Ever since a few months ago when I became an unexpected morning person. I finally decided to set a goal of having a productive everyday morning routine for all days of the week. Previously, my mornings were terrible. Since I work remotely, I used to literally wake up minutes before having to jump on a work meeting! Things were even worse when I had consecutive meetings. As I would sometimes didn’t had time to have breakfast or brush my teeth until almost noon! For me, the biggest change on having a set morning routine is having a good night sleep. Before I would go to sleep around 1:00-3:00am, completely wasting time watching random crap on YouTube. As soon as I started going to sleep around 9:00-10:00pm, this naturally caused my body to be restful and awake by the time 5:00 am came around. Another thing worth mentioning is putting my phone away by the time 8:00 pm comes around. I’ve also recently starting putting my phone on “Do not Disturbed” mode for most of the day. (This has caused a problem in the past for me, as a person thought I was purposely ignoring because of this setting being set! So be aware to let anyone know this, as it might prevent a potential misunderstanding, as did on my case)
It’s amazing the productive things, I’ve been able to do now that I have around 3-4 extra hours in the morning by having a fixed sleeping schedule.
Meditation
(10-15 mins)
Before I get up out of bed, I would sit down cross-legged in my bed and meditate for about 10-15 mins. I’m no meditation guru by any means, but of the very little I know of it, I do the basics of calm breathing and putting my mind in a state that only has happy memories and or what my future goals would look like.
The Essentials
(5-10 mins)
After meditation I then would start my day by going through the essentials. Using two 15 lbs dumbbells, I do one set of 20 bicep curls, tricep curls, over the shoulder curls, lateral raises, and a standing chest curls. Then the obvious: brushing my teeth, washing my face or a quick express shower, and put on beard oil.
Breakfast
(10-15 mins)
My everyday breakfast is extremely simple. I eat two bananas and drink Yerba Mate. I absolutely love Yerba Mate. I drink this awesome indigenous South American herbal every single weekday (I reserve coffee for the weekends only). Drinking it for many years now, that at this point preparing this awesome drink every morning feels almost like a ritual to me!
Journaling
(10-20 mins)
After preparing my Yerba Mate, and at this point probably eating one of the two bananas that I eat every morning I then shift to either meditate for another 10-15 mins or immediately jump into journaling. To me writing down my feelings, thoughts, and goals brings me into a very calm state of mind, especially when I go back and see the progression that I’ve made. Theirs been plenty of research of how journaling everyday can improve your overall mental, which I completely agree with.
Read a Self-Improvement Book
(1-2 hours)
I then shift my focused on reading some sort of self improvement book. For me, I’ve recently discovered that reading self-improvement books through my laptop via the iBooks app is the most efficient approach. This is mainly because it’s easier to copy and write down notes from the iBooks content to the Pages word app. Normally by the time I finish a self-improvement book, I would have anywhere from 10-30 pages of notes of all the major important topics. Being able to quickly take notes and going back to refer to them has been crucial on me picking up the major points of the self-improvement books that I’m reading.
Conclusion
After finishing my daily self-improvement reading, this is where I then start my work day. I do sometimes change this, for example I sometimes don’t spend all 1-2 hours reading a self-improvement book, and I would designate some minutes to walking. Thus said, all the above steps are all the core everyday activities I do every morning, and I feel it has helped improved myself considerably. Needless to say, I’m not against change, I know for a fact, at some point I would like to attend Daily Morning Mass (one hour) and would like to go to the gym in the mornings instead of evenings or nights (two hours).