How do you start your day? Do you jolt awake at the sound of your alarm blaring? Or do you mindfully ease into the A.M. with a healthy meal, exercise and setting goals for what you plan to accomplish?
Your mornings can set the tone for your entire day. It can mean the difference between a productive day or a sluggish one, having a powerful ripple effect on your mood, happiness and focus. If you leave your day to chance, you’ll likely get sidetracked by distractions, other people’s priorities and find yourself consumed with stress.
On the other hand, creating a morning routine can help you feel calm, controlled and powerful. Morning routines provide a way to feel accomplished and reach new levels of success…all before 8 a.m. There’s why many highly successful leaders — from Benjamin Franklin to Oprah and Bill Gates — have crafted morning rituals that maximize their energy, productivity and creativity all day long.
No one knows about the power of rising strong better than Benjamin Stall and Michael Xander, the co-founders of My Morning Routine and authors of the new book, My Morning Routine: How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired. I’m a huge believer and evangelist for the power of mornings and daily routines, which is why I’m grateful to have a few of my A.M. practices featured among those of greats like Arianna Huffington, Marie Kondo, Ed Catmull (President of Pixar and Walt Disney), fitness guru Jillian Michael and many more.
The duo has extensively catalogued almost 300 morning rituals. In this interview, Benjamin Spall shares insights about what they’ve learned, how you can apply it in your own life (even if you’re not an early riser) and a few of his own practices.
Why are morning routines so important and what first inspired you to study them?
When you have a positive morning in which you’re spending your first few hours (or first few minutes, depending on how long you have) doing things that you already decided in advance you really want to do, you’re starting your morning with intention. When you start your morning with intention you can bring your morning “wins” with you into the rest of the day.
It’s important to note that when I refer to morning routines, I’m referencing the time between you waking up and either leaving your home, or transitioning to the next part of your day. If you work a night shift, your “morning routine” may start at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. You don’t have to be an early riser to have a morning routine; you just have to be conscious of how you spend your time when you wake up.
The inspiration to study morning routines came over five years when my co-author Michael and I wanted to create a project looking at the importance of habits in our day to day lives. We quickly realised that mornings provide the perfect platform for new habits to grow. Three weeks after coming up with the idea, our first couple of interviews were published online.
What are the most common elements of a powerful morning routine?
The most common elements of the most successful morning routines are their ability to be simple and easy to follow. I’m serious! That’s not to say the intricacies of these habits need to be simple (your workout routine can be as complex as you want it to be), but what is simple and easy to follow in this situation would be, say, getting out of bed and doing two minutes of light stretching, or sitting down for a five minute meditation.
Without meaning to offend anyone involved, there’s nothing intrinsically special about the people we profile in this book; aside, that is, from their ability to keep the habits and routines that allow them to achieve at a high level. And we can all do this; we can all turn our morning into a more positive experience (even parents of young kids can, to an extent; we have a chapter on this in the book), we just have to know where to start, which this book can help you with.
Most people wake up and hurry off to work, but you say that a successful day starts by boosting your productivity and relaxing, which may seem counterintuitive. How does one achieve both benefits – and why does it matter? It matters that you’re achieving both benefits, but it doesn’t necessarily matter than both happen in the morning. In the book we interview a wide range of people, and doing so was so fascinating for me personally because it was often difficult to predict whether someone placed more of a premium on relaxing, working out, or getting productive work done first thing in the morning.
For example, Vanguard Chairman Bill McNabb told me that the quiet time between 6:00 and 7:30am is when some of his best work gets done. He noted that it’s his time to read, think, and prepare for the day ahead. He still works out, but he does so later in the day to break up his workday. The same is true of relaxing; some of the people I interviewed like to ease into the day by spending the beginning of their morning meditating, reading, or generally just reflecting on the day ahead, while others prefer to get right down to work and slow down in the evening instead.
You’ve gathered “interview statistics” from high-performers across industries including with leaders like Arianna Huffington, General Stanley McChrystal, Marie Kondo and others. Can you share stand-out insights from those statistics?
The main thing the statistics we included in the book do is confirm biases that we all have: yes, we need to go to bed earlier (our interviewees average a 10:57 p.m. bedtime), yes we need to wake up earlier (6:24am), and no, we absolutely should not be hitting the snooze button.
Of course, statistics don’t always give us a complete picture. If you’re a night owl and you’ve been reading this interview with skepticism, I get it. While we desperately believe in the power of having a good-for-you morning routine, that doesn’t mean you need to start waking up early every morning if you get your best work done late into the evening or at night. If this is seriously working for you, then statistics be damned, keep at it.
How do you start your day? Have you picked up habits from the people you’ve studied?
Great question! I’ve absolutely picked up habits from interviewing so many people about their mornings over the past five years, as has my co-author Michael. The most recent addition to my morning routine has been twenty pushups and ten jumping jacks, followed by a ten minute meditation. It’s so simply that I rarely don’t do it, and if I do forget it takes so little time that it’s easy to fit into my day later on.
For about the last year I’ve been keeping my phone in my kitchen overnight, on airplane mode, having replaced it with an analogue alarm clock as my morning wake-up siren (though I’m usually awake before it goes off). It took me over four years of editing the interviews on our website and being told about this trick dozens of times before I finally did it. And it’s made a huge difference to how present, calm, and generally less frantic I feel in the morning. When possible, I aim to not turn my phone off airplane mode until I start work.
There’s so much advice out there about how to craft an effective morning ritual. How does someone go about finding a routine that’s the best fit for them? Any tips you can share, especially for readers who may feel overwhelmed or assume they’re “not a morning person”?
Try everything once! Well, maybe not everything, but we do truly believe that if you’ve been considering trying something (such as meditation, a new workout, having a set time to do your most creative work… you name it), bringing this into your morning routine is a great way to see if it’s for you.
Give each new element you bring into your morning routine a fair shot. Trying something for just a couple of days before giving up isn’t enough. And keep things short! Don’t go all-in on a two-hour workout or creative writing session on your first morning.
Melody J. Wilding is a coach, speaker, and writer who helps ambitious high-achievers mentally and emotionally thrive at work. Find her at melodywilding.com