#455： How to Create the Perfect Morning Routine
Episode Stats
Summary
Benjamin Spall is the co-author of the new book My Morning Routine, which shares insights taken from the morning routines of dozens of entrepreneurs, leaders, and creative folks. In this episode, Ben walks us through how to craft the perfect morning routine, including how to make time for it in your schedule, what activities to include, and how a successful morning routine starts with what you do the night before.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast how you start
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something is often how you finish it and that couldn't be truer than for the trajectory of
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your days when your mornings feel chaotic rushed and fragmented and the rest of your day often
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does too but when you start off with a centering invigorating morning routine that feeling
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follows you the rest of the day if you're wanting to improve or simply start your own morning
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routine then this episode is for you my guest is benjamin spall and he's the co-author of the book
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my morning routine which shares insights taken from the morning routines of dozens of entrepreneurs
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leaders and creative folks on today's show benjamin walks us through how to craft the perfect morning
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routine including how to make time for it in your schedule what activities to include and how a
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successful morning routine starts with what you do the night before you also discuss how to adjust
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your morning routine while traveling and when you have kids and along the way benjamin gives us a
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peek at the morning routines of several influential people to give us some inspiration for our own
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routines there's lots of actionable advice in this episode on creating a morning routine that works
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for you and sets you up for a productive day after the show is over make sure to check out our show
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notes at aom.is slash morning routine where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into
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this topic and benjamin joins me now via skype all right benjamin spall welcome to the show thanks for
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having me brett so you got a new book out my morning routine how successful people start every day
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inspired i think people that's one of the i've noticed like i'm interested i think a lot of people
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are interested like what do other people do for their morning routine i think it's a voyeuristic
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part of ourselves so what got you looking into the morning routines of all these influential people
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well you're exactly right about it being voyeuristic that's something that i the way i think about it
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myself but the way i came to it was around mid-2012 i was reading the book the power of habit by new
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york times journalist charles duhick and i was really interested in the idea of building something where we
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could really celebrate people's habits and kind of find these different habits find these different
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ways of doing things that could be helpful for people in their daily lives and it was around about
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the same time that my now co-founder and co-author michael zander got in touch with me and he had the
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same idea of kind of documenting what people do in the morning so we kind of put this idea together
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and we created mymorningroutine.com which it's hard to believe nowadays because people write about
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morning routines all the time but back then morning routines really weren't being spoken about that much
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so we started publishing one new interview every single week and we've been doing that coming on
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six years now wow so you interviewed dozens of successful people to find out what they do
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for the morning routines did you find one common template or principle for how to do a morning routine
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all right so firstly i would say that there's no right way to start your day there's a lot of advice
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online that kind of says you have to have to get up at 5 a.m you have to do this you have to do that
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but to be honest we kind of really like to look at the idea of what works for you
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so interviewing people about their mornings for so long has shown me that it's possible to have a
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regular morning routine without being rigid and regimented about it and for us honestly it's all
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about kind of starting your morning routine with intention and what we found while interviewing people
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both for the website and for the for the book is that almost none of the world's best and brightest
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leave their minds to chance and in our view this is clearly not a coincidence all right so they were
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intentional about it but it it there's a lot of variation that's exactly right they kind of they
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kind of started out with uh many people when they kind of want to begin their morning routine they
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they think of what they do and we've had so many people come to us that say they don't actually have
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a routine whereas in reality if we ask what they do every single day it kind of is there's a rhythm
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you kind of get up you go to the bathroom you might go to the kitchen and it's just kind of like
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adding little things into that rhythm so you might want to add kind of meditation or a little bit of
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working out but when you add things within what you're already doing you can already build on what
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you have were you a big morning routine guy before you started this project or did this like
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you know was this a catalyst for you to actually start thinking about your own yeah no i i really
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wasn't at all i was kind of terrible i would get up kind of at 10 a.m this is back in my university
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days and then after i after i finished school i would just i was a freelancer so i can't get up at
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the same time and so is when i started the website it was very much an idea of using this
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information that we were gathering both from friends and kind of more well-known people as
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the site went on i was using this information myself to actually improve my own routine and
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it has improved dramatically and as we say in the book you kind of have to hear the same things many
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times over to actually get the impact of it so a great example of this is for a long time i kept
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my phone in my bedroom like right beside my head and i would often wake up and kind of just stare at
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it looking at twitter looking at email but in reality that's a terrible way to start your day
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and it took me i'd have to say two to three years of hearing this advice from people we'd interview
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where they'd say keep your phone in another room and it took me two or three years to actually
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go through with that so now i keep my phone in my kitchen and it's a great way to actually wake up
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and kind of be more intentional about your day because you're not immediately grabbing that items
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first thing all right well let's get into the nitty-gritty of morning routines because this is the fun
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stuff let's talk about the very first thing you do in the morning which is waking up now you
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mentioned earlier you see all these blog post articles about if you want to be a millionaire
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you have to wake up at 5 a.m when you interviewed all these people and these are people who are
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successful in their respective fields were most of them early risers or was there a lot of variation
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what time people woke up yeah there was a lot of variation and to be honest you really don't need
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to be an early riser to have a morning routine and when we refer to morning routines in the book and on
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the website we're really referencing the time between you waking up and either having to leave your home
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or transitioning to the next part of your day and a great example of this is if you work a night shift
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for example your morning routine may start at three or four in the afternoon and that's fine that's kind
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of when you're waking up the most important thing you can do if you already feel like you don't have
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that much time in the morning is just to slightly increase the time available to you by getting up five
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minutes earlier for one whole week so that doesn't mean five minutes a day just for one whole week get up
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five minutes earlier than usual and then next week add five minutes on top of that and eventually over time
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you'll kind of reach that point where you're like okay i have enough time for my routine but i'm not
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feeling overtired and that's a great way to kind of increase that space to allow more in there
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so what was kind of the average wake-up time for people that you when you interviewed them yeah the
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average wake-up time i actually have this in the back of the book here we go it was 6 24 a.m so that is
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still relatively early but it's not kind of like you know 4 a.m or 5 a.m as many articles kind of
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suggests you should do right and i imagine when you talk to these people their wake-ups times
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changed based on their you know different stage of life they were in yeah totally we uh we mentioned
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this along the conclusion as well because it's really important to think when you having a
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morning routine isn't something that you get to it's not the case of you eventually get there and
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this is your routine for life it really is something you change over time you just have to make sure
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you're very deliberate with these changes so for example kind of if you have if you're you know you go from
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not having kids to having kids you'll go from having kind of a lot of time to yourself in the
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morning to really not having that much time at all and so your routine is going to dramatically change
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and for this reason we have a chapter on new parents in the book but you really you do have
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these changes throughout your lifetime you just have to recognize am i making these changes because
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it's necessary because in the case of a new child or in the case of a new job are you making these
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changes because you're kind of falling back into an older rhythm let's talk about extremes on the
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waking up what was like the earliest that you can remember of someone waking up and then like what
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was the latest yeah i i i'm sure i'm sure we had it in this i think about 4 a.m was kind of the
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the average earliest kind of like we would see that relatively often but not all the time and a great
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example of that was uh stanley mccrystal who's a former u.s army general and he would often get up at
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4 a.m and he would go for a run and it was very intense morning routine which to be honest i i myself
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couldn't replicate and i think maybe the latest and this may be on the website not in the book
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kind of a 10 a.m maybe or even 11 a.m and that was sometimes i think someone we interviewed she
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just needed a lot of sleep she like personally did about 10 hours of sleep every day so that's
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why she woke up so late and we also interviewed a singer songwriter who gets up a little bit later
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when she's on tour so i think that's a good point like i think a lot of people there's this pressure
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that you have to wake up early not necessarily just do what's good for you right no that's that's
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that's exactly right and like we we are all different and we do change throughout our lives
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and if if you really struggle to get up early and if you're just going to be tired throughout
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your morning routine it's much better to kind of get that sleep in get completely rested before you
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begin with your day all right so let's talk about right after you wake up what's something
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that you found a lot of the people interviewed that they did commonly right like immediately
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after they woke up yeah so the best thing you can do honestly well first of all don't have
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your phone while you're bad but the first thing you can do is immediately get out of bed and just
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kind of do the same thing every day so for many of us we get up we go to the bathroom and then
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what do you do after that so you could go to the kitchen you can meditate you could work out you could
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even just put on your clothes and go to the gym but the idea is to actually kind of do this same thing
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every day and we talk about a lot in the book about the importance of keeping these things small
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and easy to accomplish so if you if you start out and decide okay this week i want to start
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meditating every single day if you tell yourself i'm going to meditate for half an hour right after
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waking up you are very quickly going to stop doing this because even after the first day this
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is going to feel like a lot of time that you're taking away from your morning and potentially even
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making yourself late for work so we say keep things very short like maybe a five minute meditation
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a ten minute meditation just kind of that amount of time where it really is easy to get that in
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and i would say in terms of staying on the wrong track the worst thing you can do is really just
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kind of checking your email checking twitter checking any website that you want to check
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first thing in the morning it's just a terrible way to wake up and when we interviewed her for the
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book ariana huffington told us the big part of her morning routine is what she doesn't do and the main
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thing she doesn't do is check her phone so it's really important just to kind of be in the mindset
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of kind of that feeling of calm that brings across from your sleep and not kind of having all the
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information come into you straight away right away yeah i've noticed whenever i check my phone first
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thing in the morning like it sets the like it i basically primed the pump for the rest of the day
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where i'm just gonna be constantly checking social media email etc but like when i don't
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it sets a stage or a precedent where i don't do that more often like whenever i check my phone first
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thing i end up being more distracted the other day when i don't i'm more focused yeah totally and
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it's hard it's addicting like i you know i sometimes wake up and i want to check what's on twitter i
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kind of i i want to have that little feeling of outrage first thing in the morning but it's really
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not a it's really it's really not a great way to be yeah increase that cortisol to help you help
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wake you up exactly but with that said you did interview a lot of people in the book where part
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of their job is you know keeping on top of what's going on and so they'll have to check email first
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thing in the morning because they might have you know business going on in asia and they need to
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know right away and maybe answer that email so they can take care of business yeah no totally it's
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really it's not a perfect system and like many times if i have an early morning interview or a
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meeting i do have to check that and i guess there's something there's probably some way around it where
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if you have an assistant they could text you if something changes so you personally don't have
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to check it but yeah sometimes you really just have to you know for the sake of your job for the
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sake of your work you do need to check it another thing that i i liked and i've tried to incorporate
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this but i haven't been able to do it lately because i've got kids now and so there's a lot going on but
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you know just getting outside and taking a walk in the morning first thing in the morning
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it's just so relaxing and rejuvenating and it kind of really sets the tone for the rest of the day
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yeah we actually we actually look at that idea almost in terms of meditation whereas it isn't a
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sit-down meditation practice in itself but actually just getting out there in nature is a great way to
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kind of calm you down and kind of get you ready for the day ahead and you get the blue light right
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from the rising sun to help wake your body up even more right so exactly it's it's very it's very
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natural for our bodies to wake up that way so i think one reason why a lot of people want to
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start morning routines or start getting intentional about their morning routines is they want to be
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more productive throughout the rest of the day so you talked about some things you can do to be more
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productive like don't look at your phone right because that will set the stage for you looking
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at your phone and social media the rest of the day but what are some other things that you found
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that people do in their morning routine to help them be productive throughout the rest of the day
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yeah so one thing which kind of came up time and time again is working out and while we have a
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whole chapter kind of in the book dedicated to folks who work out in the morning we quickly
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noticed that the main benefit was not necessarily working out in the morning but actually just
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working out at any time in the day so many people we spoke with including bill mcnab who is the
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chairman of the vanguard group he works out at lunch and i personally work out at lunch as well
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and he gets that benefit as well so even though it's very important to actually get that workout in
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to kind of you know pump the eye and kind of fill fill everything going just actually getting that in at
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some time of day is a great way to kind of improve the rest of your day and one benefit to doing it in
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the morning is just making sure you get it in so many people say that if they push it to later in
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the afternoon later in the evening there's a reasonable chance that work will run over they'll
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get stuck in meetings and they won't actually be able to do it so that is one reason for doing it
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in the morning and also working on a side project so many people especially right after meditating
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they say that a great thing to do is work on a side project and this this book itself was a side
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project of mine for a long time so actually having that time in the morning to work on something that
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is outside of your job it's outside of what you do every single day it's a great way to spend that
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time no that's some good stuff there so i took advantage of that when i was first starting the
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art of manliness i was i started when i was in law school and you know law school you're there from
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8 a.m to eight o'clock at night it's basically a full-time job so if i wanted to get work done in i had
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to do it for like you know i wake up at six and work on the blog for an hour or two and then go to
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school and that's how i did it for the first year or two yeah no it's a perfect time to actually
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just get in that work that you really feel that is important to your life because kind of kind of
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with the working out example when you come home from a long day of your job you're kind of not going
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to be feeling in the mood to kind of get back in front of a computer again yeah and with the
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working out i love what i love about the book is that you have these like at the end of each
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section you have like the reversal section so you kind of flip the switch and like hey maybe you
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don't have to do this in the morning and with the working out i found for a while i was working
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out first thing in the morning just so i could get it done but i found that you know i do barbell
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training and just like when i first thing in the morning i'm super groggy my joints are still creaky
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my muscles aren't warmed up so it's just really hard my workouts were terrible and then also when i
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had a terrible workout you know things didn't go according to plan i would just be in a cranky mood
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for the rest of the day and just unmotivated and distracted thinking about man i should have
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gotten that right so i finally just switched to after work and it's a lot better i don't have to
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deal with that anymore yeah no we actually we stole the reversal idea from robert green you know he
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writes the power books and like those books that are great but yeah the idea was a lot of people when
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we interviewed them a lot of people were telling us one thing but then you know maybe 10 25 of
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people will be telling us something entirely different so we kind of wanted to bring that in
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we wanted to make people feel that we're not just telling you one way to do it which we're saying
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this is how the majority of people go but if you want to go this way as well that really works we're
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going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show well on the idea
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of on the same theme of productivity did you find a lot of people would kind of create a to-do list or
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look over their calendar first thing in the morning after they did meditation or working out or was
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that something they did they did the night before i i would say the majority of people did it the
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night before and that's also what we recommend is what i personally do and the reason for that is
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you kind of the night before well maybe not the night before but kind of just as you finish work
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it's a perfect time to know what you need to be doing the next day as opposed to in the morning
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where you kind of you know you kind of may have grander ideas of what you can get done that day
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so definitely kind of before you finish work i personally i i schedule things i make sure like
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everything's in the calendar for what i'm particularly doing and i also make a to-do list
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which kind of generally the items near the top of the more important items but sometimes there'll be
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stuff down there that gets moved up and that is a great way to just it's very simple but it's a
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great way to just actually make sure you know what's ahead of you even if you don't get it all
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done it's good to actually know what's coming up all right so that's a good point too to have a good
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morning routine it also pays to have a good like after the end of work routine or evening routine
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yes no totally we spoke to many people who actually their evening routines are more impressive than
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their morning routines and one of the ways in particular that people like to kind of jump on
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the idea of an evening routine is kind of to lay out their clothes for the next day and this can be
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done in two different ways so many people if they're working out in the morning they like to lay out their
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workout clothes and the idea there is you see them in the morning and you're much more likely to
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actually do it especially if you put the shoes and everything in place you see and you know that that is what
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you need to do but some people they just decide to put out their regular outfits and the kind of the
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idea there is to defeat decision fatigue so you know there's many studies about this but generally
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in the you know in the morning we have a certain amount of decisions we can make a day before we
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kind of get a little bit groggy and we struggle to kind of make the choices that we know are important
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to us so when you have your outfit picked at night time it may be a little bit difficult at night to
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make the decisions but in the morning you kind of don't have to make that decision then
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and another thing people love to do in the evening is just clean up around their house
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so some people like i've been this way myself but some people don't really mind it to be too messy
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but for many of us it's great to actually just make sure the kitchen is clean the general
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bedroom area is clean so we don't wake up to a mess and i've definitely been in the situation where
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i've woken up and like the one pan i own is at the bottom of the sink like covered in mess so it's a
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great way to actually make sure that you have what you need for breakfast and i would say that the
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biggest kind of game changer to improve your evening routine is just to make sure that you
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allow enough time for sleep so um many people i speak with if they come up to me and ask me how
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you know how can they improve their morning routine i will often ask them how many hours of sleep they
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get typically or the night before and often this number is much lower than i would expect to be five
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hours maybe even five and a half or six hours and to be honest most of us need between about seven
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and nine hours of sleep a night and often when i say this i like to really caveat to say just because i say
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seven and nine hours it doesn't mean that you're a seven hour person you could just as easily be a
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nine hour person so i personally need about eight hours of sleep a night and if i don't get that i
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kind of struggle and so that's a great thing to do with your evening if you feel like you have to get
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up early or you just don't have time in the morning just make sure you get enough sleep especially just
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before you need to go to bed as that helps you kind of increase the quality of your morning routine
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the next day gotcha and speaking of like laying your clothes out you even you can interview people
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where they actually wore their workout clothes to sleep in and so as soon as they woke up
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they're ready to work out yeah we actually yeah when we spoke with around huffington she she mentioned
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that she used to do that but she doesn't anymore and i believe the reason was because it kind of put
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it kind of put her in this weird kind of like working out like productive mindset in bed and she
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figured it was kind of better to have like a nice night dress or something you know bedtime clothes
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so yeah i've definitely heard of other people doing that as well and also another benefit of planning your
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day you know creating that to-do list of important things you're going to do first thing the night
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before is that if you you know start off your day looking at your email usually your agenda is driven
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by your email it's like well i gotta answer that email that even then like you spend two hours you
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know like i haven't got anything done productive right just been answering emails yeah no it's true and
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for a long time i only started with to-do lists and scheduling about three years ago and up to that point
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it was exactly that my whole schedule was email as if my email inbox was my to-do list and that that's
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it's a great way to feel productive and i believe many people still kind of have that system now and
00:20:02.440
it really is a great way to feel like you're doing a lot because you kind of have that goal of you
00:20:06.880
know archiving all your emails and you kind of get there but it's a terrible way to actually work on
00:20:11.340
bigger picture goals to actually have this kind of plan for you know six months out a year out five
00:20:15.940
years out to have those plans in place you kind of really need to think long term and have that
00:20:20.920
schedule that you stick to every single day so you've been mentioning meditation a lot something
00:20:25.720
people do in their morning routine it seems like a lot of people use their morning routine not
00:20:29.360
necessarily to be productive and get stuff done but just to be like actually you know exercise
00:20:33.940
their spirituality be mindful right yeah so we actually we know in the book that even if your
00:20:38.960
idea of kind of a sit down meditation for 20 minutes doesn't work for you you can really learn to find
00:20:44.180
meditative moments in the mundane and generally kind of build in moments of mindfulness throughout your
00:20:48.740
day and there's great ways to do this kind of what you mentioned earlier the uh you know just
00:20:52.320
getting out of the house and walking around that's a great way to kind of feel these moments
00:20:56.160
and also going for a morning run and someone actually we we spoke to for the book he mentioned
00:21:00.500
that every single morning he'll put on his tea kettle so he'll put put water in the kettle he'll put it
00:21:05.040
on and he'll press the switch and then it'll be a few minutes that he'll just sit and about nothing
00:21:10.940
at all and he uses that kind of as a timer to allow him to bring that meditative moment into his
00:21:15.740
morning um but we also in the book we do describe you know typical forms of sit down meditation
00:21:20.400
and many of the people we spoke with kind of write about what they do if you're kind of more into
00:21:24.420
that but personally i've always done well for the last couple years i've been doing a 10 minute
00:21:28.940
meditation uh generally in the morning if i don't get it in in the morning i'll push it to later in
00:21:33.480
the day and it's just such an easy it's such a short amount of time that it's easy to do and i i don't
00:21:39.400
worry about it it's just something that i enjoy and even though i've never really been able to meditate
00:21:44.080
properly per se you know completely empty my mind it's a great way to really sort my tasks for the day
00:21:50.120
and this is always uh prior to uh checking email of course were there any journalers in their morning
00:21:55.080
routines there were there were i think one in particular was ryan holiday he he journals every
00:21:59.960
single morning and for him it's definitely a meditative practice he's kind of writing about
00:22:04.100
what he wants to do for the day and kind of his thoughts uh further out uh but many people did speak
00:22:08.900
about doing morning pages as well which is kind of the same idea it's by uh julia cameron and it's
00:22:13.960
about kind of i think it's quite a lot of pages to be honest but it's like kind of writing out
00:22:17.840
your thoughts for the day and what you want to achieve so i mean we've mentioned all these
00:22:21.460
different things you can do in your morning routine you can get up you're going to take a
00:22:25.660
walk maybe you're going to meditate you're going to possibly maybe look over your to-do list maybe
00:22:30.700
journal maybe do some meditation but i think one thing i've seen in my own life and in the lives of
00:22:36.400
people who try to start a morning routine they want to do so much right they try to cram in a ton
00:22:41.400
so they end up like they try to cram in so much they don't actually can't do their morning routine
00:22:45.880
and they just give up on the concepts how do you any advice there on on not trying to cram so much
00:22:51.460
into your morning routine oh here's like how long should your morning routine last right like what
00:22:56.120
what's the the right length for that yeah so we we really don't give a length to it we often say it's
00:23:01.420
kind of what you can allow and like i mentioned earlier if you feel like it's not enough time then
00:23:05.680
kind of wake up five minutes early and kind of go from there but it really does change for everyone
00:23:10.220
so some people might want a two-hour routine but that might be incredibly extreme for others who might
00:23:14.660
want more of a half hour routine and i think it's very important to just figure out what you want
00:23:19.780
in there rather than figuring out what the main length is and then definitely starting small you
00:23:24.420
know 10 minute meditation 10 minute workout you know stretching routine really just make sure that
00:23:29.140
you get all the elements in there even if it's not for a particularly long amount of time and then
00:23:33.320
if you're really enjoying something if you're really enjoying working out you're really enjoying
00:23:36.840
going for the dream gym then either increase those items at the expense of others or just increase
00:23:41.840
the amount of time of your morning routine in general all right so you don't have to go big
00:23:45.520
with this thing you can just go small no you really don't and like it's definitely when you go for the
00:23:50.120
book you kind of have some extremes i kind of mentioned general mccrystal earlier on like his
00:23:53.720
routine i think lasts for three three and a half maybe even four hours there are extreme examples in
00:23:58.660
there and they're incredibly fun to read but i think they're also they're also a great way of
00:24:02.780
showing you that you can take some elements from people's routines you can take this from this
00:24:06.560
person this from that but you really don't need to go the whole hog with any of them
00:24:09.960
so one thing you also cover the book you mentioned this earlier morning routines with parents
00:24:14.620
because before i had kids i had a pretty awesome morning routine like it was had so much time i
00:24:20.540
could you know journal for 30 minutes i could meditate for a long time i could do this and
00:24:25.380
whatever then i had kids and like the newborn phase is crazy like you there's no routine because
00:24:31.440
like the baby's gonna gotta eat or like it's gotta you know change its diaper so what did you find
00:24:36.360
that people did how do they adjust their morning routines when kids came into the scene yeah so
00:24:42.320
this was a real tough one and we want to kind of want to make make it clear here that we we
00:24:46.680
definitely acknowledge the fact that a morning routine for parents of young kids or parents of
00:24:50.620
any kids to be honest is going to be incredibly different from a morning routine where you do not
00:24:54.580
have kids but that said we do make the point that kids do thrive on having a routine themselves so if
00:25:00.380
you can kind of get this routine as soon as possible and of course you know with a newborn this is
00:25:04.260
tough but as soon as is generally possible if you can kind of bring a routine into their lives it
00:25:08.780
will help you as well and one thing that we really really do advocate if possible is once your kids
00:25:14.800
are on a sleep schedule as much as as much as can be as much as once they're on that is to kind of
00:25:20.000
try to wake up before them and this is tough especially if you've been up half the night with
00:25:23.980
them but when you wake up before them you kind of have this little bit of time and it could just be
00:25:27.940
15 minutes half an hour in which you can kind of do some stuff for yourself before you have to
00:25:32.000
kind of get on with the day and this this is tough this really isn't we're not advocating that this
00:25:36.780
is the best way to do things but it really is kind of the only way to continue on with that routine
00:25:41.280
when you do have young kids in the house so adjust your expectations you're no longer going to have
00:25:45.600
an hour of person of me time you know you might just get 15 minutes and you got to be okay with that
00:25:51.580
i think a gesture of expectations would have been a great subtitle for that chapter yeah
00:25:56.500
right and then when your kids are out of the house you'll get back your hour of me time but then you'll be
00:26:00.480
sad because there's no kids in your house anymore yeah exactly yeah it's it's we we like to point
00:26:05.400
out i think we point this out in the reversal section of the parents chapter is that it is
00:26:09.140
only temporary in a good and bad way like you'll definitely miss it when it's gone but then you
00:26:13.260
know you'll have your me time back so there's definitely a positive there as well okay so another
00:26:17.260
challenge with morning routines is there's a lot of people who travel right or they're yeah
00:26:22.380
traveling right so you go to a different place where you don't have your stuff you don't have your
00:26:25.780
chair to sit in you typically sit in to do whatever you do there so how do you adapt routines
00:26:31.520
or maintain a routine when you're away from home yeah so sticking to our morning routines when we're
00:26:37.580
traveling can almost feel like an impossible task so often we just kind of go with the flow and kind
00:26:42.480
of fall in and out of our regular routines with kind of bringing in these unhealthy habits and this is
00:26:46.700
especially true if you're staying in a hotel but what we write in the book is that you can make your
00:26:51.520
morning routine kind of work for you it might not be exactly the same but one way to do this is to
00:26:56.680
kind of think about how working for example out of a hotel room can actually make you more productive
00:27:01.920
so if you're you know you're at a conference or something you have to spend half an hour just working
00:27:06.420
if you're in a hotel room you kind of don't have any distractions you can't reorganize your desk
00:27:10.860
you can't clean out the fridge you kind of have nothing there that you know many of us like to kind of
00:27:15.780
distract ourselves with so that's one great way to uh get something out of it and another thing to think
00:27:20.740
about when you're going on the trip itself is to kind of be smart about your scheduling so if you
00:27:25.580
know that you sleep well on planes you should try to work to travel overnight so you can wake up
00:27:29.640
refreshed and ready to get on with your morning routine the next day and if like many of us you
00:27:34.080
know that you don't sleep well on flights you could just choose to fly in the evening so you're kind of
00:27:37.620
getting in at night and then you can have that night in the hotel room but definitely the most
00:27:42.900
important thing to think about when you know with regard to your morning routine when traveling is you
00:27:47.080
really shouldn't beat yourself up and it's totally normal for your routine to not be as far and not
00:27:52.280
be as efficient when traveling but this this is tough you just need to allow for these inefficiencies
00:27:56.980
and just know while you're there know you know you're traveling for work you're traveling for a
00:28:00.880
vacation know while you're doing it and kind of just let set that aside and just worry about it when
00:28:05.500
you get home i thought it was really interesting for the extreme travelers people who were traveling all
00:28:09.960
the time they had like different morning routines based on which city they were in right because they go to
00:28:14.640
the cities regularly so they've been able to establish a routine so they know well if i'm in
00:28:18.740
chicago i'm going to go to this place and do this thing before i get going to work if i'm in new york
00:28:24.380
city i do this or that if i'm in dallas i'll do this or that yeah that was pretty fascinating and i
00:28:28.660
totally see how that works if you do have the kind of job where you are in two or three different
00:28:32.660
places quite frequently then you can kind of create real real morning routines in these places but if
00:28:38.700
you're traveling it's kind of more sporadic and kind of more into random destinations and definitely
00:28:42.540
kind of have the idea of what you can do in a hotel room or what you can do in an airbnb or wherever
00:28:47.740
you're staying and kind of just go from there yeah the hotel thing the hotel trick i have found
00:28:52.360
there's i've done this this has like nothing to do with morning routines but when i've had a lot of
00:28:56.260
work and i got to get a lot done i need no distractions i will actually go to a hotel here in town
00:29:01.780
pay a hundred bucks and just work because no one knows where i'm at and i can just i've understood
00:29:08.200
i've just complete distraction free work zone yeah i guess part of it's part of distractions and
00:29:13.520
also the fact that you know you've paid that money and you kind of want you want to get something out
00:29:17.420
of that payment yeah yeah the most extreme version of that i heard there's some guy who he he needed
00:29:22.420
to get a book done and so he bought a plane a round trip ticket to japan and he just wrote the entire
00:29:29.180
time there and then like he as soon as he got to japan he got on the plane back and wrote
00:29:32.980
i think he paid like two thousand dollars but he got the book done oh my god yeah you you would you
00:29:38.580
would want an upgrade for that you would not want to do that in a car right now so those are those
00:29:42.920
are extreme tactics those are one of those things where it's it's just interesting to know about you
00:29:46.580
might not do so yeah you mentioned this about being flexible with your mornings and routines because
00:29:51.020
i think a lot of people think okay i got a morning routine i had to stick to it always for the rest
00:29:55.960
of my life and if i miss it like my day is ruined but you guys said no you shouldn't have that
00:30:01.240
attitude towards it yeah no that's totally right and like we always we have this question at the
00:30:05.860
end that we ask every single interview interviewee both in the book on the website and the question
00:30:10.160
is what happens when you fail to follow your morning routine on any given day and it's interesting
00:30:15.220
because while some say that this messes them up for the entire day the vast majority of people who
00:30:19.520
answer this question say that they they kind of really let it slide and they just make sure that
00:30:23.820
they get back to it the next day and that really is that's kind of like the crux of the book the most
00:30:28.560
important thing to think about is when you have a routine you you you know you can you can do it
00:30:33.400
every single day but do not beat yourself up if you miss a day and i always like bring up the example
00:30:38.460
of uh jerry seinfeld he had this example of when he when he's writing jokes he has this big wall calendar
00:30:44.000
and every single day that he writes a joke he'll put a big red x on that day he calls it a chain and
00:30:50.440
the point of the big red x is to say that he wrote a joke that day and then he says your main goal
00:30:55.480
now is to not break that chain so just to make sure you get a big red x in the day every single day
00:30:59.960
and while this is a great idea it's a really great way to make sure you get your writing done you get
00:31:04.640
your work done whatever you want to get done it's terrible if you miss a day and you kind of feel
00:31:08.980
like everything has gone wrong and you can't continue anymore so the point of what we really
00:31:13.240
like to make in the book is that just because you miss a day or even if you miss two or three days
00:31:17.860
don't worry about it like don't aim don't aim for that to be your goal but if it happens if you
00:31:22.480
mess up if for some reason you know your kid gets sick or just something happens don't worry
00:31:26.680
about it and just aim to get back to it the next day uh how has your morning routine changed since
00:31:31.280
you've you know after completing this book and working on the site for six years what's it looking
00:31:35.040
like right now yeah it's much better like what's interesting is i am not an extreme morning routine
00:31:41.100
person by any any means i am not getting up at 4 a.m i typically get up between about 7 and 7 30
00:31:46.200
and you know once i get up i'll go to the bathroom and then i'll come into the kitchen
00:31:49.820
and then i typically do a 10 minute meditation followed by about 10 or not many less than i
00:31:56.660
should do jumping jacks and then some push-ups and then i just make breakfast for my wife while
00:32:01.160
she gets ready and then during this time i don't check my phones so my phone would have been on
00:32:05.000
airplane mode in the kitchen overnight so i don't check it unless i have a meeting but for the most
00:32:09.540
part that's okay and then we just sit and have breakfast together kind of slowly and we just talk
00:32:14.440
about the day ahead and the great thing about this routine is she has her space she's allowed to get
00:32:19.320
ready you know while i'm in the kitchen making breakfast and then in that time when we're
00:32:23.500
speaking we're not talking about the news we're not talking about you know what someone just did
00:32:27.540
in the press or something like that we are just literally sitting down and talking about our days
00:32:31.560
and it's a really relaxing way to start the day especially when you consider many of our lives
00:32:35.800
nowadays which is just you know being inundated with emails being inundated with things to do
00:32:39.840
it's a really nice way to continue on the calm of the night into the morning right so morning
00:32:44.420
routines can be a way to connect with those you love oh totally yeah it's many people we spoke
00:32:49.200
with especially those with families with young kids just really talk about the importance of just
00:32:53.200
if they can you know often people have to leave early but if they can just having breakfast together
00:32:57.380
having that moment of connection because for many people especially with younger kids you may come
00:33:01.300
home and they're already in bed so i'm just having the time in the morning is a really great way to
00:33:05.660
connect and really great way to be together as a family i'm curious did you come across any
00:33:09.120
routines that really didn't seem like a routine like they're just like i you know it's not it's
00:33:14.500
not what a typical morning routine you think it would be a morning routine they just i don't know
00:33:18.440
i don't know what i'm trying to ask here yeah it's just it's like completely random right yeah we've
00:33:23.240
definitely had a few of those on the website i think none of those really made it into the book
00:33:26.500
because on the website we've published close to just over 300 routines now and there's 64 in the
00:33:31.520
book many of which are brand new the majority are brand new for the book but yeah we we do
00:33:35.600
interviews people sometimes and it's fascinating so what they talk about is great so we do publish
00:33:40.780
it but i'm like i'm not sure if that's entirely entirely what you would do every day all right so
00:33:45.420
uh there's like one thing someone can start doing today to make their morning routine better tomorrow
00:33:50.420
what would be that recommendation like it's an easy a lot of roi but it's super easy to implement
00:33:54.800
yeah so i would say the best thing and this is kind of you know outside of the box but the most
00:33:59.360
important thing is to just make sure you get enough sleep the night before and like i said so many
00:34:04.540
people come to me they say they don't get enough sleep but they wonder how to improve their routine
00:34:08.180
that really truly is the answer because if you're tired if you're just constantly groggy you're
00:34:13.260
constantly lacking in sleep uh you you are not going to get you know you could have the best morning
00:34:17.520
routine in the world it could have all these exercise elements that you could meditate you could do all
00:34:21.600
these things but if you're sleepy while doing these things you're really not going to get the most out
00:34:25.380
of it so definitely the number one tip is to just make sure you're not tired in the morning
00:34:29.200
well benjamin is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and your work
00:34:34.120
yeah so you can order the book right now by going to my morning routine.com book which has links to
00:34:39.700
amazon and everywhere else or you can head to your local bookstore barnes and noble or anywhere the
00:34:44.280
books are sold and you can find me personally at benjaminspaul.com and on twitter and instagram
00:34:49.920
at at benjaminspaul fantastic well benjamin spall thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:34:53.900
thanks for having me bro it's been great my guest today was benjamin spall he's the co-author of the
00:34:58.120
book my morning routine it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more
00:35:02.340
information about his work at mymorningroutine.com also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:35:08.260
slash morning routine where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic
00:35:12.400
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly
00:35:28.000
tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com we've got
00:35:31.920
4 000 articles over there if you haven't checked those out yet also if you haven't already i'd really
00:35:36.220
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00:35:39.840
that thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think we get
00:35:43.460
something out of it as always thank you for your continued support until next time this is brett mckay