3x3 Morning Routines
This is not a how to article or one of those 23+ lists you have to read to increase your productivity and get that promotion you des(erve)ire. No such expectations are set for this piece. Instead please read it as if we went for coffee and I just told you about something new I am trying. In particular, one of my ambivalent friends - a routine!
The free spirit in my gets bored quite quickly and at the sound of routine (sometimes called business as usual in corporate terminology) I am already unsettling on my seat. However as I grow up and evolve (I hope) I become to appreciate the ambivalent relationship and start to take the good pieces I do enjoy about it. In my mind I call them little rituals, special dedicated moments I am looking forward to.
Here are few I though are worth sharing with you:
Prepare and print an article you will read with your morning coffee/tea.
Day before I select and print out an article I would like to read next morning. I prepare it on the kitchen table and it waits there until my coffee is ready to spend 15-20 minutes of intellectual adventure. Right now my main source is Harvard Business Review which I subscribe to and to avoid letting another such subscription go to waste I am quite happy with this solution.
TIP: Instead of trying to find one hour of deep focus time try to start with little digestible bites. You might end up reading more with 5 mins per day than struggling to find that one long focus time.
2. Give yourself 2 mins to recalibrate
Every morning before I get into emails, calls or work in general I spend 2 minutes with small index card writing 3 things:
What specific thing I am grateful for today?
Which one thing I am going to focus on today?
Which feeling / topic / issue I will let go?
I don't have a perfect 100% filing rate, but I must tell you as days go by the index cards stack up and reading through them brings me joy. I found this idea in the article shared by one of my mentors on LinkedIn and you can read more about this here.
3. Start morning by mindless manual work
Every morning I make coffee and tea for myself and my fiance, feed little pup and load the dishwasher. I stopped looking at this as a chore I have to do (especially the dishwasher part). It is time when I don't have to talk to anyone, I just manually move things from one place to another, I listen to Luxembourgish radio (where I only understand english words and few numbers - my favorit is four) and most importantly I don’t have to think about any of the things I am doing. In 15 minutes I see clean kitchen surface, I can smell freshly grinded coffee and warm tea and happy dog resting in her bed ready for the walk. I feel I accomplished something visible before I even started to try hard at work. Feels great.
Now all this is not every single working day. I don’t want to become a prisoner of my routines. But my perception of these rituals changed and I am looking forward to next day to do all of them again. I hope you found something you would like to try yourself. If you do something else, please let me know. Although I don’t plan to wake up at 2am to do all those things, it is always fun to mix things up.
Before you go…
Here are three thoughts to keep in mind:
Routines help to anchor your day. No matter what happens at work after work I call my mum and friends to catch up.
Routines decrease number of decisions you have to make during the day and create mind space for new things.
If you fail once, be like a gold fish - forget it happened and try again next time. I don’t want routines to make me feel trapped. I carefully sort and choose those that bring me joy.
Don’t be afraid to try and reshuffle your day. Once you try one thing it does not have to stay like that for life. You can always get back to it when circumstances change.
I wish you playful exploration!
