Eric's Estimate

“Hacking” my morning routine

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Eric

A bad morning can completely mess up your entire day. Every time I get a slow start in the morning my day ends up finishing around the 10pm mark instead of a more reasonable 4-6pm.

There’s lots of talks about 30 day “tests” to build habits in your life so I won’t get into it here (click here for an article if you haven’t heard about it).

So for the next 30 days I’m going to be trying out a new morning routine. It involves a few steps that I often neglect in my day and I think I will have more productive days and be a healthier person as a result.

Creating a new routine

My first new morning routine will be to eat/drink before I do ANYTHING else.

Sometimes I don’t eat or even have a coffee until 2 in the afternoon. I just plain forget. I get in “work mode” as soon as I wake up and everything else takes a back seat.

This has to change. It’s unhealthy and I’m sure that I’m getting a harder afternoon crash as a result.

So after a coffee, some almonds and yoghurt and a huge glass of water the next thing I want to do is be outside for 5 minutes.

Before my computer even comes on.

Why? Well hell, why not? I’m lucky enough to have a gorgeous deck looking out over a gorgeous city but instead of appreciating it I usually hit my RSS reader and my emails before anything else.

No more. 5 minutes of fresh air will wake me up, give me more perspective and not rush my morning so much… Awesome. I can even combine the first step with the second so this is perfect.

Next up is to do business development for 30 minutes before I even read my morning emails.

This is important to me. I try to get 30 minutes of biz dev into my day every day, but sometimes it gets pushed to the end of the day when I’m out of energy and enthusiasm.

By pushing this task to the beginning of the day (even before I check email GASP) I’ll make sure it gets done, and by the end of 2012 my business will be miles ahead of where it is today.

That’s it! I think that these small changes will make a huge impact on my day to day efficiency.

I’ll push hard to not miss a day this entire month and by then it should be a habit.

Do you have a morning routine? Let me know in the comments below.