Add something to your morning routine

Tiny tweaks add up over time

We are just a day into the new year, and lots of people use this occasion to rethink their routines. Many people resolve to start a morning routine — which we usually envision as involving long stretches of exercise, meditation, and possibly green juice.

But here’s the truth: almost everyone already has some morning routine, defined as things you do most mornings. By adding just one good habit to the mix, you can reap the benefits of doing it over and over again. It will become a part of your life, benefitting from the compounding that comes from repetition.

Daily routines

So think about what you do almost every morning. It might help to track your time to see. I know I shower basically every morning, and put on make-up. I make myself a cup of coffee and I get the kids their breakfasts. Many mornings, I drive at least somebody somewhere.

Then think about what small thing you could add that would be a positive in your life. A few years ago I decided to start writing two lines in a sonnet each morning when I sit down at my desk (I do this on weekends too - 20 syllables is quick enough that I don’t mind a stop in my home office). Two lines a day is 14 lines a week, which is a complete poem. Three years in I’ve written 156 of these things. That’s the power of doing something small every day.

What might fit into your routine? Perhaps you could write in a journal for 2 minutes while your coffee is brewing. That’s enough time to fill in a line-a-day journal. Keep that for years and, well, you’ve got a record of many years.

Just a few minutes

If you want to add a little strength training to your life, maybe you could build in 5 minutes of push-ups, planks, and the like before you turn on the shower each morning. Five minutes isn’t much, but if you shower 7 days a week, that’s 35 minutes a week, which is like an extra trip to the gym that you don’t have to make.

You can also redeploy time you’re already spending. If you find yourself on your phone in the mornings, send a text to someone in your life to say you’re thinking about them, or suggest plans for getting together. Sending 365 thinking-of-you texts in a year will definitely make your relationships stronger, and if some of those texts involve making plans, your social life will be significantly better. That beats reading headlines.

The point here is not to build a multi-hour morning routine. It’s to recognize that you probably do something repeatedly most mornings already. If you can add one good thing on top of these existing habits, then you will do that good thing repeatedly. Little things add up over the long haul — one morning at a time.