block(a la Cal Newport) the day and use Focusmate to set up all coding hours to keep me on task.
-I do a quick 3 minute warm up on the trumpet
Then I’m done. Usually my first hour of work is on my espresso tests in the kitchen so I’ll head down there for that.
PS. I've found that if I don't do my morning routine in the morning for whatever reason, if I do it later in the day even at night, it resets me. (minus the espresso)
PPS: I also track most things like hours of deep work and 'make bed' in the Strides App on my phone which i can use Siri to log. literally I say "Siri. log bed." and it's done.