My Morning Routine: How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired

by Benjamin Spall

We’re less reactive in the morning—as we’ve not yet spent our whole day making decisions—so we can think more clearly and be proactive about our morning.

Next I make coffee, feed the milling animals, grab two protein bars, and sit down to read. Not the newspaper, though I do often check the headlines, but a real, honest-to-God book. If one’s not around I will settle for the New Yorker.

Four days a week I do a boot camp in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It’s exhausting and arduous and clears my mind like nothing else I’ve ever done.

Jen and I usually play a round or two of Boggle before bed, and I like to read a bit.

A.M. I drink three glasses of water, usually within sixty seconds of getting up. It’s amazingly effective at waking up the body

“white space,” from 8:00 A.M. to noon, which is blocked off on my calendar every workday and which only I have the authority to fill.

the most important thing I do each morning is steady myself by not allowing a sense of urgency to penetrate. Every once in a while I find myself in a spin cycle of urgency—a sense of internal panic that the list of things to do is lengthening no matter how hard I try to control it. But I learned long ago (even though I occasionally forget!) that this sense of urgency is nearly always illusory. I am more productive when I am not operating with urgency.

I remember years ago reading a passage in a book about Thomas Keller in which the author marvels at the pervasive sense of calm in Keller’s famous restaurant, the French Laundry. How could such incredible food, the author wondered, prepared at such exacting standards, be produced in such a calm environment? The irony is, of course, that the calm environment was the reason for the productivity, as it revealed total mastery of the task at hand. I strive for that same sense of calm mastery, and I occasionally even achieve it.

If I’m not in a rush to leave, I’ll use the time until 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning to study anything unrelated to business. Subjects that really interest me, but which I would otherwise never find the time to learn. I use this time to learn to play instruments, read nonfiction books, study astrology, or go for a walk in nature.

“There are so many benefits to mindfulness, so I make a point to search for reflective time throughout my day, even if it’s in small ways. If I’m stuck on a long line or delayed on the subway, rather than be annoyed, I see it as an opportunity to reflect and practice being present and in the now.”

It used to be ten to twenty minutes a day (sometimes just five), until I realized that it was actually the most important thing I could do in a day, not something to be squeezed in.

I love listening to soothing guided meditations before bed, but I have them on an iPod.

I fixed this by using pretty aggressive content blocks* on my laptop to block anything vaguely related to social media, entertainment, or news from 10:00 P.M. until 11:00 A.M. (and again at regular intervals during the day). I keep blocking distractions until 11:00 in the morning because that’s another low-willpower time of day for me;