develop a daily morning routine

In honor of Mutual Improvement’s October theme, habits, I’ve decided to give this goal another go.

Having a quick look through my previous entries, it looks like this is actually the fourth time I’ve tried to complete this goal. Fourth time is a charm.

We talked about this at lunch last week. Things like this are a question of pure will and get to the real heart of motivation. It’s a battle between YOU and… YOU. What makes it so difficult to wake up in the morning? It’s simply that I don’t have enough reason to. Create enough reason, and it’s not even work to do it. Waking up should feel more like rolling down a hill than rolling up the hill. As long as it’s an uphill roll, it won’t stick. Things that go up tend to come down. Motivation is funny… wanting to do something is often confused with wanting to want to do something. We do things that we want (like sleep in, eat more healthy), and don’t always do things that we want to want to do (like wake up earlier, eat more tasty). We identify more with our “want to wants” than our “wants”.

The key to figuring this out might be in understanding why I want to want to want to wake up earlier. Despite being ineffective, it’s clearly a strong motivational force… one that has kept this goal on my list and forced me to attempt this four times now… maybe I can find the source of that “want to want” motivation and redirect it into REAL desire that is a simple “want”. Framed this way, it’s really easy to know what that motivation is. I “want to want” to be productive. Early hours are correlated with productivity, even for late birds like myself. I want to want to be in on that.

But, thinking about it some more, I think it’s because I often stack “want to want” factors on top of each other… a bunch of things that I really want to want to do but don’t actually habitually or emotionally want to do when it comes down to it. So, adding “listen to French tapes,” “write morning pages,” and “exercise” to the list of tasks only increases the weight on the side of what I want to want to do.

My tactic this month will appeal more to my subconscious and its more subversive logic. I’m going to attack the problem at its root and find out what I REALLY WANT in the morning. It only took a couple seconds to figure this out. I want to be warm. The difference in temperature between under the covers and out is pretty drastic in my airy box-like habitat. If I could stay warm, I think it would be easy to wake up. This in mind, I think I might invest in a good warm and soft robe. And maybe some slippers. I’ll attack waking up with warmness and softness and see how that goes, possibly developing a second and third offense in the near future.

Can anyone recommend a good soft and warm robe for me?

I was on a roll with the morning routine for about a month, then it slowly got phased out. I’m going to give it another try with a couple changes. For one, I’m going to try Steve Pavlina’s advice and wake up at the same time every day. That time is going to be 7am. The idea is that by setting a constraint on the waking up side of the sleeping schedule, you will be able to train yourself to wake up at that time… and it will automatically regulate your going-to-sleep time. I’m going to try the “wake up when the alarm goes off the first time” trick, and the screaming trick (where I scream the first thing that comes into my head when waking up… usually profanity).

The reason for my new take on this is so I can begin the 12-week program in The Artist’s Way, which includes writing 3 pages of morning babble every day. It goes in well with a couple other projects I’m working on too, so hopefully the momentum from those projects will make adding on this one a little easier. Anyway, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while now.

Waking up at 7am (which is a big change for me… I usually wake up around 8:30) starts tomorrow. I can’t wait.

My morning routine has sort of fallen apart. Oops. Help! So I’m going to try another tactic and work on my waking up skills.

I’m pretty good at waking up already, but I think I could be a whole lot better. I think the area that needs the most work is the “getting out of bed” phase. Once I’m out, I’m golden. But getting out is the problem. Over time, my wake up strategy has evolved into a bit of an embarrassment. I have two alarms on my clock set at, respectively, 90 minutes before I have to wake up and 45 minutes before I have to wake up. The snooze routine is a celebration of procrastination. To top it off, just in case, downstairs I have an alarm on my computer to start playing the radio at an irritating volume 60 minutes before I wake up. All of these sounds represent a symphony of wake up calls… all equally effective.

I think the faulty thinking is that it requires SOUND to wake me up. If I have trouble waking up, double down on MORE SOUND. What I need to do is work on the wiring between wake up signals and ACTUALLY WAKING UP.

So, to this end, I’m going to bring the waking up ritual back to its basics and solve the problem where it actually exists.

1. I’m going to remove all but the simplest of sounds. One alarm, and no radio.
2. No snoozing, so the alarm will be set at the exact moment I want to wake up.
3. I’m going to wake up and scream the first thing that’s on my mind. No going back.

The screaming is just for fun… but I tried it this morning and I think I screamed “FUCK THIS WAKING UP BUSINESS!” And that actually seemed to do the trick.

Andy Warhol used to call someone every morning and have a short conversation with them. I might start doing that. So, if you get an early morning call from me in the next couple days or weeks, consider yourself special.

If this helps get me back on track, then I’ll re-integrate the rest of my morning routine. Baby steps baby.

I’ve been interested in figuring out a way to squeeze more out of each day without completely disrupting my normal daily flow. Since my evenings are usually a lot more varied and unpredictable than my mornings, I think the best way to do this would be to wake up an additional half hour or hour earlier than usual (not difficult since I usually don’t wake up until 8:30 or so at the moment) and spend that time on a deliberate routine of some sort.

After trying out a few different ideas this last week, I think I’m going to continue to experiment with a few things that can all happen in the morning:

1. take my vitamiins
2. eat breakfast
3. stretch/sun salutations/morning yoga
4. listen to one of my French tapes
5. do a NYT crossword
6. read out loud

I think it would take longer than an hour to do all of these things, so I’m going to try different combinations to see if any of them stick. The French tapes I just got today are pretty good… they’re all conversation based and so can be easily listened to while stretching. I have an old AM/PM yoga DVD that seems to work well on the iMac (I lost my yoga mat in the move though). And the reading aloud comes from a book I saw a week ago called “Train Your Brain” that stated that the brain is most active when reading out loud. Maybe I could make this fun by reading the morning news out loud and recording it on Odeo or something weird like that. Or by reading whatever book I’m reading at the moment.

This morning ritual’s most challenging detail is whether or not I can actually do it. But since we’re half way through “Deliberate Self-Improvement Month” it seems like I can try to at least make it the rest of this month. These things are always easier once they have actually begun.