Morning Routine

One of my New Years resolutions was to make (and stick to) a morning routine. While I've already failed at many other resolutions, I've somewhat stuck with this one.

Historically, my mornings have been pretty minimalistic. At night I'd set my alarm by taking min(first meeting, 10am) and subtracting 40 minutes (20 minutes to shower/dress and 20 minutes for the commute to work). Although this worked, I decided that I wanted some spare time in 2013 for a morning work out and to cook some sort of breakfast.

What time to wake up?

I took to the internet for an answer to this question. 2 blog entries came up quickly in my search.

• Want to create a new habit? Get ready to break it. I like this article because it relates the obvious but often forgotten rule : that no matter what, new routines will be broken. These breaks need to be accepted and shouldn't kill the overall momentum of the new habit.
• Fun Friday: Routines Needless to say, I was pretty shocked by their proposed ~5am wake up times. After a rash decision (no, not careful deliberation), I decided 7am should work. After all I did wake up at 7am for 13 years while in school. Although this new time is significantly earlier than my old wake up time (~2.3 hours), it would give me enough time to run, eat, shower and get to work early. Success!

One month in, where do I stand?

I'll give myself a C-. I've certainly been better at waking up than running (a week straight of 12� weather certainly didn't help). I now have a pre-set alarm for 7am, Monday through Friday which is also progress. As I've never been able to consistently work out before, my 6 times running so far this month is an amazing ~300% increase over the past 25 years of my life - not too shabby! As I've just shown, numbers can make anything look good. 6/19 days (see below for weekend explanation) = a shitty track record. I have room to improve.

Unexpected obstacle :

I'm unsure of how to handle weekends as they simply throw everything off (going out, eating late, drinking, late night Seinfeld). I'm still working on this but for now, I've decided to simply cut weekends out of the routine. Hopefully I'll come up with something better during my next morning-routine-retrospective (or moropective if portmanteaus are your thing).

*Aside : *

I saw the below in a tweet - certainly an interesting routine in its own right. The ironic part is that Hunter S likely maintained his routine with more diligence than I will mine.