Are you a morning person? Either way, you may find the purpose behind a morning routine and these five stages useful at any time of day. Inspired by Amy Landino, for the last few years, I woke up at 5 am and immediately focused on productivity. At the same time, I learned more about morning routines from books like The Miracle Morning and The Artist’s Way.
Do you need to prioritize productivity, self-care, or something in between? Are you naturally an early riser or are you a night owl? If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to build a morning routine around current priorities and habits.
Maybe this type of routine is better served at 8 pm instead of 5 am.
Don’t focus so much on a particular time for waking, and then filling those hours. Instead, determine what you want to accomplish in the morning, then work backward timewise from when you need to start the workday.
Conversely, this same information could be applied to when you want to wind down and sleep.
How to develop YOUR morning routine
We should note that I am a morning person. Typically, I go to sleep and wake up 7-8 hours later, even without an alarm. Before I began a morning routine, I would wake and stay in bed playing on my phone or reading.
Then, four years ago, I embarked on a five-year plan journey and decided that the best way to begin my days was with the purpose necessary to get things done. With that direction, I focused on early morning productivity.
My morning self-care routine 2022
Taking my own advice, I have built a morning routine focused on self-care and easing into the workday. Is this routine still productive? Yes, because most of the daily habits I have cultivated are also housed within this me-time. However, staying true to introversion, I take this me-time one step further and disconnect from others until complete.
At 5:30 am I wake and make a cup of caffeinated tea before diving into my early morning routine:
- Morning pages: a practice shared by Julia Cameron in the Artist’s Way. The goal is to write three free form pages of thoughts. No prompts, no set intention. Instead, letting the brain dump onto the page without organization or function. At first, I found this difficult, so I created a few journal prompts that helped me get started writing each day. Now, with practice, I am able to knock this out with ease in about 20-30 minutes every morning (including the weekend).
- Read a book: next I placed time within my routine to embrace an activity I enjoy offline. You may have noticed over the years that I am an avid reader. The feeling of getting lost in a good book remains unmatched and highly cathartic. My goal for morning reading is to take time and read the non-fiction books I come across. I also read in the evenings, but I find that non-fiction puts me to sleep at night, whereas in the morning, I am able to take time to think about what I am reading and apply the information learned.
- Find movement: I don’t love exercise, but I also find it necessary to an overall healthy lifestyle. After four years of consistent exercise, one thing I know is that waiting to exercise in the evening is a no-go for me. Without fail, if I try to exercise in the evening, I am more likely to talk myself out of movement. My busy workday doesn’t lend itself to an afternoon workout session, so mornings are my best bet for maintaining a habit of movement. Plus, finding movement early in the day helps to rev up my metabolism and encourages healthy eating for the day ahead.
- Nourish the body: speaking of eating, post workout a healthy meal is necessary to fuel my day. Without food stores, I will crash around noon. Typically these meals are either protein or carb focused depending on if I mainly did a cardio or weight lifting workout. I think because this morning routine encourages me to complete daily habits, I also tend to eat the same weekday morning breakfast for at least a full season.
Enter social media
Breakfast is also the moment I begin to allow my brain to engage with the wider world. As an introvert, I spend the early morning hours focused on myself, intentionally avoiding my phone and emails. While eating breakfast, I tend to check emails so I am sure that nothing has come up between ending work the day before and waking. Also, because I am a part-time content creator, I tend to use this time in the morning to post and schedule content for that day.
- Clean up & Go: Then my brain is firing on all cylinders and it’s time to get ready for work. I clean up my dishes and refresh my body before putting on work armor (clothes & makeup) and heading out the door to fight Atlanta traffic. Typically, I do a 15-minute clean of my apartment before leaving, so I can return to a clean and organized environment after work.
Early morning routine?
This entire routine takes me three hours because I want to take that time for me. I could easily condense this routine, but I enjoy easing into my day. As an early riser, I am comfortable waking between 5 am and 6 am, but a morning routine is not about waking up at a particular time of day. You get to decide what steps are involved in this type of routine and the time it takes to complete.
Since the routine above is focused on self-care, easing into the day makes complete and total sense. However, if I was focused on productivity, I could condense this routine and include things like planning the day ahead, scheduling meetings, or working through a project with total focus. The time you wake doesn’t matter, it’s the value placed into the routine through intentional regard for what you want to accomplish as part of an early morning routine that matters.
Instead of copying the routine below:
- Determine the priority for your morning routine (self-care, productivity, maintenance, etc.)
- Lay out what you need to accomplish
- Set timing for each thing you want to accomplish
- Work backward from the time you need to begin work to determine your wake-up time
Want to build a self-care routine for mental well-being?
Remember, you cannot pour from an empty cup. When developing your morning routine, your task is to determine what self-care rituals help to refill your cup. Would a meditation practice help your mental clarity? Would exercise help to destress? Use the various YouTube, Pinterest, and social media resources to help experiment and find the ritual that will best help level up your mental.
Want to build a morning routine for productivity
This type of routine is typically focused on efficiency and workflow. Use this routine to determine how to get things done and make room for ease within your everyday life. Do you need to research time management systems? Would waking before everyone else in your contacts help you focus on achieving those hard-to-handle tasks? You are less likely to receive a barrage of phone calls and emails before 7 am, so determine what you can accomplish without the input of others. Prioritize those tasks for your early morning routine.
The overall goal of these types of routines is to accomplish the habits and rituals that will make your days easier and minimize stress. Though I relegate the timing and ritualistic quality of this routine to Monday thru Friday, the steps inside spill over into the weekend.
Why? because these habits make life more enjoyable and less stressful. Overall, I seek ease in life and that isn’t relegated to mornings, weekdays, or weekends.
Many years after developing that first routine, I now recognize the true value of quiet mornings. Today, that knowledge and experience have shaped a routine focused on myself and how I want to show up in the world.
