The Morning Routine

My Morning Routine

I worked nights in a newsroom for 10 years; and though it’s been a long time, my body somehow never recovered or recalibrated. The mornings are tough for me. Even if I’m not sleepy, I have zero inclination to actually get out of bed.

People are sometimes surprised to hear I’m so crap at getting out of bed and functioning like a human before 10am or so, because yoga is very much my jam. An absurdly early rising is a major part of the yoga lifestyle, isn’t it? Sun salutations and all?

Yeah, not me. But I am a creature who enjoys daily habit, and I can push myself to get up at the same time every morning as long as I know I have a checklist to get through.

Here’s the Monday-through-Friday morning routine that works for me. Feel free to use it or play with it if you’re looking to adopt something similar.

1) Rise at 6:45 a.m. I know for a lot of people, this doesn’t qualify as early, and I deeply admire those people, but for me this is a real challenge.
2) Put my contact lenses in and head for the basement. In the summer, it’s naturally cool (I hate air conditioning) and in the winter, we leave the heat vent open so it’s the warmest part of the house. I camp out on one of the two loveseats, whichever one the cats aren’t sacked out on. No reason to wake them early.
3) Meditate 5 to 10 minutes. I’m a big Peloton fan (#ViserionIce) so I choose a meditation on the app, or sometimes I go for a meditation specifically for writers (try Abbie Emmons’s “Writing Meditation for NaNoWriMo” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X484E... ; Georgette Graham’s “Meditation for Writers: See Your Setting” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6sb7... ; or Georgette Graham’s “Meditation for Writers: Meet Your Muse” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXl9...).
4) Work on my novel in progress. Right now, that novel is Foreverness and I’m in the brainstorming and outlining part of the process, so I work as hard as I can until it’s almost 8 a.m.
5) Feed the cats, grab my breakfast, and log on at work. I do my day job from home these days, so I log in and begin my workday. Also, I’m a huge breakfast eater—it’s my favorite meal! So I make an egg-and-cheese burrito or avocado toast, or maybe eat a great bagel from The Back Bay Bagel Co. (www.backbaybagel.com) that I bought and froze over the weekend. I’m a born-and-raised New Yorker, and I can attest that these bagels are the closest it gets in Massachusetts to bagel magic. And by the way—I don’t drink coffee. I hate the taste. I drink an iced tea or a glass of quality chocolate milk with my breakfast.
6) Sneak in journal time. Most of the time I can snag a few slow moments in that first hour of work to write in my journal. I commit to two pages a day, and my journal entries are short lines—one thought per line. Kind of like a weird long epic poem. And I scribble fast, so it doesn’t take me long at all to get out two pages—10 minutes, tops.

I maximize my morning time in two ways:
1) I shower at night. I used to hate doing this, but I like it now because I’m so draggy in the morning and I can’t be bothered to do all that work, lol. It’s nice to wake up clean and only have to kind of arrange my hair rather than do a whole song-and-dance with it before I get down to my day.
2) I train during my hourlong lunch break, or in the evening. I hate exercising in the morning anyway, so this works out well.


As far as weekends go, I wake up early on Saturdays to teach an 8:30am yoga class, and I sleep in on Sundays, so those mornings I don’t follow routine. But I clear a lot of time over the weekend to get writing and other work done, so those mornings aren’t as crucial for me. On weekdays, getting my writing done early is key to feeling good (and accomplished) the rest of the busy day.