My Morning Routine

so my morning routine for the past couple years has been crazy simple you could call it minimalist I wake up I brush my teeth I make a cup of coffee then I sit down and open up my laptop the first 30 minutes of my day are scattered I check email sometimes social media often times I read the news I'm fairly unproductive until around 7:30 a.m. when my brain finally powers up and I'm ready to do real work that's typically when I open up my Notes app and start writing okay but let's be real there are a couple deviations from the rule like when my alarm sounds and I pull my phone into bed and get distracted browsing the internet or when I hit the snooze button every 10 minutes for an hour Natalie loves it when I do that of course there are also sick days travel days and days when I have no time for a routine at all but for the most part I get my ass out of bed and get my day going well I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with my morning routine it seems to be working just fine I've always wanted to structure my morning's more intentionally focusing on personal growth and my own well-being doing something that grounds me and helps me start my day right so I've decided to mix up my morning routine to do just that so every day for the next week I'm gonna be playing around and experimenting with a different mindfulness practice I'm trying to find a startup guide for my own life I'm gonna be using some tools I've used in the past like meditation and journaling but I'm also going to be experimenting with some things that I haven't yet explored naturally the first thing I did was research how the most successful people in the world wake up now that these millionaires are anything like me which to be honest they probably aren't their days will vary a great deal so take the following with a grain of salt but here's what I found online Kevin O'Leary and Tim Cook wake up at 4:30 or earlier every day CEO Kara golden wakes up and checks email first thing in the morning Gary Vaynerchuk starts his day by catching up on the news and messaging his Twitter followers the only thing that I can say that I consistently do is wake up take my phone and go poop Gary it's been like an hour that is the fourth time you've flushed so far yeah I'm not gonna do any of those things while these CEOs entrepreneurs and celebrities might really and their morning routine they may attribute it to success or productivity it doesn't really feel like the right path for me it doesn't feel like an improvement over what I'm currently doing so I'm gonna have to think a little bit deeper about exactly how I want to implement and change my morning's going forward I realized pretty quickly that building a morning routine for my life was going to be just as much about the things I don't do as it is about the things I do do so the first thing I did was remove as many distractions from my morning as possible that meant leaving my phone outside the bedroom when I went to sleep since I still need an alarm to wake up I used my Fitbit which vibrates when I need to wake up and Alexa Alexa okay so one pro tip for those that are really bad at waking up early I using the Fitbit or the Alexa alarm might not be the best idea because it is so easy to simply roll back over and go back to sleep and turn off the alarm completely or just keep hitting the snooze over and over again something that I've suggested in another video is to place your phone across the room on the other side of the room that way you have to get up get out of bed in order to turn it off you're going to be less likely to pull that phone back into bed with you over the past two years apart from a couple of strong months of self discipline I've gotten into the habit of checking email first thing since doing a digital minimalism experiment a couple weeks ago that I shared on this channel I've been committing to not checking email until 11 a.m. and I'm gonna continue to stick through with that this week since I've been waking up at 7 a.m. lately that will give me close to four hours of uninterrupted time to work mostly uninterrupted controlling the tryna catch me ridin dirty each day I experimented with bringing in self-development practices that have been neglecting I started with 10 minutes of stretching I'm getting pretty old and even though I stay active I rarely make time to stretch okay any lower than that I enjoyed it and would definitely like to make a habit of it each morning I'll it's a jour Palo Santo I'm not very spiritual and I'm definitely not into woowoo stuff but they smell really good and it was nice to start my day with them next I tried ten minutes of journaling I don't journal very often and never in the morning bringing it to the beginning of the day didn't really change my relationship with it don't love journaling probably won't continue to do it I took a walk first thing after I woke up this was really nice because it forced me to put pants on but there were some other benefits as well so I just took a 15 minute walk around my neighborhood and I gotta say it felt really good it was nice I don't remember the last time I actually took a walk just to take a walk is usually because I'm going somewhere cuz I have to move my legs to get there but this time I just went outside and I walked around I got some fresh air a little bit of Sun and felt more energized than I typically do it is nice to get my body movement a little bit to get in a few steps I just broke about a thousand steps which I know isn't that a lot but it's a lot more than I normally do in the morning then I tried ten minutes of meditation after 30 days of meditating for one hour every day this year I still meditate a couple of times a week I usually like to save it as a buffer between activities like after I finished writing for a few hours or after I'm done with work for the day it helps me to calm my racing mind and transition into a less creative mindset I didn't really like meditating first thing in the morning if I'm being honest my brain is still filled with the fog of melatonin and it's really easy for me to doze off and get distracted although getting distracted is nothing new to me when it comes to meditation so the one thing that I'm realizing is that my morning walks and my meditations are a little bit redundant because when I'm going outside I'm taking a walk I really feel like it is a meditative process and it really forces me into the present moment I tried 30 minutes of reading listening to audiobooks and podcasts while I enjoyed these practices and I was often inspired by them I found them taking up too much of my morning's that could be dedicated to productive work as the clock ticks on and our mornings become afternoons we have less creative energy in our tanks this is one of the reasons I've always wanted to get straight to work I know that as the day goes on decision fatigue sets in and I'm gonna become less and less productive the final hour of my day is rarely the time when I have my breakthrough ideas before I break down my takeaways from this week's experiment and talk about my new morning routine going forward I want to take a moment to talk about my sponsor for this week's video Skillshare Skillshare is an amazing platform that has a bunch of classes on creativity productivity and business I just took a great class from Mike boy you might know Mike from his YouTube videos where he learns new things and documents the entire process from kick flips to muscle ups making fire and memorizing 100 digits of pi in a day in this class he teaches the best ways to practice effectively how to push through the dip and everything he's discovered about how humans are wired to learn I've always hated the idea of being bulk Stan and that my abilities and my talents were predetermined before I was even born I got a ton of practical advice from this class and I think you guys will gain a lot of value from it as well since skill share is sponsoring this video if you guys use the link down in the description that will give you a two month free trial so through this experiment I discovered what was most important to me when creating a morning routine I wanted to create some balance for my personal well-being but I also wanted to get [ __ ] done I didn't want to focus so much on these mindfulness practices that it actually took away from the work that gives me so much purpose all right so after a week of experimenting with my morning routine and trying different things from journaling to meditation taking walks the question is what am I gonna change about my mornings going forward am I gonna bring all this stuff in continue to pack it all into the first 30 minutes to an hour of my day no you probably figure that out already but I do actually want to make some changes going forward and so let's just I'm just gonna just read out my current morning routine this is like the ideal morning for me right now wake up around 7:00 a.m. and brush my teeth stretch for about 5 or 10 minutes then if I haven't already put on pants and walk around the block for 10 to 15 minutes these walks were definitely the best part of my week and something that I want to continue to bring in in the future I don't know it's more tiring than walking or holding a vlogging camera once I get back in my Bloods flowing I'll make coffee light something that smells good and sit down to begin my work now what this routine to help prep my mind for work not distract from the work itself so my goal is to start work at 7:30 a.m. where I usually write for one to two hours before moving on to other tasks writing is such an important part of my work and I find this to be the ideal time to come up with my best ideas 11:00 a.m. is when I check email for the first time in the day 11:30 a.m. I'll have lunch and then right at noon is when I'll go to the gym I'm almost never on time when it comes to these things so this is just a general idea of when I'm trying to get things done in my day so will I be able to stick with this for the long run I mean you know I hope so I'm gonna try that's definitely the the goal but if this if my past is any testament that what's gonna happen in the future I'm gonna slip up I'm gonna screw up I'm gonna fail I'm gonna fall back into old habits and routines but that's okay I try not to get too hard on myself these days the older I get the more I realized that perfection is an impossible ideal and but it's not going to stop me from trying I'm definitely gonna try to bring this into my the first 30 minutes of my day I definitely think that getting out and taking a walk is much better than just sticking my head in a screen and absorbing myself into technology any further so I would actually love to hear from you guys do you have any mindfulness practice morning routines that you follow that it really helped you out a lot I truly would love to hear your recommendations things that I would love to try in the future definitely let me know in the comments down below as always thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next week hey what if we do one where it's like like volume increase increase increase and then you get up to and were you're both like Alexa okay Alexa Alexa you missed it some poor Alexa alright I'm up hatin trying to get to me ridin dirty try to catch me ridin dirty tryna catch me ridin dirty well thank you very much

Channel: Matt D'Avella

Views: 1,546,526

Rating: 4.9454908 out of 5

Keywords: morning routine, my morning routine, routine, morning, healthy morning routine, my actual morning routine, morning routines, my morning, minimalism, coffee

Id: lqvioBo1his

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019