A practical guide to structuring morning routine and improving your life
Recipes that will help you create a self-development plan, stay focused, organized and productive
For many of us, one of the biggest challenges is finding the time for daily personal development. Books keep piling up on the bookshelf. We bought sports clothes, but we haven’t worn them yet… Sometimes we don’t have enough time or we can’t follow the resolutions we made. Sometimes instead of starting, we indulge in procrastination.
In this blog post, I will share how I fight and overcome procrastination. It will borrow ideas from six popular self-development books (Miracle Morning, Drive, The Power of Habit, Why we sleep?, The Bullet Journal Method, Start with why). I’m going to share all the tips gathered throughout my experiences. You will see how to implement your own morning routine, observe the progress, and constantly improve your plan to accomplish the resolutions by making continuous self-reflection.
As mentioned, you can expect that this blog post is aimed at morning people. If you are not a morning person, don’t worry. I’m sure you can still gain a lot from this piece and apply it in your self-development plan.
#self-development #morning routine #improve your life #Miracle Morning #Drive #Power of Habit #Why we sleep? #Bullet Journal Method #Start with why
Miracle Morning
Miracle Morning is a framework for structuring a morning routine based on continuous self-reflection. The idea originates from the book of the same title by Hal Elrod. From these six books mentioned in the introduction, Miracle Morning is the foundation, whereas the other five are an invaluable extension that helps you prepare the development plan and persist in achieving your goals.
Before we start implementing the Miracle Morning routine, we have to prepare our mindset first. Clarity Questions, Wheel of Life Assessment, Your Level 10 Vision are the questionnaires to help you with that preparation. All of them you can find on 👉 miraclemorning.com under TMM 30-Day Life Transformation Challenge.
Clarity Questions
The first step is answering the Clarity Questions. They help us gain clarity and prepare the mindset for the Miracle Morning routine. Here are a few examples of these questions:
Wheel of Life Assessment
By filling out the Wheel of Life Assessment, we measure the level of success/satisfaction in every area of our life. It helps us get a clear picture of which things we are doing well, and which things we should focus on in the future.
As you can see, we have ten levels here and whatever you plan to work on next will contribute to one of the areas in the wheel.
Level 10 Vision
As the name suggests it’s your vision of a “perfect” life — where you would feel successful and satisfied. Now it’s time to answer more general questions for each of the areas mentioned in the wheel.
👉 #Tips
Go through the Clarity Questions, the Wheel of Life Assessment, and the Level 10 Vision from time to time, e.g. once per year. Always be up to date with your priorities. Do it if you have already accomplished all your previous goals and you don’t see anything coming up.
Level 10 Habits
Level 10 Habits are small steps that we can establish now to move towards Level 10 Life. They are more detailed and more specific. Instead of coming with a general statement like “I would like to have more money” as it was in the case of Level 10 Vision, here we have actionable steps like “spending max €10 for lunch”, “start saving program”, etc.
We have to be conscious when we come up with Level 10 Habits. Soon, we will pick up a few that we want to focus on. A friend of mine once told me “Time is precious. You have to always ask Why? in order not to focus on things that don’t matter and won’t rob you from that precious time”. That’s why before you choose a habit or a goal, ask yourself: Why do I want to pick it up? Why is it important to me right now? Are there any other things that need more attention? If you struggle to answer these questions, try to use the 5 Whys Method. It will help you find the root cause and the real purpose behind the habit you want to establish.
“Satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals.”
~Drive, H. Pink
SAVERS
As soon as you prepared your mindset and answered the questionnaires, we can start with your first 30 Day Transformation. Before we jump into it, let’s quickly go through SAVERS — the foundation of the morning routine.
SAVERS is a six-step morning routine that helps us stay motivated, track the progress, and also believe we can establish new habits and accomplish our goals.
S stands for Silence 💆. Many of us have a problem taking a step back, sitting down, or just relax drinking a coffee in the morning. The Silence step is an opportunity to relax and/or re-think your life. Silence, or “relaxation” as mentioned in the Power of Habit book, is a keystone habit that helps you concentrate on even tiny moments and parts of your life. If you do meditation, or you have never tried it but you want to, this is a great opportunity to do it within this time slot.
A stands for Affirmations 💪. Affirmations are a kind of personal pushers. They could be a recap of what you have done well in the past. Have you heard something nice from your family, colleagues, or boss? Note it down and add to the Affirmations list! Write all of the positive feedback you receive and read it every day to see how much of a valuable and amazing person you are. “what people believe shapes what people achieve”, so believe in yourself! Start with simple affirmations: “Because I accomplished X, I can accomplish Y too!”.
“(…) what people believe shapes what people achieve. Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities (…) determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish.”
~Drive, H. Pink
V stands for Visualisation 💡. It’s good to visualize goals and see how we would feel when we achieve them. It helps us stay motivated. Visualization has a powerful psychological effect mentioned in the Power of Habit book.
E stands for Exercise 🏃. This one is about keeping your body healthy. You can go running or to the gym, do yoga or whatever you like 😊.
R stands for Reading 📚. This is the time slot to read books, blog posts, newspapers, or anything that you bookmarked to read.
S stands for Scribing ✍️. This is an extremely important part. We will talk about it more later, but just to give you a short introduction, Scribing is the key step to observe the progress.
30 Day Transformation
Now, let’s say we want to pick up 4 habits we want to establish:
- Daily run.
- Saving 5€ from lunch.
- Doing a German course.
- Catch up with parents.
Since we know what the SAVERS are and we chose the habits, it’s time to start the 30 Day Transformation!
Each 30 Day Transformation represents a month and starts with a table. The first six rows are SAVERS and the next four are the habits we want to establish that month. You can ask why we need 30 days and not 2 weeks? From many researches, scientists came up with the conclusion that people need 30 days to establish new habits. That’s why we have a 30 Day Transformation and not 2 weeks 😊. Let’s have a look at the table:
SAVERS and four of our Level 10 Habits are shown in the table. Now we can start doing the morning routine. Measuring the progress is very simple. The “X” means we completed the step, whereas “ — ” means we didn’t.
You have probably noticed that we have Daily run as a separate step from the Exercise. Since Miracle Morning is a framework, it’s always up to you how you want to manage it. For the Daily run, if you want to keep it under the Exercise step — it’s totally fine. If you are preparing for a marathon and it’s one of your bigger goals and you don’t want to spend too much time on it in the morning, you can create a separate habit, and do yoga under the Excercise step. Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to follow all the habits in the morning. If you prefer to go running in the evening, you can do so. The 30 Day Transformation is a way to track your progress, not a nasty reminder that forces you to do all the steps in the morning. The same goes for reading, for example. If you have to read a few books in a short period of time, it’s okay to allocate more time in the morning and create a separate habit, whereas under the Reading step you can focus on books that you want to read for pleasure.
👉 #Tips
As soon as you come up with four habits, consider having only one big goal at a time. What do I mean by that? Let’s have a look at this example:
- Doing a German course.
- Drinking 1l of water.
- Waking up before 7 am.
- Eating fruit for breakfast.
All of the habits besides the course are so-called “easy wins” — easy to do, easy to track with no additional effort. In this case, you can really focus on your main goal which is doing the German course. Now, imagine that you have two big goals at the same time, like a German course and writing a blog post. It’s very easy to put more effort into one over the another and that’s not the point. Starting your Miracle Morning routine with a course and after one hour switching back to writing a blog post could be a disaster for your mind. First you have to defocus from doing the course, and then focus again but on writing a blog post. Switching contexts is very expensive. And from my experience, I can say that having more than one big goal at a time won’t provide many benefits.
👉 #Tips
Define the priorities for your goals and pick up the ones with the highest priority or the ones that you are simply interested in. If you pick up something you are not super curious about, you will always be thinking about the more important things on your list.
👉 #Tips
It’s good to come up with mixed types of habits touching different areas of your life. For example Finances, Personal Development, Career, and Health. If you pick up four habits that only contribute to a single area, then you can neglect other areas of your life. You can get demotivated soon before you finish the 30 Day Transformation.
When to wake up?
You have set up the morning routine, but what time should you wake up? Based on the chosen habits, we have to count how much time they can take it. Let’s go back to our 30 Day Transformation table:
Let’s say all SAVERS will take 10 minutes each. Daily run around 40 minutes. German course, let’s say 1 hour and phone call — half an hour. All of them give us around 3 hours. So if you usually start working at 10 am, and you need around 1 hour to prepare yourself for the day, you have to wake up around 6 am to do your morning routine.
Scribing ✍️
Now let’s talk a bit more about Scribing. For me, this step is a game-changer and the most important part of the morning routine. As I mentioned earlier, Scribing is about writing all your thoughts and feelings every single day. In Why we sleep?, Matthew Walker tells us that writing about your thoughts and feelings has a positive effect on mental health. By Scribing and looking at the 30 Day Transformation table, we observe the progress. We are constantly forcing ourselves to do the reflection. Remember, there is no bad or wrong writing. Write whatever you think is worthwhile. From now on, your notebook becomes a log of your life.
For every week set three small goals, very small. Do a summary (in an Agile team, it’s called Retrospective) every week to see if you managed to accomplish these three goals.
““Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.”
~ The Power of Habit, C. Duhigg
Apart from doing the retro every week, do another one monthly to see how new habits and goals went overall:
- Did you manage to establish them or not.
- What went well.
- What you have to improve.
Finally, at the end of the year, do the annual review. The annual review is a way to sum up all your accomplishments, thoughts, and to come up with new resolutions while self-reflecting about the past.
👉 Scribing #Tips
If you want to treat your notebook as a source of truth, and not only as the Miracle Morning tool, I really recommend the Bullet Journal method described in the book written by Ryder Carroll. The Bullet Journal method can help you come up with nice tracking lists and much more. Here I want to share with you a few examples of how I use the Bullet Journal method:
- Monthly Log, Future Log, Monthly Tasks Page, Collections — they all come from the Bullet Journal method. They help you track to-do lists, organize your days, and plan the upcoming months.
- Work Accomplishments — a list of things you made good at work, that you are proud of. That might be also useful during the annual review with your manager 😁. More importantly, it’s for you to see how many things you achieved, and how big progress you have made at work.
- Ideas— it’s a place for gathering all new concepts that you have in mind. They could be new habits you want to establish, product ideas, or blog posts, talks, and so on.
- Beauty & Health — a health appointments list like dentists, blood checks, etc. Create a list of vaccinations and allergies you have. You might find it helpful at some point.
- Long-Term Goals — think about where you want to be in the next 10 and 30 years. Prepare a list of steps that will help you achieve it.
I recorded a video about the way I approach Scribing:
What if Miracle Morning doesn’t work for you?
First of all, keep in mind that nobody is perfect. It’s not about having all “X”s in the table. It’s about observing the progress and seeing that you have done more than you actually thought possible. As it’s described in Drive, failures are absolutely normal and they help achieve mastery by continuously applying new improvements.
“Mastery is an asymptote. You can approach it. You can home in on it. You can get really, really, really close to it. But like Cézanne, you can never touch it.”
~Drive, H. Pink
You started doing the Miracle Morning, but you can’t really wake up at 6.30 am? In this case, I recommend reading Why we sleep?, where Matthew Walker explains every single aspect of good sleep. But before you pick the book and start dive in, I will give you a short summary of his tips with my personal experiences on how to improve your sleep and wake up early.
👉 #Tips
- Sleep full 8 hours.
- If you want to wake up at 6.30 am, go to bed at 10 pm (it’s around 8 hours of sleep and at least 30 minutes for tipping from side to side).
- If you go to sleep at 10 pm, go to bed 20 minutes earlier. You can read some paper books in bed or chat with your partner, and just relax.
- Don’t use your phone, kindle, TV, laptop, or basically any screen before bedtime.
- Don’t read any suspenseful book before sleep: “will she kiss him in the next chapter or not?” 😁
- Relax, silence, reading a book, or a nice talk with your partner is the best thing before you go to sleep. Try what works for you best.
- Do an experiment and track when you go sleep and what time you wake up. Make a note of how you felt before going to sleep. Have you been extremely tired? Did you have a headache? Did you watch TV? Make another note of how you woke up the next day. Did you have some obstacles to wake up at 6.30? Do this experiment for the next 14 or 30 days and you will see what distractions disturb the quality of your sleep.
- Go to sleep on a regular basis, even during weekends and holidays.
- Open the window and bring fresh air into your bedroom.
- Use yellow light in your bedroom.
- Get a hot shower before going to bed (it can improve your sleep quality by 10–15%).
- The temperature in your bedroom should be a bit above 18 degrees and not more.
👉 #Tips
Find your own place to do the Miracle Morning. It’s good to do the SAVERS in a permanent place, so it will be always natural to sit and start doing the routine while staying focused all the time.
👉 #Tips
If you are a happy mom or dad and you always take care of your kids in the morning, you might think it’s not for you as you simply lack time. If you feel it could change your life, then consciously plan your daily schedule. Discuss it with your partner and try to block some time for yourself e.g. every second day. At that time, your partner can take care of kids while you do the Miracle Morning. Find the habits in your morning routine that you can combine with childcare, for example daily running 🙂.
👉 #Tips
If you are really not a morning person, try following the routine in the evening. But keep in mind that your willpower is limited. If you drain it by doing complicated things during the day, it will be harder to follow your routine later. Charles Duhigg describes it using a „muscle” analogy:
“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”
~ The Power of Habit, C. Duhigg
However, if you feel that evening would be a better option for you, go with that. As I mentioned, Miracle Morning (also the name) is a framework. In the end, only you decide how the routine would look and only you know what works best for you.
Conclusion
Each book mentioned in the article brings some ideas and tips on how to improve your life. In this blog post, I shared all the tips that I found important and useful. The combination of all these hints is extremely powerful and bring unimaginable value. In my opinion, all these books create a coherent whole.
I do Miracle Morning since 2018. I can admit that it changed my life. I achieved many goals that I couldn’t imagine before. Bullet Journal method helped me become more organized. When looking at my Tasks page or Monthy log, I see what’s coming next. Because I have my Beauty & Healthy collection, I’m going to a doctor and I’m able to answer all their questions. Why we sleep? on the other hand, helped me increase the quality of my sleep. I often wake up rested and ready to face the challenges of the new day. Drive and Start with why helped me understand how to stay motivated and find the root of my actions and desires. Thanks to Power of Habit, I was able to replace some of my bad habits with good ones.
In this blog post, I shared with you the knowledge I gathered from all these books and learnings taken from my experiences. I hope they can help you structure your routine, stay organized, and control your life. A friend of mine once said, “control your life and don’t let life control you”. There is nothing wrong with being spontaneous. However, you can achieve a lot while living life consciously, and that’s what the morning routine and this comprehensive guide are for.
Special thanks to Michael Navarro for proofreading and making this article better.
Resources
Below I attached affiliate links to Amazon. If you use these links to buy something I may earn a commission. Thank you! 🙏 😊
- “The Miracle Morning: The 6 Habits That Will Transform Your Life Before 8AM” by Hal Elrod — Miracle Morning routine described in detail, with an amazing Hal Elrod story.
- https://miraclemorning.com/bonuses/ — Miracle Morning bonuses where you can find all examples of Clarity Questions, Wheel of Life Assessment, Your Level 10 Vision, etc.
- “The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day” Andy Puddicombe — if you want to try meditation this book might help.
- “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams” by Matthew Walker — if you want to increase the quality of your sleep, treat it as a mandatory position to read.
- “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change” by Charles Duhigg — a solid dose of scientific research on habits and practical hints on establishing the new ones and replacing the bad ones.
- “The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future” by Ryder Carroll — a method that helps you organize your day and plan upcoming months.
- “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink — an explanation about what motivates us and what to do to stay motivated.
- “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” by Simon Sinek — a must-have position if you want to learn how to find your Whys.
