Morning Routine and Balance

There's a lot of information out there about the power of habits and so I'm not going to rehash that here except to say that habits are extremely powerful tools in building the life that you want and if you're not familiar with how to create new good habits and kick old bad habits to the curb then learn.

You may have seen posts on social media that contain something like:

$$$$$$$ Morning

  1. Wake up before the sun
  2. Ignore your phone
  3. Meditate - 5 minutes
  4. Workout - 30 minutes
  5. Eat a Healthy Breakfast
  6. Shower
  7. Write down your daily goals
  8. Start killing it

I'm going to refrain from whole-heartedly mocking these types of posts because I feel like they do deliver an important message even if it is only partially complete. This main focus here is definitely your physical facet with a tiny bit of mental and social mixed in. I encourage you to keep your time in the morning balanced between all three facets. As a matter of comparison consider this routine:

Balanced Morning

  1. Wake up before the sun
  2. Meditate
  3. Read a book
  4. Workout
  5. Eat a Healthy Breakfast
  6. Shower
  7. Write down your daily goals
  8. Send an email to a friend
  9. Post something on social media
  10. Start killing it

By adding reading, sending and email, and posting on social media we've balanced this morning routine more evenly across the physical (workout, breakfast, shower), mental (meditate, read, goals), and social (email, social media) facets. I've removed ignoring your phone because it can be a really helpful tool in both mediation and reading.

Is this morning routine perfect? Nope! No morning routine will ever be perfect for everyone but I hope you get the idea that it's important to keep balancing your facets.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activity: How Balanced Are You?

In this activity we’re going to use your original list from the previous activity to determine where you’re spending your time. This should give some insight into who you are shaping up to be. Don’t try to analyze yourself at this point or pass any judgement, we’re just trying to get a baseline for where you actually are right now in the present. Tasks Take a moment to rank each facet for yourself without much thought. Are you more social or physical? Put them in the order that you feel fits you like: physical, mental, social. Go back to your original 15 things and try to classify each primarily as one facet. Many things could fall into two or three facets, try to focus on what you get out of doing the activity or why you do it and pick only one facet. How many are in each facet? Does this line up with your initial ranking? Should you reevaluate each facet's rank? Example Using my initial list that I built earlier I bucketed them as follows. Mental Physical Social Meditating Readi...
Read more

Social: Deeper Look

The social facet might be the hardest to conceptualize because there is more to this than just the people you interact with. Parts of socializing include communicating, even though the skill of communication is from the mind, the act of communicating is purely social. You could see the act of socializing as a way of trying to spread your idea of who you are and make it match up with how other people see you. This goes both directions, sometimes you learn more about your social self and it adjusts your inner idea of who you are but more commonly you’re expressing your feelings and beliefs to other people and they’re changing their mental model of who you are, this happens millions of times a day with everyone you meet. One example of something that I believe would be social is money. The things that you buy with money can influence all of your facets but simply having a lot of money in the bank would be social in my opinion. Think of money as a contract with other people that says you h...
Read more

Mental: Deeper Look

I'm going to spend the next few posts trying to dig deeper into each specific facet. I'm hoping to build a baseline for what types of things make up each facet. One of the most important points to make is that just because something is mental for me it might be social to you. It's important to think about things in relation to what they mean to you. I'm going to give you a framework to help you determine for yourself where different activities fall for you. Digging deeper into the mind and isolating it from the other two aspects we find that our inner self is the source of our ideas, personality, emotions, and education. We can improve the mind by learning and understanding how our inner self works. I like to think about this as being who I see myself as. Am I a funny person? Do I know a lot of facts? How quickly can I do addition? There are many pieces that make up the brain and its functions and those would all fall under the mind. Your mind is expanded by new experie...
Read more