Issue #024 — The year I stopped optimising my mornings

Dear reader,

I stopped optimising my mornings, and I want to tell you what happened.

For about three years I was, in the gentlest sense, a morning-routine person. Not the 4 a.m. influencer kind. The slightly-saner variant. Wake at 6.30. Water with lemon. Twenty minutes of journaling. A walk. Cold rinse. Reading. Then start work at 8.30. The whole thing was, technically, well designed. I copied it from someone whose life I half-admired.

It worked, in the sense that I did it for three years and outputs were fine. It did not work, in the sense that the entire morning was a performance of being someone who has their morning together, and at no point during those two hours was I particularly present. I was executing a script. The script was an identity. The identity was a small, ambient pressure I was carrying through the whole day.

Earlier this year I stopped. Not on purpose; I went on a trip and the routine did not survive the trip and I never reinstated it. The first two weeks back home, I felt mildly guilty. The third week, I noticed that I was sleeping more. The fourth week, I noticed that mornings had become boring in a way I had been outsourcing through the routine.

The boredom turned out to be the point.

What I do now, instead of the routine: wake when I wake. Drink water. Sit at the kitchen table. Sometimes read. Sometimes stare. Start work when I am ready, which is usually a bit later than the old plan called for. The sitting and staring is — and this is going to sound silly — the most generative part of my day. Ideas surface there that do not surface anywhere else. The walk does not need to be a walk; sometimes I take it. The journaling does not need to be daily; I write when I have something to say. The cold rinse turned out to be a thing I never actually liked.

I am not arguing against morning routines. If yours works for you — actually works, in a way that holds up to honest inspection — keep it. I am arguing against the inherited assumption that a good day requires a structured morning. It does not. It requires a body that is not running away from itself, which is a different problem and is not solved by lemon water.

If your morning routine is mostly performance, you are allowed to drop it. The day will be fine. You might, against your expectations, be more present in it.

Yours,
Enova