Category: Morning rituals

Hi there!

I have been reading a lot of blog posts recently and in the near past about how successful people have their own morning ritual. This habit helps them be more successful, makes them use time efficiently without wasting a single second of their day and a lot more only positive things. So, that is why I tried to follow their advises and make my own!

I have been trying for several months with several tools (see Mentally prepare: time management techniques continued for more on my habit creation techniques and habits back then) and I think I have been rather successful. Since habits are time based, you have to adjust them dynamically according to your ever changing schedules. What I mean by this is that you make so well organized plans and boom! Everything falls apart in just a sec! You all know of this!

Changes to habits (so far)

My morning habits during the last months transformed into the following:

Currently, I wake up at 5:50am. (Yep! I cannot believe it either!). Before this, I had a period of 42 days (after my trip to China from 6/2/2017 to 19/3/2017) waking up at 6:50. And before that I was getting up whenever I felt like it! 🙂

I shifted all my daily habits into my morning ritual. Oh man! This is the best decision I have ever made in my life! Now I cannot believe how relieved I feel when, after finishing everything, I look at the clock and the time is around 8am! I also renounced my notion of “debt” pomodoros: I noticed that they weighed heavily on me when the “debt” kept increasing disproportionately with my daily available time. This means that if by any means couldn’t keep my streak for more than two days the amount of time needed to compensate was increasing more and more so I wasn’t able to finish my task in one single day (even if this was Sunday or sth)! So, my new solution is to make my habits as easy as possible to complete even if I am in the worst mental or sentimental condition! This helped a lot! I realized that is more important to keep the streak rather than doing an awful big amount of something each time. Small steps! But, consecutive times!

Measuring performance and logging everything down is extremely essential for any field of your life! I still use HabitBull to log every successful or not day to the calendar and Productivity Challenge Timer for the pomodoro timer (and statistical records), even at my regular job! I had started writing down any expenses I had since I heard that John D. Rochefeller (the wealthiest man ever lived!) kept an extremely detailed book of his expenses and more. When I started recording my expenses I was stunned by the waste of money in useless stuff! Now, I am going to record my weight too, because I want to loose some rather slowly.

I started learning chinese but I keep speaking italian with my fiancée as a 15-minute daily conversation lesson!

Reading books changed to pomodoros from number of pages. This change took place because I spent approximately 3 pomodoros for 20 pages! Now, my time is fixed. See? I translated everything to pomodoros which are time based for more control over the time schedule!

Programming was also downgraded to one pomodoro each day!

I keep writing blog posts every Sunday! I realized it is important to stick to specific times for any habit to stick on to.

All these changes freed up some serious time for me during the day! So, here is my morning ritual in a time table manner:

Morning ritual

5:50am: waking up (lights on immediately, washing up)

6:00am: reading books for 2 pomodoros (currently on 2/3 of Titan)

7:00am: chinese lesson for 1 pomodoro (started with ChineseSkill app)

7:30am: Programming for 1 pomodoro

8:10am: 7-minute workout (this has been added only 2 days ago – 2 day streak!)

Finally, I quit coffee (thanks to Benjamin Hardy articles) and started exercising (last two days). Programming work has been very painful lately for my neck and my back. I also gained some weight that I want to get rid of pretty soon. Coffee was bugging me for a while because while working and due to the fact that the office provides free coffee I used to drink 4-5 espressos in an 8h interval!! Pretty much, don’t you think?

Before we go… I would like to know about your morning rituals. Leave a comment if you feel like it below. Thanks!

PS: during programming lesson I drink at least 1 litre of water. After exercise I eat breakfast!