The Morning Routine: An Experiment
By Scott Salsman, M.S., Leadership Consultant + Associate at Coffee on Leadership
Morning routines are some of the most talked-about rituals of high performing individuals.
From athletes to directors to CEO’s, everyone seems to have a morning routine they follow. There is a good reason for this, there is plenty of science that suggests that components of morning rituals are good for us. Drinking water, meditation, exercise, going for a walk, are all things that most individuals would agree is a healthy way to start one’s day. How does someone put this all together into the perfect morning routine? There are countless videos, podcasts, articles, and even books on the topic and all of them give a different perspective, and at times contradicting advice on how to arrange your morning. What we do know though is at the core of all of these principles is productivity, fulfillment, and ultimately personal success.
Most of us have been told in one way or another that we need a morning routine. Some of us have been on the search for the perfect morning routine for years. This is where my experiment comes in. My goal is to find out why we need a morning routine. Do I need to get up at 5 am to be successful? Do I need to follow a rigid plan every day? How can I find the best routine for my life?
So instead of another article telling you should do these things, I am going to be doing them with you. We are practitioners here at COL and good practitioners practice what they preach. Theory is great, but practice is better. I learn by doing, and a fundamental component of these morning routines is to get up and do them. There is power in a shared experience and this experiment is no different.
How am I going to do it? I did not want this to be a complete overhaul of how I arrange my day. Creating new habits can be intimidating and adding 10 new things to my mornings can cause decision fatigue and a lack of desire to complete my goal. I wanted these habits or routines to be challenging but not so disruptive that I am rejecting my already established schedule. I wanted to find a routine that would allow me to start my day with positive intentions and help me feel productive right off the bat. My thought is that if I can start my day feeling productive that will flow (no pun intended) into the rest of my day.
Here are my non-negotiables:
My son gets up at 7 am every morning. That is when our day starts and I wanted to integrate my time around his schedule.
My wife and I are both working from home and we have a work schedule built around who is watching the baby and who is working. This schedule works great for us so I needed these routines to be able to seamlessly integrate into our already functioning schedule.
That’s it. Just those two things. As long as my family is moving smoothly the rest is up for grabs.
Here is what I decided on:
Meditation or Mindfulness (can be used interchangeably) and waking up early. I picked these because through my research I found that these are two of the most popular but also most two of the most ambiguous elements of morning routines. Early is a relative term and meditation and mindfulness have several different avenues to venture down. This seemed like the perfect place to start and experiment.
For the mindfulness component, I am going to start with 10 minutes twice a day (Lin, Eckerle, Peng, & Moser, 2019). Research suggests that anywhere from eight to twenty minutes a day is optimal, so I will be doing two sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon roughly 10 minutes each time. I have worked with mindfulness and mediation on and off for the past 5 years in varying capacities. I know the value of using mindfulness as a way to find clarity and focus but I have never committed to making it an established part of my day.
I have said I want to wake up early for as long as I can remember but I never had the motivation to do it. Waking up to read or work out always ended up with watching ESPN or social media scrolling. So, I am waking up at 6:15 am daily (yes weekends included, and yes to some this is very early, to others I am 2 hours behind. As I said, early is relative). In those 45 minutes before my day starts, I am going to focus on creating positive intentions for my day. This will include a quick 2-minute check-in before I get out of bed, a morning mindfulness practice, a morning stretch, mapping out my day and because this is an experiment, I am going to be writing everything down to track how It is all going. All before 7 am, all before my day “starts”.
I chose these practices because I believe that we need a clear purpose for why we are creating these morning routines. I needed to have a reason for waking up early and a reason for practicing mindfulness. For me it was accessibility. I wanted something that I could implement at any point throughout my day. My goal for mindfulness was to train my mind, to get myself better prepared for my day, and for when things go off track which is inevitable. Through this practice, I will hopefully build the mental skills to bring myself back into focus and into the present moment to keep moving productively throughout my day.
To some this is a small and insignificant change, to others waking up before 7 am is on their non-negotiable list already. That’s fine. The goal is to not create uniform habits, the goal is to create consistency which will lead to sustained positive change. Throughout this series, I want to find the best practices, try them out, and fit them into a normal person’s schedule.
At COL we believe that leadership development should be accessible. It’s hard to relate to Jeff Bezos’ morning routine because we are not worth $188 billion dollars (I’d wake up a 6 am every day for 1/1000000th of that). The hope is that through this real-world experiment from a real person you will be able to create some habits and routines that resonate with you and that help you find success in a meaningful way.
One last thought before this experiment starts— I am a firm believer that there are no hacks in life and there is no magic bullet to instantly make you a more productive person. To find success, or to become good at something requires a significant amount of work and practice. I am choosing to do this experiment because I want to find the threshold of where that is. Is that 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year? Maybe more? Not sure, but I do know that the only way I will find out for myself is by doing the work.
I am tracking my habits daily and at the end of each week, I will do a quick recap of my thoughts. At the end of the month, I will give you all my final report on this morning routine.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle.
References and Additional Resources:
Lin, Eckerle, Peng, & Moser. (2019). On Variation in Mindfulness Training: A Multimodal Study of Brief Open Monitoring Meditation on Error Monitoring. Brain Sciences, 9(9), 226. doi:10.3390/brainsci9090226
https://alifeofproductivity.com/how-to-experience-flow-magical-chart/
https://hbr.org/2010/07/defend-your-research-the-early-bird-really-does-get-the-worm
https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/radio/10
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/12/study-20-minutes-of-meditation-leads-you-to-make-fewer-mistakes.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-net-worth-explodes-in-2020-chart-2020-12