Three types of morning routine & how to choose yours

How do you start your days? There’s a reason why successful people are asked about their morning routines. Organising your morning for joy and achievement creates structure and sets the tone for the day. Having a morning routine in place also frees up your mental bandwidth, so you can still have some energy to think about important things later in the day. I’ll walk you through three types of morning routines and the change I made recently, as well as what you can do to develop or upgrade your own morning routine!

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Type 1: The panic & run morning routine

This is where most people start out so it will probably seem quite familiar.

The alarm goes off, you snooze it a few times as your bed is nice and warm, and you’re not really looking forward to the day ahead. When you finally do wake up, your first real thought of the day is “crap I’m late!”. But for some reason, you still grab the phone that is by your bed – with WiFi left on – and scroll through notifications and news feeds, making you even later. You then rush through getting ready – looking less than ideally polished and definitely not squeezing a workout in. Finally you grab a quick snack to go or forgo breakfast altogether and hurtle out of the door or to your laptop to stumble into your workday.

Stress level: quite high; achievement: very low; enjoyment: meh.

If you recognise yourself in this scenario, don’t fret, we’ve all been there. The key is to identify the madness of it all and start addressing it.

Type 2: The personal development morning routine

This is the type of routine I used to follow until quite recently. This kind of morning routine is recommend by Hal Elrod in his book on this very subject, The Miracle Morning.

The idea is that you wake up a bit earlier than in the scenario above, and take the time to work on becoming a better person. How do you do that as part of a morning routine? In his book, Hal recommends six key elements that he calls “SAVERS”:

• Silence – could be meditation or prayer;
• Affirmations – positive words of encouragement you say or write to yourself;
• Visualisation of success in your day;
• Exercise – this is pretty self-explanatory;
• Reading books to improve yourself as a person;
• Scribing or journalling: putting pen to paper about your thoughts.

I incorporated these elements in a different order into my morning routine. I got up, drank some lemony water on our front step, came back in and put my workout clothes on. Then I made breakfast and read the Bible while eating it. As a side note: I’m reading the “chronological Bible” in a year, I would recommend it, whatever your faith, as it underlies a lot of our arts and culture. Next year I’m thinking of reading the Quran and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The early morning can be a good time for spiritual exploration – or more pragmatically, reading little chunks of really long texts!

After breakfast, I would read a couple pages of the Little Book of Mindfulness. Then I would do some colouring and drawing of plants (so relaxing!). I would then read a chapter of a “how to” book. These can be personal development or business books, or related to health or my research. After that, I would write three positive affirmations linked to my big goals in my journal. For example:

• I want to feel toned and healthy;
• I enjoy doing research;
• I enjoy working on my website and blog posts.

Then I would list my three goals for the week and journal about the chapter I had just read, but also just write down my thoughts about the day ahead. I would keep writing until I completed three pages, similar to the “morning pages” idea. After that I would set out and do my workout, whether it’s running, yoga or strength training. Then I’d have a shower and tackle the first task on my list.

Even though I don’t follow this routine anymore – as it started to feel like indulgent procrastination to me – it could be that it is just right for you in this specific stage of your life. I would strongly recommend starting with this type of morning routine for people who feel a bit lost and are new to personal development, and who want to take time to figure out where they’re going with their life.

Type 3: The goals-oriented morning routine

I changed my morning routine from type 2 above because it started stressing me out. I enjoyed all the activities – the reading, journalling, drawing etc. But by the time I was done it was quite late in the morning and I felt “late” on everything I had to do that day. And that’s kind of the key to the whole “choosing your morning routine” thing: if what you do in the morning causes you more anxiety than enjoyment or achievement… Then it isn’t serving you and it might be time to shake things up!

That’s what I did recently. I have now shifted to a morning routine that allows me to touch base with my three big goals every morning. I still do the reading while having breakfast bit and the exercise at the end. But now after breakfast, I spend 50 minutes (with a timer!) reading a research paper for my PhD and 25 minutes on my next blogging task “due”. Then I do my workout – while often listening to a podcast that is related to my goals. After a shower (here comes the exciting bit) I put a load of laundry on.

I then feel like I’ve accomplished something and the rest of the day seems less daunting. As we all know, it’s often the starting that is the most difficult step. If I left all of my blogging tasks to the end of the day – like I used to – they’ll just be pushed back to the next day and the next and the next… Making it a habit to nibble away at my most important tasks every morning has already led to heaps of progress. Imagine if I kept this up (and I will!) – by this time next year I will have read more than 200 papers, just in that morning time slot alone!

Have a think about what your goals are and how you could get a little bit done every morning, which would then lead to a much bigger impact. If you’re looking for a job you could work on reaching out to people in your desired sector every morning (via email or Twitter) for 10 minutes. If you want to move to a new country, you could do 25 minutes of languages with Duolingo and Memrise in the morning. Or if you’ve decided that this year you’re going to get back into reading, you could read a chapter or a given number of pages every morning.

The key is to figure out what you want to achieve and how much time you have. Then get up, have breakfast, set a timer and work on it for 5, 25 or 50 minutes! Telling yourself that you’ll “just” start for a given number of minutes makes the task much less overwhelming.

Setting yourself up for morning routine success

Now that you’ve read about the three types, here is an inspirational video and some quick-fire tips to set up your morning routine.

Mindset

Whether you need help with getting up early or you just enjoy listening to Australian accents (guilty!), check out Sam‘s advice below:

Organisation

• Plan your morning routine in advance: have a think and write it down somewhere, so you can refer to it the first few times;
• Put that block of time in your calendar;
• Try to go to bed at a regular time as often as possible.

Environment

• Put your phone in another room: this has the double benefit of keeping distractions out of reach when you should be sleeping, but also forcing you to get up to turn your alarm off;
• Change the sheets once a week – it makes your bed feel like a lovely sleep palace;
• Air your bedroom out – I like to do this in the morning when I make the bed (if you don’t make your bed, maybe start doing it: it makes the whole room feel neater!);
• Try to keep the room clutter free and relaxing (I’m still working on this one!).

What do you think?

1. Take a moment to think about what you do in the morning. Even better: try to write it down. How do you feel about your morning routine? Satisfied? Or do you think you could improve it?
2. Share in the comments below what you are doing now (which type are you closest to?) and what you would like to incorporate into your morning routine.
3. Send this article to a friend you believe could do with an upgrade to their mornings!