Your morning routine is a waste of time

It's time for something new

I recently had an epiphany: I’ve been sabotaging myself by squandering those precious early hours with an unnecessary morning routine.

After all these years I’ve thought that having an elaborate morning routine would make me more productive, helping me get into flow state - but it wasn’t and it hasn’t. What sparked this epiphany was a video I saw online - it upended my previous notions about morning routines. Something began to shift in me.

I've been experimenting with morning routines for a decade, chasing the perfect routine, an elusive unicorn that probably doesn’t exist. (I do this with a lot of things for better or for worse.) But I’m an openminded person and want to get better so now it's time to try something new.

You’ll see that many morning routines typically involve these activities: meditation, yoga, cold showers, going for a walk, red light therapy, and the list goes on. These are great activities, but they are recovery activities. These are things that are wonderful for staying healthy and on top of life but not necessarily the things you should be doing right away.

After all, how often have you tried to implement a morning routine only to find that you have nothing done and it’s already noon? I’d bet more often than you’d like to admit.

We’re all familiar with the flow state but a new concept has been introduced to me called “flow proneness” which is your susceptibility to getting into flow state. According to research, flow proneness is highest first thing in the morning. There are primarily two reasons for this:

1. Cognitive load is low, since we did not have the time to “load” anything into our mind.

2. Upon waking, brainwave activity is similar to that observed during flow state.

The crux of it is that in the morning you're less likely to be distracted - you have less things on your mind, and it's easier to plummet into your deepest work.

The video’s narrator explains how he had spent time interviewing dozens of ambitious entrepreneurs and billionaires. They were high-achievers who didn’t give a damn about their morning routines. Within minutes or even seconds upon waking, they dove into their highest priority work and were rewarded for it.

So what's going on here? Why are these high achieving types getting more done without a morning routine? Something isn’t quite right.

The flip side of the narrator’s point is that these “successful” individuals had achieved all of these amazing things in their professional lives, but they’d burn out, neglect their deepest relationships, and were oftentimes unhealthy and/or overweight.

There is hope. We can get the best of both worlds by reversing the morning routine - benefitting from both early morning flow state and the rest activities necessary for longevity.

In order to make that work, the trick is that you must plan your early morning work session the night before. What I’ve been doing is creating a new page in Obsidian (a notes app) then writing out two to three of my highest priority tasks that need to get done in as much detail as possible. That way when you wake up, you don’t have to think about what to work on - you dive right in.

Flow state can be taxing for the brain, so after a couple of hours of work, you’ll want to do things that will help you recover (aka your old morning routine activities).

My routine now:

• Within 5 minutes of waking I go to my standing desk and launch into my task list, I see how long I can do this for but it’s usually 2-3 hours without stopping - I’m already amazed by my output with this technique

• In the afternoon, I spend a couple of hours working out, reading, meditating, and doing yoga

• I tend to spend a couple of hours working in the evenings, and spend that time planning for the work-to-be-done for tomorrow morning

My brother recently said the 9-5 is over and he's not wrong. How and when we work are drastically changing. Plus we're able to be more productive with new AI tools - but there are more distractions than ever, and so capitalizing on the precious few hours we do have with little distraction should be habitual, instinctual.

Perhaps my fiancé has been right all along - working first thing is totally fine and better than the alternative. I used to give her a hard time for working immediately after waking up. I thought that if we all spent time devoting ourselves to a religious morning routine, we’d get into flow state and realize all of our visions and grand plans. But boy was I wrong (at least seemingly so).

This is an experiment for me. I can't yet say that morning routines are totally bogus quite yet because we’re all different and I don’t have conclusive data - though I do have a hunch that this time it’ll stick.