Tips & Tricks: My morning routine (nomad edition)

Why a morning routine is important

Anyone working a 9-5 job can relate to how quickly even your most organized day can get away from you the moment you come online. With that in mind, I cannot emphasize enough how much my morning routine matters to me. A morning routine is that sacred window of time before the madness commences that is totally and unequivocally… mine.

So here’s a glimpse into my rituals and morning routine that make up my favorite time of day: the morning.

Anyone who has read Hal Elrod’s famous The Miracle Morning will recognize several elements of the SAVERS framework that pepper the first hour or two of my day. It all starts with the oh-so-dreaded alarm…

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The schedule

1) Rise and Shine – (5 min)

The alarm typically rings before 6:30am. If I’m on a particularly good streak, it’ll ring earlier — sometimes as early as 5:20am if I’m on my A-game. I try not to snooze and position my phone (doubling as my alarm clock) in the bathroom. That gets me up and over to the sink where I wash my face shock my body back into the analog waking world.

2) Coffee and brain games – (7 min)

The morning cup is 100% my responsibility and I take a great deal of pride in my coffee preparation. But the first step is to get the mental gears turning. As I put water on the kettle to heat up, I’ll usually open up the app, Elevate, on my phone and go through a few micro-games that act as brain training exercises. Interestingly, I can usually tell how good my sleep was the night before based on how I score on these little exercises. It’s awesome.

Within those 5 min or so, the water is ready and my AeroPress coffee ritual begins (more on this in a future post). On my favorite mornings, Midori is still asleep at this point so I can go wake her up with a piping hot cup of coffee – arguably a helluva lot better than her iPhone alarm.

At this point, it’s quiet alone time for us both to get our mornings started.

3) Morning pages – (10 min)

As I sip my coffee, I’ll typically open up Notion on my tablet and fill out a pre-made template I built for my Morning Pages. The point of this exercise is to give me a canvas to write and document anything on my mind. This template has a few components:

1. Gratitude (I write 3 things I appreciate in that moment)
2. Freeform (this is where I word vomit anything and everything on my mind. Recollections from my dreams, tasks from the day, a fond memory on my mind, etc. Anything)
3. Affirmations/Dreams (a series of statements that define who I want to be articulated in the present tense).

I’ll wrap up the Notion template with a single sentence ‘intention’ for the day. These can be aspirational and lofty, or as simple as ‘Get our flights to xyz destination booked’

This little part of my morning ritual does wonders in focusing me and hyping me up for the day.

4) Meditate – (10 min)

These days, everyone and their mother seems to meditate (seriously, my mother and I both do!) Now, I don’t claim to be an expert in it. But I will be the first to attest to how meditation has changed my life.

I started attempting to meditate 7+ years ago in college. It was my saving grace in dealing with the pressures and stress of an incredibly challenging college experience. Now, it continues to be what feels like a secret weapon in maintaining calm and clarity in the professional world.

I’ve tried most of the major apps. I paid for Headspace for years and dabbled with Calm before that. Everything changed once I started using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. I’m a die-hard Sam Harris fan (let’s unpack that, anyone?) and have been financially supporting his podcast for years. His app takes the most unique (and most effective, IMO) approach to meditation both as a tool and as a domain of self-examination that ought to be explored with every iota of intellectual curiosity one can muster. For anyone who has relinquished their foray into meditation because it “wasn’t for them,” I implore you to try again with the Waking Up app. It’s just awesome. and might change your mind — pun intended

On the occasional day where sitting in silence isn’t the vibe I’m feeling, I’ll substitute with a Tony Robbins ‘Priming’ session. Another amazing tool.

5) Exercise – (30-45 min)

I keep it relatively simple here. I’m a huge fan of HIIT workouts at home using my 35lbs kettlebell and my knockoff (but awesome) TRX bands. Though the former is a hassle to travel with, the latter is weirdly portable and versatile.

My goal here is to break a sweat and feel like I’ve pushed my body harder in these 30-40 minutes workouts than anything else that day can. Eat the frog – check!

6) Read + feed the mind – (20 min)

The shower that follows the workout is almost always accompanied with that day’s episode of NPR’s Up First podcast. This tends to be my primary means of staying up to date on the news. In an era of endless information, it’s nice to get a quick dose limited by a 10 to 12 minute podcast episode. Should my shower run longer than 10 minute (which it always does), I’ll have my podcast app auto-play any number of other podcasts I’m subscribed to: BiggerPockets, The TF Show, Farnam Street, etc.

Post shower, I’ll pick up my Kindle for 15-20 minutes and make some progress on whatever I’m reading. For anyone interested, I keep an always up to date record of my reading library here. This kind of scheduled reading has me walking into the workday with some new idea or, at the very least, a tidbit of inspiration knowing there’s so much more to the world than the job I’ve got now.

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That’s it! Morning: nailed. Whatever comes throughout the rest of the day, the first hour or two of my day was mine. Best of all, I tend to have made some non-trivial progress on the stuff that matters to me before the priorities of others take over for the remainder of the day.

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