Is Your Morning Routine Ruining Your Day?
by Rochelle Melander
The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life. —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
If you’re like 80 percent of the population, you check your smartphone within an hour of waking up. And more than a third of those people check it in their first five minutes of wakefulness. Another 41 percent of people check their phone when waking in the middle of the night.
Checking our phone first thing is an example of a gateway habit, the thing you do that acts as a catalyst and reshapes existing habits.
Typically, positive gateway habits tend to be things like sleeping, walking, meditating, and creative play.
Negative gateway habits might include surfing social media, reading the news, not sleeping, eating poorly, procrastination, and drinking alcohol.
I’d love to tell you I’ve conquered my morning habits, but I haven’t. To be a responsible business owner, I check email as soon as I get to my desk. And guess what? My brain is pulled in a hundred different directions. Even though I try to focus on my work, I I keep thinking about answering emails, meeting deadlines, and more. This affects my productivity for the morning and often for the rest of the day.
As a result, I’ve been evaluating my time. Maybe it would help you, too.
Take a moment this week and look back at your least and most productive times.
- What habits support the habits that you want to cultivate, like writing?
- What habits disrupt your focus on creative tasks?
I’d like to encourage you to make the most of your morning creativity. It’s precious time. And it’s a gateway to the rest of your day.
In the book How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci, Michael J. Gelb posited that people are most creative when waking, on a moving vehicle or near water. Research seems to suggest that our creativity peaks in the morning when creative connections are most active in our brain. And even if morning is not your most optimal time, that can be a good thing: you may tend to be more creative when you’re a bit groggy.
So how can you make the most of this morning creativity?
Try one of these morning habits. Before you get out of bed, grab a notebook or use the notes feature on your phone and try one of these exercises:
+Record your dreams.
+Brainstorm ideas for whatever creative project you are working on.
+Sketch out a scene or a section of your book.
+Vision your day in writing, imagining the best possible outcome for everything you tackle.
+Write three sloppy pages about anything.
But…my phone! My emails! My texts!
Reaching for your phone is a habit. But before you had a smartphone, what did you do? Even if you’ve culled this habit of checking in first thing in the morning, you can break it. Try morning writing practice for just 5 minutes a day. When you have tackled that, you can increase the time.
As you work on this, take notes on how this practice changes the work you do in the rest of your day. Does writing first thing help you to write more later in the day? Does it impact you in other ways—perhaps improving your mood? Then move on to the rest of your day: what gateway habits support you? What habits derail your day?
I’d love to hear about your morning habits and the rest of your gateway habits! Feel free to comment on this post!
