The morning routine is ultimately the foundation of your day. This past month of setting an expectation each morning really gave me the leg up on some days that may have been much worse off otherwise. Even days where I rolled out of bed and felt rushed, I forced myself to stick to the general outline of the routine I wanted to follow. Doing so helped me take my day back.

To sum up four weeks of routines, I personally found a short burst of cardio to be the best thing to start out with. Jumping jacks have been the easiest to do. You can do them anywhere without equipment and you also don’t need much space even.

Next, I’ve been reading as I try to drink a tall glass of water, which I’ve prepared the night before. The water is refreshing after hours of slow dehydration. What I would really like to try more of is meditation at this point in the morning, but that’s been the toughest for me to start so far. I’ve been able to a few days, mostly weekends. Most guided meditations I find are just new age whack for me to really settle in during. Maybe I’m too cynical or am just an ass, but I just can’t loosen up when I hear about certain spiritual concepts. Something I might try in place here is to do breathing exercises. I definitely have some more research to do here.

The final piece is to come up with a “first win” of the day. This was definitely the most difficult for me. Anyone who has known me for a while may know that I do not operate well in the morning. I am a night owl when it comes to getting work done. I write better at 10 o’clock at night as compared to 9 o’clock in the morning. To work with my personality here, what I’ve tried to do is lay out a good foundation to work on. I will jot down notes or an outline for a project I’m working on later allowing myself to get into the meat of the work quicker. For example, this week, I recorded a podcast episode with a friend of mine (shout out to you Dan!). That morning I made sure I had at least three points in mind for the recording. Whether I used them or not wasn’t the point, the important thing was to set myself up with some ideas to get over the brainstorming phase and be able to get into the work quicker.

Not every day requires prep work for a project, so I’ve also done small maintenance tasks from cleaning to reorganizing. These don’t require much brain power but can help prevent procrastination down the road. I’ve tried to take note of the small things that have built up and need to be addressed.

One of the most important pieces I think I learned is to accept the fact that you will not be able to keep up with your routine every day. We are not robots…yet. The key here is to forgive yourself for missing a day and take steps to avoid it happening in the future.

Stayed up too late? Have a reminder go off 30 minutes before you need to go to bed. Have trouble getting out of bed? Create systems that reward (or don’t punish) you for getting up the first time. The important thing when you miss a morning is to learn from it and apply some thought to preventing yourself from making the same mistake.

Another piece I love about my routine is that it’s mine. I love to try out new things (who would think?), and morning routines are probably one of the most frequent things I will look up. I don’t know why it took me so long to actually try and implement a routine in my own life, but better late than never I suppose. When creating your routine, make it YOURS. Try different things, I know I’ll be continuing to experiment as time goes on.

Whether you plan on having one or not, whatever you find yourself doing every morning will become your routine. It’s up to you to make one that helps you win the day and not get beaten before your day even starts. This trial was a good test run of a few different approaches to a routine. I think there will definitely be further experimentation down the road, but sticking to a general outline I think helps. For me, that outline is getting in something physical, mental, and a first win.

My next trial will be attempting to do some freelance work. I recently acquired an itch to try and do some work on the side to not only build my personal skill set but see what that line of work is truly like. Is this something I’m cut out for? Could I be a self-starter? Or should I stick to my day job? Literally.

The morning routine trial continues! Over the past few weeks, I’ve probably tried at least a dozen different morning activities to get my day started. I’d say it’s been going well, and here’s a quick rundown of some of the activities I’ve been trying so far.

With a fairly small apartment in which getting outside becomes a task in of itself, I’ve been starting the day out with a variety of calisthenics and body weight exercises followed immediately by some stretching.

Push-ups, sit-ups, and squats were all fairly effective, but I don’t think anything has been as beneficial as jumping jacks. They’re easy to do and you can start immediately after standing up, but loosen up stiff joints and get your heart rate up to wake up the body. Depending on how much time I have to spare in the morning, I’ve gone anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds of jumping jacks to loosen up before starting to stretch.

When stretching, I focus carefully on loosening up my spine. It’s perhaps a variety of factors, but my lower back is pretty atrocious. Just turning or bending forward slightly leads to a few cracks in my back in the morning. With my recent yoga trial, I’ve tried incorporating a few poses I learned in the weeks of trying that out (here’s a link to part one of that trial if you’re interested). In particular, Cat-To-Cow and some poses in Warrior 2 (that I don’t know the names of) are the most beneficial I’ve seen work for me. I’ll usually top things off by bending forward initiating the previously mentioned back cracks and trying to feel each vertebra stretch apart. From there I’ll shake out the rest of my body with arm/shoulder circles and leg stretches.

When waking my mind up, I’ve been long reading The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. I started reading the book at the beginning of the year, and have done so every day since January first. I’ve tried a few other approaches in addition to this, but haven’t found one I’m ultimately sold on.

So far, I’ve tried both guided meditation and journaling (which I also tried in a previous trial, these things just keep popping up, huh?). For meditation, I am a decent fan of guided meditation, but more so as a place to start. I found a meditation before bed that seems to knock me out cold, as the guide gets me out of my head and into my body then is silent for a few minutes. I’ve rarely been awake to hear his closing statements. I’ve tried a few morning meditations, but none have quite gotten my mind hacked like my nightly meditation.

If you have any good meditation suggestions, please let me know in the comments.

This has been the single most difficult piece of my morning routine puzzle. Trying to come up with something every day has been pretty tough. There have been a few that were relatively simple. Many have just been maintenance tasks that during the day I tend to forget, but others have been plans to make the rest of the day or week go a bit more smoothly.

Today, for example, my objective was to come up with a podcast topic to record another episode this coming weekend, keep your eyes peeled for that! Another day, I simply fixed a part of my bike that had bent a bit and needed to be put back in the right place.

Overall, my goal is to try and simplify my day by taking just a few minutes each morning. I don’t think any routine I’ve done has taken more than 25 minutes. This next week, try some of what I’ve done above on just one day and see how it changes the rest of your day or your entire week!

The morning and evening act as the bookends of your day. If one is thrown off, the other is going to feel it.

Due to many different factors lately, my nights have been off balance. This has led to me waking up late, having rough insomnia, or even simply not planning for my mornings well at all. Ultimately, this causes my mornings to be not as easy going as I would hope. There have been multiple nights, this past week where I’ve set my intentions and goals for the morning before bed, but could not fall asleep if my life depended on it. I’ve been on and off, almost interchanging days on a schedule. There have been days that I’ve been able to do a short workout, read, and accomplish something before leaving the house heading to work. Other days, I might just barely get one of the three done before rushing to work and starting my day there.

In the process of this trial, I’ve had to create a bit of a nightly routine in order to get into the swing of things. Unfortunately, I totally screwed up my sleep schedule with some poor sleep this past weekend, I blame daylight savings changes. This has broken up my mornings pretty bad. I’m still pushing to get my three pieces of routine in, but it’s a struggle I don’t accomplish every day.

Even waking up late, I try to take a breath and stick to what I need to do in the morning. If I panic and rush through everything, the rest of my day is in a panic. Monday this week, I woke up later than I needed to and tried to rush through my morning. The rest of the day I felt like an amorphous blob just getting by.

Tuesday, I woke up a bit late again but slowed myself down. I took the minute or so extra to do things right, and it benefited the rest of my day. Allowing myself the time to get what I needed to done cascaded into the other aspects of my day. At work, I felt better and more focused, at home, I could concentrate on what I needed, and at night, I was able to set myself up for getting to bed on time.

All of this has gotten me thinking about creating a better routine before bed. Ideally, I would like to start winding down from 9-10 PM, put on a pot of water, and make some good night time tea, preferably this tea from Yogi at the moment ( not a sponsored link or anything, just what I could find online). At that point, reading a good book. From the research I’ve done, fiction is best to read before bed, because it helps reduce the problem solving our brains try to do. Though sometimes for me, even fiction will get my mind spiraling down some rabbit hole of research or investigation. If you have good fiction recommendations, let me know. I’m hoping to try and find some good books to help wind down instead of riling myself up.

The first step to creating a good morning routine is creating a good routine before bed. Proper preparation for the morning makes everything easier. Pick the clothes you’ll wear to work. Make sure you set up systems to make your routine easier. Good systems will beat willpower any day.

Depending on how the rest of this week goes, I may write more on evening routines as well those for the morning. I’ll be experimenting with some different tactics for sure. Be sure to drop by next week for updates!

Creating a personal morning routine has been something I’ve tried here and there, but nothing has really stuck. I think trying out some different things and thinking out the successes and failures in writing will help me, and possibly you, find a good routine and stick to it.

Over the past week, I’ve started my mornings with three things a physical stimulus, mental stimulus, and a first win of the day. I’ve tried a couple of different approaches to each but will continue trying new ones over the next few weeks.

To start things out, I usually try to wake my body up. The goal here isn’t to exhaust myself, but to simply shake out from laying in a bed for hours. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to A) have warm weather to go outside in shorts and a t-shirt and B) be in a convenient spot to go outside easily, my grandpa’s house. Because of this, I was able to try out a recommendation from a YouTube video that helped get the ball rolling for this, jump roping in the sun for a few minutes. Afterward, spending a few minutes with some dynamic stretches, which involve moving the body around instead of stretch-and-hold type stretches. So far this has been my favorite, though I think largely due to the rarity of the weather previously stated in the Midwest during early March. Other than the jump rope + stretch, I’ve done a combination of jumping jacks, push-ups, and sit-ups with some brief stretching. Both accomplished the base goal, to get the body moving and awake.

Once my blood was flowing and my body was ready to start the day, I then would shift my focus to my mind. Thus far, I’ve tried both reading and meditation as methods of mental priming for the day. I’ve tried meditation before, and it was often the final part of my yoga practices, but for some reason, I can never stick to it. I will admit, doing it right off the bat in the morning has made it more enjoyable. Getting my mind on a certain wavelength early in the day has helped me get a hold of my mind when it starts to stray from that wavelength, usually down a path to a dark or at best unproductive place. Morning meditation has helped me to build a foundation for the day, usually giving myself some positive mantra I can tell myself when my mind wanders to bring me back to where I need to be.

A specific example of this involves when I went to see some friends this past weekend while spending some time in my hometown. For whatever reason my mind was throwing negative thoughts my way and I was feeling kind of bummed out, but then I just repeated some of the phrases in that meditation, which to be honest I can’t even think of right now, and I was right back where I wanted to be, having fun and sharing stories.

The final piece of my routine puzzle is to set my day up with a win. This can be easier or harder depending on planning the prior night. Most mornings so far, I’ve come up with what I want to tackle before going to bed and put it on my to-do list. This makes jumping into that task fast and easy, and most things I can wrap up in a matter of minutes. The nights that I didn’t come up with a first win, I spend more time coming up with what to do than the actual task takes. The beauty of the first win is that it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. A few simple examples from just this past week are tidying up my car and setting up my mail list template.

The key element of your first win is to accomplish something in the day. Have you ever had a day where you look back and can’t think of anything you “accomplished” and think “today was a waste?” Getting yourself a win right away gives you momentum to push thru the rest of the day. The win can be small maintenance tasks, most of mine from this week have been, but can also be progress on personal projects, side-hustles, creative work, etc. The win can be big or small, it’s up to you to define it.

I’ll come right out and say it, I did not accomplish my routine every morning. On the very day I’m typing this, I woke up nearly an hour later than expected and had to rush over to work to get in at a reasonable time, not necessarily “on-time.”

Tim Ferriss has a great quote that he uses when discussing following a diet plan, “The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.” This quote came to me as I made my way into work. I missed a day so I have two options, tell myself I have to quit completely because I missed one day, or just move on and try to set up better systems to avoid this in the future. Something about option two feels a bit better, I can’t quite put my finger on it.

All in all, it’s important to forgive yourself for mistakes. They will happen.

The major lesson I’ve learned in week one has been that the success of your morning routine relies on the prior evening. If I didn’t set myself up for a successful morning, it’s not likely one will just happen by chance. Getting to bed at a decent time and deciding on a win to start the day are two simple steps that can be taken to set up your morning for success.

A second lesson I took away was the concept of moving past one bad day. It may sound obvious, but when you’re in the shoes of the person who messed up a plan you feel thrown off. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of “why do this tomorrow if you didn’t today?” Luckily, I shortly answered something along the lines of “because it’s good for me.” Messing up is tough, but it’s going to happen. Forgive yourself and keep moving forward.