How morning routines make the day
This week we look into the importance of morning routines. Our morning routines set the tone for the day and help us prepare for what the day will bring. In this episode, we discuss ways to create your own perfect morning routine. We explore how mindfulness, healthy habits and a little bit of planning can set you up for the best day ever.
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We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did. Also, just a reminder that we also post the show on YouTube and are going to posting some additional content there. Check us out there at http://betrr.io/youtube.
Here are some highlights from this episode:
- Ian quizzes March and Darren on statistics about high achievers’ sleep and wake habits from MyMorningRoutine.com website.
- How having children affects morning routines and tips for creating a “family time” morning routine.
- How Ian, Darren, and March use the “do not disturb” and “bedtime” modes to make their phones support their morning and evening routines.
- Darren gives the neighbors an 105 decibel wake-up alarm and March inadvertently burns through 5 bottles of shampoo after his recent move.
- and lots more!
We’d love to hear about your experiences and tips for successful morning routines so drop us a note on Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter and share your story with others in The Better Show community. Or you can email us at hi@bettershow.io. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Show Notes
- 2:05 — What do we mean by a “morning routine” and why your own morning routine matters
- 4:35 — Getting your mental “auto-pilot” to work for you.
- 5:17 — Ian talks about a book 📖 he’s reading titled Make Time by Jake Knapp.
- 6:30 — Research into the effects of mindfulness exercises and why adding mindfulness
- 8:35 — Why are we talking about a “morning” routine and not a “lunch” or “evening” routine?
- 9:55 — Ian shares how his morning routine has changed over time.
- 13:37 — Using your morning routine to approach the day “on the offense” instead “on the defense.”
- 16:58 — Darren shares his approach to designing his own morning routine and how it changed from his youth to adulthood.
- 21:28 — Darren shares a tip 💡 about starting your morning routine the night before.
- 22:35 — March outlines his morning routine and shares a tip 💡 about getting enough sunlight during the winter months by using a full-spectrum daylight lamp.
- 24:50 — How March tricks himself into staying faithful to his morning exercise routine.
- 27:10 — March and Ian talk about the Oura ring’s readiness score helps them start their day.
- 28:45 — Ian recommends the website My Morning Routine and talks about how having children affects one’s morning routine.
- 34:55 — How small changes or disruptions can wreak havoc on one’s morning routine.
- 39:15 —Ian quizzes March and Darren on statistics about high achievers’ sleep and wake habits.
- 41:58 — We share a tip 💡 about “do not disturb” and “daylight” and “bedtime” modes on smartphones.
- 47:35 — A tip 💡 for using your wireless router settings to limit screen time for kids.
- 48:50 — March shares tips 💡 about doing a body scan meditation in the morning to become aware of stresses that might be affecting him at the start of the day.
- 54:50 — Our personal “night before” routines to help start the next day off effectively.
Mentions
- 📖 Book: My Morning Routine
- 💻 Website: MyMorningRoutine.com
- 📖 Book: Make Time by Jake Knapp
- 👍 Product: Luma wireless router
- 👍 Product: Beurer LED Daylight Lamp
- 👍 Product: Oura or Motiv health tracking rings
- 👍 Product: Five-Minute Journal
- 📱 App: Freedom
Episode Transcript
Darren Austin — 00:00:00 — Sorry, I had to trim the wick. That’s about to get smoky in here. One more, one more maintenance item. Right on the list of things I got to do.
Ian Mikutel — 00:00:10 — You know how a lot of podcasts, we’ll pick out their podcast episode title from something they said in the episode.
Darren Austin — 00:00:15 — Right? Right.
Ian Mikutel — 00:00:16 — It doesn’t really have to relate at all. If you had a live audience, you know, like rather than pick out their favorite five terms and then we pick one trim, the wick would definitely be the name of this episode.
Darren Austin — 00:00:30 — That’s awesome.
Ian Mikutel — 00:00:32 — Hold on, I got to trim the wick.
Darren Austin — 00:00:34 — Hold on, I got to trim the wick.
Ian Mikutel — 00:00:38 — Welcome to episode 56 of The Better Show. Today, we dive into the fascinating world of morning routines.
Ian Mikutel — 00:00:54 — It is a show for people who want to get better by people who love getting better and that’s that’s us.
March Rogers — 00:01:01 — When you start thinking about all the different ways that we can improve and we can get better and we can help the people around us get better. It’s such a wide world like covers almost every aspect of human experience in daily life.
Darren Austin — 00:01:14 — I’m pretty excited about building a community of likeminded people.
Ian Mikutel — 00:01:20 — Hello everybody and welcome to the better show. I’m Ian Mikutel.
Darren Austin — 00:01:23 — I’m Darren Austin.
March Rogers — 00:01:24 — And I’m March Rogers.
Ian Mikutel — 00:01:25 — And on this episode we are up before the crack of dawn. Not really, but we tried and we are talking about morning routines today. Guys, this is one of my obsessions over the past year. I think I’ve mentioned it previously on the show and you know what’s funny is this topic, I don’t know if you saw this either while researching or the past just year while we have had the show, but it’s become a bit of a hot topic I would say on the Internet. It’s definitely a trend. It’s almost trendy, I hate to say, but I’m okay with that because I love it so much. It’s effective.
Darren Austin — 00:01:59 — Yeah, it matters. It matters.
Ian Mikutel — 00:02:01 — Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, real quick, when we talk about morning routines, just in case you’re, you don’t really know what we’re referring to. We’re just talking really simply about like that. Like what do you do when you wake up? What’s the series of events that you go through a in your to kickstart your day? That’s, that’s all it is and it could be different activities you do or rituals or a little hacks and tricks, but it’s all in the, I think essence of the whole show, which is just like have you have, you have a better day and we’re all about having a better life and all those days add up to something good. So I think a morning routine is just super vital from that standpoint and we’ll talk lots more about, I think our personal experiences with it and so on. But I just wanted to throw that at the top because I actually realized like we say morning routines and I guess it’s kind of straightforward, but no one ever takes the time to really explain it.
March Rogers — 00:02:53 — No. We just like to clarify.
Ian Mikutel — 00:02:54 — Are you talking about, you know, is this a religious act or, or spiritual thing? Like what, what are we talking about? It could be a lot of different things. Um, and it’s actually very personal and unique per person, which is a fun aspect of it too. So, uh, yeah, let’s dive into a guy. So March, uh, what did you find in your scouring of the interwebs around why morning routines matter?
March Rogers — 00:03:16 — Yeah, well, I think the first thing to be aware of is that even if you think you don’t have a morning routine, you probably already do. It is just the series of things that you habitually do every morning and, and we all live our lives so much on autopilot that you’re probably doing the same things over and over again.
Ian Mikutel — 00:03:35 — That is a really good point because a, we’ll talk about it later in personal section, but I at first was thinking through the whole history of my life and I was like, I don’t think I had a morning routine for the first 28 years of my life. And then I looked back and I went, oh wait, that was a routine. It was a bad one. Right? So we’ll talk about. Right?
March Rogers — 00:03:55 — And then the question becomes whether, whether that is the routine that you want to have and you know, I think you can ask yourself the same fundamental questions that we ask ourselves all the time on this show, which is, you know, are you enjoying your life? Are you achieving the goals you want to achieve and are you, are you happy and healthy with the way that your life is going? And if there’s things that you think could be improved or tweaked than a, a morning routine that has been designed, uh, and is very done with a lot of intention, might actually be really helpful for you. And I think morning routines that are first and foremost about mindfulness, about deliberately choosing how to use your time. Now I will say, and we talk about some of the benefits of that mindfulness and why that would be helpful to build into your day. The other part of it is, is that you can actually make the, the autopilot inclination of the human brain work for you. So rather than have this sort of art, rather than be on autopilot of checking Twitter as soon as you wake up in bed or you know, always going to bed late because you’ve got, you know, one more thing on social media to look at.
March Rogers — 00:04:55 — Instead you can use the autopilot to say, oh, I don’t want to have to exert willpower and think about what it is that I want to accomplish every day if it’s just built in to to my habits. And so I think it’s a combination of being mindful in the design of your morning and then being able to use the fact that you can be on autopilot to not have to read, decide to do those things every single day.
Ian Mikutel — 00:05:17 — I was just going to add, there’s a new book that I am reading right now called Make Time and that’s by Jean Knapp and he wrote the Sprint Book. He was previously at Google ventures and we’ve talked about that in the past, but he has a really fun metaphor that he uses to talk about the autopilot stuff and he just calls it. It’s essentially like creating default settings for yourself, so settings in your phone and your computer for different things. You want to program default settings for yourself as a human, and I just loved that concept. I thought that was really fun.
March Rogers — 00:05:52 — So I have a couple of things and you know we’ve talked about mindfulness before and the it in the context of meditation or something, but in general, mindfulness practice, which doesn’t have to be as elaborate as meditation is turned out to be very beneficial for you, so related to stress reduction. For example, there was one study where participants were randomly assigned to an eight week mindfulness based stress reduction group and then they were compared with a control group. I’m on measures of depression, anxiety and even psychopathology and they measured neural activity in an FMRI machine while they were watching sad films, which is an interesting little experiment. Yeah. Researchers found that the, the, the, the researchers found that the participants who experienced mindfulness based stress reduction had significantly less anxiety, depression, and even somatic distress, like tension or pain in their body compared with the control group and the FMRI data indicated the mindfulness group had less neural reactivity when they were exposed to the film.
March Rogers — 00:06:49 — So basically they were harder to knock off their center of balance and they were less likely to be distressed by seeing or hearing about something sad. So you could easily imagine replacing that sad film with the morning news or whatever the latest, you know, a thing being sent around Facebook is. Those things. If you’re not in a good sort of well balanced place, they can really linger with you and they can affect your whole day. So stress reduction is definitely an advantage to mindfulness. Fascinating. One I thought was that also you can boost working memory, which just makes it more effective. So there’s a 2010 study that documented the benefits of mindfulness meditation amongst a, a military group who have participated in eight week mindfulness training. And then, uh, there was also a non meditating group and a group of non meditating civilians just in case they were something in the military.
Ian Mikutel — 00:07:39 — I’ve heard about this study. Yeah. Yeah.
Darren Austin — 00:07:40 — Yeah. I remember seeing a reference to it as well.
March Rogers — 00:07:44 — So the thing is both the military groups, the meditating and the non meditating ones, we’re in a highly stressful period because they were just about to be deployed overseas, which you can imagine how stressful that is.
Darren Austin — 00:07:54 — And then the all kinds of things.
March Rogers — 00:07:56 — Yeah. And then the researchers found that the non-meditators millet military group had decreased working memory capacity over time. It just sort of started wearing away at their ability to just think and focus and remember a. whereas the working memory capacity amongst the meditating soldiers was sort of protected during that time. So that again, these are just a couple of examples of that. This, this mindfulness. It’s not just to make you feel good, it also has these very functional effects on your brain also improves your focus, can even improve people’s perceived relationship satisfaction. So it’s worth doing that. And we’ll talk. I think when we get into some of the tips and tricks about about really specific mindfulness things you can do as part of your morning routine, but I think the whole designing of your morning in general as a designer, obviously I have a little bit of a bias there
Darren Austin — 00:08:41 — It’s good for you.
March Rogers — 00:08:42 — It’s good for you. One of the things that people ask, like why? Why is this a morning routine? Why not a lunchtime routine? Why not a nighttime routine and the morning is really where you’re likely to be most refreshed and focused as long as you’ve got a good night’s and your willpower. I always pictured this as like a health bar and a video game. Your willpower will have been refilled by a good night’s sleep hopefully. Uh, and so it’s the best time to start new habits and things like that. And also for a lot of people with a nine to five life, it’s much easier to make time for yourself in the morning before the days really gotten going than it is to carve out a chunk of time in the middle of the day. So there you go. That’s why the morning is probably the best time to be trying this sort of stuff out.
Darren Austin — 00:09:21 — Well, I think it’s also, it’s, it’s the start of, of what you’re, it’s the start of your day. So it’s just like anything else in life, uh, a strong start ensures sort of a stronger. Right.
March Rogers — 00:09:33 — I like it. Yup. Yup.
Ian Mikutel — 00:09:34 — Yeah. I love that you even just use the title of that book to make time. It’s funny that we, we feel that way these days, right? You feel like you need to make time. Um, and I think that that even just in our subconscious is a really telling sign of how most people states are. Their default state is these days and that’s a great transition. I’ll, I’ll use to go into our personal experiences because for me, I would say literally for the past 29 years. So we started this show about a year ago, ish. We’re coming up on our one year anniversary, I believe, and I was reflecting before this episode and I was trying to pinpoint the time when I started caring about morning routines and it really was when I decided that I wanted to start waking up earlier and so to take a step back, first off what was my life for 29 of my 30 years on earth.
Ian Mikutel — 00:10:25 — It was. I’m A. I come from a family of night owls and I like to burn the midnight oil as they say, and I typically doing that then need to sleep in as much as humanly possible because I’m up late and I will use whatever my first thing in the next day is as a demarcation of when I need to get up and so I’m trying to maximize sleep up until that event. Right. And so to me mornings were the time when I recover and get the sleep from the night before and that was it. Like I didn’t have a concept in my head of really ever doing anything in the morning because this was from as early as I could remember how I operated and there was a lot of reasons for that. Like I do really believe that there is something to the whole, I don’t know, genetic disposition, a predisposition around being a night owl. And there’s a little bit of research around that. I, I still think it’s kind of in my head. I don’t necessarily believe it. I think anybody can be anything they want if they just actually build up the habits.
Ian Mikutel — 00:11:23 — But suffice to say I was that person. And then in addition I had weird stuff happen. Like I grew up in the time when like personal computers became mainstream. I was lucky enough to have one in my bedroom that and, and like kids these days have it way worse with phones and tablets and stuff. But I had a desktop in my bedroom during like my high school years when I was like controlling my own schedule because my parents were pretty nice and like let me have a lot of responsibility. But that came at a cost because I was one of these like, you know, I, I’m going to do a lot of extra activities after school and then I’m going to have a ton of AP homework and stuff. And then I also was chatting with friends and try and have a social life and so by the time I actually got any homework done also because I’m like a d a and also obsessive compulsive on my work. That was a bad combination. Right. So I’m finishing work being a night owl, doing side projects in high school, staying up till 1:00 AM, then having an alarm set for 6:30 AM to get up for school. And so there’s no way I’m getting up at five. I have a morning routine. Right.
Darren Austin — 00:12:23 — That is the definition of burning the candle at both ends like that. Exactly. You’re stretched on both ends of the day and in your life and everything.
Ian Mikutel — 00:12:32 — So here’s the, here’s the funny part of the story. So that’s, that’s Ian’s life for, for literally, I would say 29 out of 11 it went. I graduated, I went to high school, same kind of thing. It’s probably worse in college obviously because everybody is in that mode, everybody’s out, you know, having fun or whatever. And then I’d go to work. Luckily got a job at Microsoft where hours are flexible. This was not your typical, like everybody’s in at 8:00 AM, right? Like that’s not the culture. And so in a weird way that actually just contributed more to that lifestyle, uh, it probably made it worse. And so, so, um, it, it’s funny. So then we start this podcast and I think it was the summer before we started it, I decided just kind of randomly that I really enjoyed waking up early. Like I would do it once in a while, not to have a morning but to just wake up earlier. So I would still sleep in that very moment and then get up at seven and then start my day. Right. Like, because I had a really early meeting or I need to prep for something or whatever. And I always loved it.
Ian Mikutel — 00:13:30 — And we’ve talked about this on the show before because I feel like, and I think this is a theme, if you want to think about a morning routine, you can feel like you’re on the authenticity for the rest of the day. You don’t feel like you are on the defensive as soon as you wake up. And that is just an immensely awesome feeling if you have not experienced that. If you are, if anything I’ve just said about my first 29 years on this planet resonated with you. If you’re that person, like just suck it up one day and wake up like an extra three hours early, even if you’re exhausted and you will probably feel amazing by the end of the day because you weren’t bombarded when you first woke up with a zillion notifications and, and whatever.
Darren Austin — 00:14:10 — Um, yeah. It does give you a start to get a jump a headstart, right?
Ian Mikutel — 00:14:14 — Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And uh, just sort of wrap up my story. The funny thing was I decided that I wanted to have a morning routine. I decided I just want to wake up earlier because I enjoyed that feeling. And the funny, the funny ending of the story is what I realized was, oh my gosh, I like, I’m waking up at 5:00 AM every day and I don’t have my first meeting till nine or 10. I got a lot of time on my hands for the first time in my life, in my entire life. And I didn’t. I literally was like, what do I do with this chunk of time? It’s amazing. Like nobody’s messaging me randomly because no one else is up and I don’t have any work do. So it was just this profoundly awesome feeling of like, Huh, I can like do stuff for me. And so I started researching this world of like, how do I craft a morning routine? And I fell down this rabbit hole of the, Oh, this is a thing, guys will talk about it in the tips and tricks section. But this is like, I’m not the only person waking up early and like figuring out what to do with my life.
Ian Mikutel — 00:15:14 — And, uh, and it turns out there’s most of the world, a lot of the productive, most productive people in the world, CEOs, four star generals, uh, you name it, they’re there doing this and there’s things I can learn from them. And so I will talk about in the tips and tricks about the things I’ve learned and why become so obsessed with this. But that is my personal story in a nutshell and how I got to where I am. It was actually completely by accident and I’ve never been that person. And so it’s, it’s been an interesting ride so far.
Darren Austin — 00:15:41 — Well, you have the perspective from both ends too, right? I mean, you’re coming at it from like, okay, I’ve, uh, I’ve seen the other end of the spectrum and that didn’t seem sustainable. So let’s get into this other direction. And now you’re on this thing where you’re optimize, optimize, optimize. Right? Right.
Ian Mikutel — 00:15:58 — So I, I would say in this whole show, one of the things that is always in the back of my head is can I, with every ounce or fiber in my body say that something is truly better than something else, right? Like I think that oftentimes when we talk about stuff, it doesn’t matter the topic, it’s so hard to say something is just like undeniably better and you should just do x, right? Like oftentimes we’ll end the discussion with, well it depends on the person and you should consider this and dah, dah, dah, dah. This is one of those cases where I can say for an absolute fact, waking up a bit earlier, having a morning routine is just better for you. Like there’s no, there’s nothing in my body that says, well, you know, it was nicer to be up late and then wake up, rushed in the morning a cup. No, it’s just not like I can tell you I did it for a long time. It isn’t,
Darren Austin — 00:16:51 — It’s true. I mean I think that that probably is a good. That speaks to me and the reason why I think about a morning routine being important. So to me, an organized morning routine, it’s critical for me to maintain control over my time because I’m hit during the day with so many different distractions and pressures and frankly it’s just sort of gotten worse. I was sort of reminded, um, about a quote I read in a book. I was looking it up here before the show and I couldn’t find it, but I’ll find it put in the show notes. It was a book on mindfulness and thinking about how to recapture the quality of your life and, and um, the quote was something like, the more time saving devices we invent, the less time we seem to have. And it was contrasting life on a farm before all of technology and now like a modern society with the smartphone and for the push notifications that all the things coming at you and all the social media pressures and everything.
Darren Austin — 00:17:48 — And it was like, if really feel like you don’t have enough time, go to a retreat where you don’t have any electricity or devices, you will find out that there is a lot of time. And the reality is we all live in this. We have to live in this world that we, that we’re in. I mean, unless you’re really gonna, make a dramatic change in life. So how do you manage it? Right? How do I balance the things I’ve got to do to continue earning a living and being productive and having a fruitful life with friends and everything is. So to me, that’s what the morning routine is about. And that’s why I think it’s important to have one that’s organized. And it’s also why I think the military folks that you mentioned, Ian also subscribed to this because they’ve got a lot of gay. They have to get a lot of things done. It’s mission critical. They don’t have a good routine. Uh, I think they go off the rails, not get the things done. So.
Ian Mikutel — 00:18:38 — Hey everybody, Ian here. Hope you’re enjoying this episode. A quick break to talk about the only sponsor for this episode, which is actually our own newsletter, The Better Show Bits and just like the podcast, it is a newsletter for people who want to get better and here’s how it works. Would you like to get a very short email each Friday with a roundup of our best stuff that we found to get more out of life that could include interesting new articles. We found stories of crazy experiments we’re testing out ourselves or my personal favorite, which is simply new products that we’ve discovered that you can try out if you would like to receive this or just check it out, head on over to bettershow.io/newsletter. Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one. All right, that’s it. Let’s get back to the show.
Ian Mikutel — 00:19:30 — So, so, uh, Darren, what has your morning routine been like throughout your life? Like a real quickly, like what was it like when you were a kid? How did it. Did it change at all when you became kind of a lake, let’s say living on your own, when you moved out or whatever, and then as you’ve risen up through your career and had more responsibility and you’ve managed teams, did it change again then? Uh, because I know that that might be a factor in it.
Darren Austin — 00:19:53 — Yeah. I think when I was a kid I didn’t really think about having much of a morning routine. I just sort of played it by ear and it was fine. Yeah. I think I had, I had a, my life wasn’t too hectic. I just, I had a routine of weekly daily sort of routine, but my morning routine was pretty much get up, get ready, go to school, probably forgot to do homework, cranked it out really quick, made it, you know, got it by. It got very regimented when I went to college and I started doing things. I don’t know why, I think I just decided I really want to nail this. I want to do a good job on this. And I just got organized and so I started doing interesting things like, and I highly recommend this for any college students out there, like read the chapter that you’re going to cover in class like the day or two days before I would actually read that chapter.
Darren Austin — 00:20:43 — I would take some light notes before ever having even heard about it in class. And then in class I can actually tone, like tune in and listen and I could take some additional notes to augment it.
Ian Mikutel — 00:20:55 — You can actually tune out then.
Darren Austin — 00:20:56 — No, no, no. But here’s the deal. What that meant was I like when class was over, it’s like I got this, I’m already studied for the test and I w I could go out like happy art shit, count me in baby. I’m in for happy hour because I already got this thing covered. So that’s sort of the routine that I had in school, uh, as I’ve been an adult. And in career it’s changed a little bit, but it’s mostly just functional stuff. So like I, the single biggest tip I will give people about a morning routine from my experience anyway is my morning routine starts the night before, so I pick out my clothes for the next day in the evening. Right. And I just, I literally just pick them out. I don’t know why it saves me five to 10 minutes at least every single morning if I pick them out the night before, I don’t know why I can’t seem to make a decision in the morning about whether I want to wear this shirt or that shirt. But the night before it seems to vary really easy. So I do that.
Darren Austin — 00:21:52 — The other thing I do is sort of take a quick glance over my calendar for the next day. I start jotting down my priorities because you guys know I’m a productivity planner kind of guy. And then that that’s the, that’s the biggest trick. And then beyond that, it’s just my regular stuff. I wake up, do a little bit of meditation, I log my sleep and mood in weight. So that’s something I do sort of very regimented. And then I do my regular routine, uh, tend to listen to the news while I’m getting ready. I have this whole thing where I get the dogs going, my, we have a couple dogs, one of them needs medication, so. And she, she’s challenging so that takes a little bit of time. Uh, but yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much my jam.
Ian Mikutel — 00:22:33 — That’s really cool.
Darren Austin — 00:22:34 — How about you march, you what? What’s your routine?
March Rogers — 00:22:36 — My routine these days is usually includes some kind of exercise, a little bit of self reflection, a, a, a thing. I’ll talk about the tips and tricks called a body scan. Oh yeah. And in the, as we’re getting into, we’re recording this in October and it’s, we’re getting into the winter months where where I am in Ireland didn’t. Same thing in, in Seattle is the days start getting noticeably shorter and a little dreary. And so I start using a full spectrum lamp for a little bit in the morning and of course coffee. So I don’t, I don’t eat breakfast, but I definitely. The coffee is a central part of my morning routine.
Ian Mikutel — 00:23:17 — I remember for a long time ago on earlier episodes you talked about, uh, you were training for races and you had, I think, found a routine of like jumping out of bed and getting right into the running gear.
March Rogers — 00:23:30 — Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. So I, um, actually all of the deliberate morning routine stuff for me started with, with exercise probably I was in my early twenties when, because I was, I was whatever the opposite of a jock is when I was a teenager. I did almost almost no sort of sport or, or organized activity at all. And in my twenties I discovered the joy of physical activity and I started running and that was where I was like, okay, I need a time everyday where I’m going to run. And so it was going to be morning before I had to get off to college and so and then work. And so it all became about how do I structure my time so that I have time to go run. And then I also started, this was the first time I started noticing this has been true. Honestly, my whole life is that there’s days when you’re motivation is high and you’re like, yeah, and you’re going to leap out of bed and you’re all at, you’ve been wearing your running gear all night long in anticipation and you’ve run out the door and it’s a fantastic time.
March Rogers — 00:24:27 — But those are not everyday, right. Everybody’s going to go through like a sort of highs and lows in regards to their motivation and so a lot of my routines started becoming about how do I still get out the door on those days when I really would rather stay in bed.
Darren Austin — 00:24:39 — Ooh. Is that the coffee? Is that what coffee does there? Is that the exercise?
March Rogers — 00:24:43 — Well, the routine for me breaks down to I don’t make a decision about whether I’m gonna get ready to go for a run. I’m not like looking out the window saying, oh, it’s this sort of day. I’m not even going to make another choice about evaluating whether it’s going to be a run day or not until I’m standing on the doorstep in my running gear because the number of delicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then. And then I’m like, okay, okay, so I’m out here. Yeah, sure. It’s a little rainy. Shirts, a little cold, but I’m already out here. Right. I like sometimes I’ll deliberately close the door behind myself so I’m going to have to like dig my key back out. Sometimes I even will go as far as if it’s a bad day, like I’ll put my headphones in, I’ll dial in my music or my podcast I’m going to listen to. And then that’s when I sort of let myself look around and say, what kind of day is it? Because it’s just. I dunno, it’s about. It’s about making that autopilot work for me.
Ian Mikutel — 00:25:38 — Sorry, I’ve just been distracted this entire time by researching the Antonym of jock and it turns out it’s not an easy thing to find answers to so far. It depends on where you’re looking at. Sofas, bud, lazy bones, loafer sloths. I love sloth. Just these are just ridiculous. Good. Is that a good answer? Them? I apologize, but sorry for distracting everybody. I just needed to find that out. You have to be wondering.
March Rogers — 00:26:05 — No, that’s. That’s just funny actually. There’s a whole other tangent here about like the journey I went on to discover that I had a body that was capable of athletic activity, right? Because there’s so much when you, when I say chuck, I don’t just mean someone who does sports, right or is physically fit. It’s the whole thing about that, like personality and identity and the group that they’re a part of and the way that they’re perceived, right? That I rejected that version of jock as identity, but in the process I accidentally threw the baby out with the bathwater, which is actually being fit and athletic is great. Uh, so. But it took me a long time to figure that out. Uh, yeah. So I know like, let’s say I have, I actually started waking up very early, not of my own volition, but because my daughter would wake up super early. And so now my morning routine, like a normal, I would say late wake up for me is 6:00 AM.
March Rogers — 00:26:59 — Uh, and I’ve just adjusted to that. And so I go to bed pretty early. I go to bed about 9:30 or 10 to make sure I get the full seven and a half, eight hours, and then it starts now. And a new part of my routine that we can talk about a little bit later as well is I got the aura ring, which is. Yeah, you guys know this ring, right? It’s like a sleep tracker. Health tracker, fitness tracker in the form of ring. And uh, uh, I see the, I have the V2.1
Darren Austin — 00:27:28 — and Ian still wearing his V1 because he hasn’t gotten around to upgrade.
March Rogers — 00:27:33 — He’s got his. I see the V2 right there.
Darren Austin — 00:27:36 — Look at the V1 is on his finger or are ringing.
Ian Mikutel — 00:27:41 — I’m doing to date. It’s got to be better.
Darren Austin — 00:27:45 — Dueling Banjos. I like it. You can see the right hand left hand difference.
Ian Mikutel — 00:27:49 — That’s right. That’s great.
March Rogers — 00:27:51 — So what’s cool about the ring is that every morning you check and it kind of gives you this report on your readiness score. You know what you’re a liger lowest heart rate was over the night how your sleep was, what your heart rate variability. Yeah, exactly aligned. And so what’s really cool about it is it’s, it’s both, for me at least, a really great mindfulness sort of focus of what sort of day am I going to have based on my readiness score. Like should I take it easy? You should I be going hard, what should I be doing? A lot of exercise, what should I be doing? But it’s also a reflection of like what choices did I make, particularly about the evening that I might want to either continue doing or adjust or stopped doing based on how my night went. So I’ve actually found that to be a really cool sort of moment of inflection that I’ve added into my morning routine.
Ian Mikutel — 00:28:37 — Yeah, I’m glad you brought up the, uh, your, your uh, daughter. Because one of the things that I, we could transition into a tips and tricks and hacks as well. One of the things that is a tip and trick and hack is a resource that I would like to tell everybody about. It’s an amazing website and it’s called my morning routines. So you could just go do a search, will have in the show notes. So this is a site that was started, I believe in around 2012 and it is a, an archive and it’s an innocent online magazine. It’s a blog and they interview high-performing interesting people and every week they post one new in depth interview with them about what they’re specifically morning routine is.
Darren Austin — 00:29:19 — I have not gotten an invitation yet. I don’t know why we’re, I haven’t. We been invited.
Ian Mikutel — 00:29:25 — Well, you know, they have like four star generals and CEOs and the Olympic gold medalist. So maybe we’re just not on the top of their list yet. You could always try.
Darren Austin — 00:29:36 — I don’t, I don’t. You don’t understand it. I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ian Mikutel — 00:29:39 — Well we’ll explain after the show, Darren, you don’t want to put it on their credit, but. So this is a super interesting site because you can learn from the best and you can also start to correlate patterns between people’s morning routines, which is really, really cool. So what I started to realize when I was reading through a bunch of these interviews and prep for the show is that one of the biggest factor is that every single person didn’t matter, their background at matter, their job listed was becoming a parent and how drastically that changed their current team or if they did not have one in their life, it forced them to start one. And so I wanted to bring that up in two ways. One is obviously the ramifications if you on yourself, if you are a parent having a great morning routine, you could make being a parent better. But there’s actually another side of this which I just wanted to briefly pause and mentioned, which is if you are listening to this and you either are a parent now or plan to be, you should highly think about, uh, the fact that when you are, when you have young kids, and I was thinking about this as each of us spoke, we all kind of said we didn’t really have a strong morning routine when we were younger.
Ian Mikutel — 00:30:46 — I had a sneaky suspicion, a, correct me if I’m wrong, guys, that, that probably means that our parents did not either. Um, and it, it, it reminds me of when we did the episode on food and we talked about what were the foods that you ate when you grew up and we all had these really strong recollections of like what we ate as a family growing up because you as a kid aren’t making those choices. You’re eating whatever your parents decide to eat as the food for your house. And I think when you’re a child, it’s the same exact thing for your morning routine. If you have parents that are rushing to get ready for work, then you’re rushing to get ready for school. If you have parents that are getting up early and have a very regimented morning routine, you might get a little bit of that from osmosis as a child. And especially if your parents invite you into that process. That’s the key, right? Like, and I just thought about that. I was like, wow, I never, I never would’ve thought of that. You know, my, my dad had a morning routine, it was like drink coffee and read the paper.
Ian Mikutel — 00:31:42 — It wasn’t, you know, anything involving me really. Not, not that he didn’t want to, but like he had his thing to do and my mom was like a more night our person and she had her own thing and then I was just rushing for school and sleeping in and so
Darren Austin — 00:31:56 — I could say like, I’m not sure that, that, that doesn’t ring true in my world I think. I think my parents had a good morning routine. I just in maybe I had one but just wasn’t conscious of it, you know, kinda how you said like you want, but you really did. I. Maybe I did, but because I kind of did the same things but it just wasn’t anything I thought about where it is today. It is something I think about.
March Rogers — 00:32:19 — Right. I think I do think that a lot of it has to do with like, whether it’s just the normal sort of, oh this is just what we do and it’s kind of a little. You’re not aware of it as a, as a kid. It was interesting. You reminded me of like a little piece of the morning routine. I live to my, uh, my grandparents house from about the age of two to eight and every night before bed my grandmother would set the table for breakfast the following morning and then, yeah, like bowls and plates and cups and saucers and spoons and stuff. And so part of the morning routine is you’d come down and the kitchen is sort of, you know, immaculate ready. The table is laid and ready and you sit down and everybody has breakfast at the same time. And my grandfather would always just be like, yeah, he would just be like two minutes later than everybody else. And he would come in and he’d make his instant coffee because he would have coffee and the rest of that have tea. So he had his own cup and everyone else had shared a pot of tea.
March Rogers — 00:33:15 — And just, you know, just like I could picture the color of the orange plastic box that the cereal was stored in. My grandmother would buy the cereal and take it out of its packaging and put it into this sort of like special type of word that was the airtight. So she, she had a really strong routine, but I never thought of it as a routine because it was just. I just flowed through it.
Ian Mikutel — 00:33:38 — Yeah. Yeah. That’s actually. I’m glad you said I like the push back. You guys or Darren that you were saying is in. Um, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll talk about a couple of tips that I got from reading some of these routines from the site, which I highly recommend everybody does. But one of the things maybe to build on what you’re saying is I think it comes down to the thing march, sending the top of the show, which is being intentional. And so for example, I was reading the morning routine that was recently just posted of Jake Knapp who is the author of that book that I was talking about earlier and he was saying that for the past 10 years, he and his wife, they have a 13 year old, I think in a six year old. And he said for the past 10 years, they, they have a very intentional morning routine where they, they bring, they make oatmeal for the whole family and they sit down and every day the four of them the meal together and then he walks one of his, he walks his 13 year old to school and then he runs home as exercise.
Ian Mikutel — 00:34:29 — But like, that’s a very intentional decision they made to do as a, as parents to say we’re gonna make the breakfast. So when the kids come down they’re not like, you know, searching for their own cereals and doing their own thing. Like it’s ready.
Darren Austin — 00:34:41 — It’s one step ahead. Yeah.
Ian Mikutel — 00:34:43 — Yeah. So that was nice. I think it’s being intentional. But um, so anyway, that that’s some of the things I want to. Let’s jump into the tips and tricks and hacks. We’ve kind of really started to dive into that.
Darren Austin — 00:34:55 — Do that. I gotta ask you guys, because I had an experience this morning, but I’m and um, because my morning routine. So I’ve introduced a new thing into my routine and I’m wondering if you guys have ever done this and if or if you’ve ever been disrupted in your morning routine and what happens there? I’ll tell you quickly what I’m talking about. So uh, we have a house alarm and I got out of the habit of setting it because we were doing some construction and I disabled it or whatever and didn’t set it and I’m trying to do that now in the morning or in the evening, set the alarm, go to bed. I can’t seem to get unsetting the alarm, like disabling the alarm into my morning routine this morning is we’re getting ready for this podcast. The reason I was a couple of minutes late getting online here with, with, with you guys, I go through my morning routine and it is just like just March, just like you said, it’s like autopilot and I’m taking it on the surfing the wave of the autopilot man and it’s great and all of a sudden woo house alarm goes off.
Darren Austin — 00:35:58 — The dogs are outside, running around. I outsource. It was actually hilarious, although maybe not for the neighbors. So my neighbors are listening to this show right now. Apologies for the early morning wake up call. Uh, but yeah, it’s so funny how just a small little change in your morning routine could just throw you completely off kilter. So anyway, I’m curious if you guys heard anything like that.
March Rogers — 00:36:22 — I, I have this thing and I’m actually going through it at the moment which is. So we moved over to Ireland so we’re in a new house and a new lab and so it’s funny how much your environment dictates your rhythms and your routines. And so one of the things my daughter loves to play with anything that’s like soap or shampoo or anything which is fine in a controlled environment, but in an uncontrolled environment she’ll like empty out an entire bottle of shampoo to the tub.
Darren Austin — 00:36:46 — Fill it with the suds if given the opportunity. Hey, you know, and the place smells great. So what do you want?
March Rogers — 00:36:52 — The bathtub has never been cleaner, but we don’t, we don’t tend to, you know, especially, you know, if we have nice stuff, we don’t leave it out, right. Like we are, it’s in a little lock box in our bedroom and we bring it into the bathroom like a little kid, like, you know, like if you guys ever went to camp or something or you stayed in a hostel, it’s kinda like that you’re like, you bring your stuff in and out and I can’t for the life of me remember to take my shampoo back in with me after I’m done with the shower. And I seriously, like, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but we have lost probably five bottles of shampoo to the gigantic suds monster. And, and my wife at this point, my crystal was just irritated with me. She was like, why did you forget it? And I was like, Oh, I’ll remember tomorrow. And I didn’t, uh, we lost out the bottle and then she got more and more angry and now she’s out the other side and she just stares at me like, what’s wrong with you? Like, it’s almost funny, right? She’s staring at me with pity.
Darren Austin — 00:37:50 — Oh, I love it.
March Rogers — 00:37:51 — So and I haven’t been able to get my brain to, to, to adjust to that. There’s something. What I need to do is there’s something happening in my routine when I get out of the shower that is blocking my mind from noticing this, this thing that I’ve left there. Right. So I, I have to. Maybe I’ll, I’ll, I can trick myself because you can build these triggers and habits, right? Like maybe it’s a sticky note that says shampoo, exclamation mark. That I just stick on the wall on my way in or something. Let me give you a tick.
Darren Austin — 00:38:16 — Let me give you a tip. Because I’ve been in situations similar to put the shampoo bottle in a different location. Like if you have it in your hand, you’re washing your hair, put it, don’t put it where it goes, put it on the or or where you’re going to get into it again. And it just that smart a different location. It’s going to trigger for you.
March Rogers — 00:38:35 — Okay. Alright. I will, I will try that. I’ll try it. Yeah.
Ian Mikutel — 00:38:37 — Yeah, so in the last 15 minutes of this episode, let’s get to our tips and tricks and hacks. This is what people have been beating for. They’re like, all right guys, let’s, let’s help me out here. So I have some really specific things that I want people to try out. If you’re listening to this and you haven’t done it and I think you guys both do as well. So my number one thing is actually, well first off it’s go to the mall, my morning routine site and read and learn from people who have interesting morning routines, right? These are highly effective people, highly productive people, highly successful people, and you, like I said earlier, you will notice patterns, which is one of the coolest things. And so, um, that site actually started to look at statistics from all their interviews. They’ve interviewed over 300 people. And so for example, uh, I’m going to do a quick quiz for you guys. I don’t know if you saw it in the show notes. So if you did just pretend like you didn’t in guests.
March Rogers — 00:39:31 — No, I haven’t. I haven’t.
Ian Mikutel — 00:39:32 — Great. Alright, what do you think the average bedtime was and the average wake time for these people?
March Rogers — 00:39:39 — How many people?
Ian Mikutel — 00:39:40 — This was about 300 interviews since 2012 with four star general cCEOs, Olympic gold medalists, all facts. All walks of life. March. I’ll start with what do you think the bedtime and wake up is?
March Rogers — 00:39:52 — Okay. I think bedtime is probably, I dunno, 11:00 PM.
Ian Mikutel — 00:39:59 — You nailed it. It’s 10:57 PM.
March Rogers — 00:40:01–10:57 and then there’s something psychologically good about going to bed. Like it’s like something that’s 7.99 as opposed to $8. Like going to bed at 10:55 feels like going to bed early.
Ian Mikutel — 00:40:13 — A trillion percent. Also by the way, sneaky suspicion from using the aura ring for the past like two or three years. I think it actually likes that more too. It will raise your score. You shouldn’t. You should try that. I just don’t.
Darren Austin — 00:40:26 — You are hacking the aura ring algorithm.
Ian Mikutel — 00:40:32 — Yeah. Of course, I am.
March Rogers — 00:40:33 — And then, wake up. Let me see. It was probably early risers at 9. What would the average out to. But these are all people who are high achievers, right? I’m going to say don’t know, 6:30, maybe.
Ian Mikutel — 00:40:45 — Nailed at 6:24 AM,
March Rogers — 00:40:49–6:24. That’s actually goes back earlier.
Darren Austin — 00:40:51 — That’s actually the two things I would have guessed too, because I saw this actually when you said that my morning routine.com. I went there and checked it out and I immediately went to the stats page, which is where I saw those. Yeah, and that’s exactly what.
Ian Mikutel — 00:41:02 — The crazy thing about it though, is that that means that the people are averaging around six and a half hours of sleep, which is not enough sleep for most people, which totally plays into why the whole world is sleep deprived thing you like. Most people need eight hours. That’s the average and then below and above it. But it’s just interesting. Uh, but there is a lot of value in going to bed a little bit before midnight. We’ve seen from research, uh, in case you. And that’s one of the tips I wanted to give people that I’ve been finding. It’s crazy. Another thing that you will notice with the ordering, March, if you actually try getting the same amounts of sleep, but then shifting it before or after midnight, it is ridiculous how much better value the sleep you will get is it? Whether it’s the aura ring score, how you feel, the amount of deep sleep you see there is something with our circadian rhythms and how that works that like it’s just really as an so anyway. I don’t want to believe at that point. That’s the interesting stat there. Read up on other people’s morning routines.
Ian Mikutel — 00:41:57 — The number one thing I wanted to give people that I have implemented in my life which has been really helpful is do you guys know about, not the do not disturb feature on your phone, but the fact that that you can now schedule it on android and iPhone to be a predetermined set of hours.
Darren Austin — 00:42:17 — Yes. I did know about that.
March Rogers — 00:42:18 — When I upgraded to iOS 12. It actually started picking up on what my wake up alarm was and tying it to that, which yes, I think it did buy it.
Darren Austin — 00:42:25 — Oh, that’s pretty smart.
Ian Mikutel — 00:42:26 — So I’m shocked that most people I know know about do not disturb mode, but they don’t know that they can just automatically set it for a certain range of hours. It’s crazy to me, and this is the number one tip,
Darren Austin — 00:42:38 — Now, I got a really good tip.
Ian Mikutel — 00:42:39 — Because here’s the thing I want to say, I think your morning routine, the, the, the right mind frame for it is to view it as, as me time. It’s your time and view it as sacred. Like don’t let other things steal it from you. And so, uh, the, the, the do not disturb and setting it to the hours you want, it lets you just like own that time and not let other things taken away from you. So in iOS 12 they added a couple of unique things. I wanted to bring this up real quick. Uh, they are really powerful. One is there’s a new in iOS 12 called bedtime mode and so this helps you do the thing we talked about earlier, which is you want to like prep for your morning routine and so bedtime mode will dim your screen automatically and it blocks all notifications. And so it’s really cool, it’s a brand new setting. You have to go into your do not disturb settings and, and find that the second one is you can geo fence do not disturb now.
Ian Mikutel — 00:43:28 — So this is really cool too. So you can say I want to do not disturb when I am in this current location and that could be like your house. And as soon as you walk out the door, uh, if you’re heading to work, it will turn it on and you’ll start getting your important work stuff or whatever. And as a, as a note, a lot of people worry, they say, oh, do not disturb. Now I’m not going to get important calls or whatever. If people call you repeatedly, it will go through. You can set special context to go through like your boss or a or an emergency contact or your wife or whatever. So you shouldn’t feel like, do not do not disturb as your way to block out all the stuff you shouldn’t see. It’s not going to block out the most important things.
March Rogers — 00:44:03 — Is, is this the setting that you’re talking about?
Ian Mikutel — 00:44:05 — This, I don’t know. I think that is, that’s not the one for do not disturb though.
March Rogers — 00:44:13 — Um, because I found this one inside the alarm clock,
Ian Mikutel — 00:44:18 — that’s a different thing,
March Rogers — 00:44:20 — but you can set your bedtime and your wake time and I think the do not disturb will pick up the, the setting that.
Ian Mikutel — 00:44:27 — Got it. That makes sense. Because when I was going to mention was they now connect, do not disturb with your calendar and so you can block off for. So this is what I do personally. I block off time for my morning routine on my calendar every day just so work. People can’t schedule me for a super early meeting, but what’s cool is now do not disturb, can actually say automatically turn off, do not disturb after this meeting. And so what I do is I say my morning routine is a meeting on my calendar. Make sure do not disturb is automatically on. As soon as that timeframe ends, it goes off. And because one of the common complaints that do not disturb is people go, oh, I forgot to turn it off. And it’s like, well, you have many ways to do that. Geo Fence it to a location, a connected to your calendar, connected to an alarm. Um, so really powerful. And I would say the number one thing that has helped me craft a great morning routine because no longer am I getting randomized, which is so, so important. So
Darren Austin — 00:45:19 — yeah, I do that too. I’ve used do not disturb the timer or with the time settings on mine. Yeah. But you know what else it does, it just for peace of mind, you can also set certain contacts to be ignored. So for example, if my mom calls me in the middle of the night or my dad or my brothers or whatever, I want that call to come through. So I do not disturb is nice, I want it. But I want the peace of mind to know that if there’s an emergency I’m going to get, I’m going to get the call or the text or whatever. So that’s one thing. The other thing is I also do the same thing for the blue light filter. So the blue light filter sort of does sunrise to sunset and I’ve also got a one of those. I’m always on displays that shows the time and that’s turned off during the day just for battery savings and so it doesn’t distract me, but at night my phone sort of acts as a little bit of my clock next to my bed, which I know is not the greatest thing in the world, but it’s nice.
Darren Austin — 00:46:17 — It’s actually all of that stuff sort of synchronizes to make that the phone. Not a distraction when I don’t want it to be.
Ian Mikutel — 00:46:23 — Right. That’s great. Okay, that’s great. So that’s my big thing. I’m the one other two are. The things I will say is use this app called freedom. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Freedom lets you do a whole range of things. You can block websites, you can block certain apps, you can turn off the whole Internet for your devices for a set time. It syncs across all your devices, so it supports everything. They have an android version in the works, so everything else, Max windows, Ios, they support across all your devices and they have one feature which I really love, which is they call it a lock mode, which means like if you do shut off your internet, you can’t go because you have little willpower and turn it back on and if you lock it it’ll say like, nope, sorry, you’re locked out until this time and you. There’s nothing you can do. And that’s just awesome. So super powerful, super helpful. Check that out. A lot of writers use it for, for focus
Darren Austin — 00:47:12 — related to that Ian, you know, because we were talking about listeners with kids and how, you know, you, you talked about the ability to sort of turn off the internet. Um, my Luma wireless router kit has that as well. So there’s a lot of parents out there that are concerned that the kids are staying up until all hours of the night, you know, a playing Minecraft or you know, you know, on their phones or on the computer, whatever. You can actually set your wireless router a lot of times to turn off the internet or to to block certain devices and that’s a great step as well.
Ian Mikutel — 00:47:43 — Yep. Cool. Last tip for me is a set expectations and create defaults. So we talked about this a little bit with marches running, but um, when I was reading some of the morning routine interviews, this was a really powerful and recurring theme and I found this to be true too. So a good example again was that Jean Knapp Guy, he was saying the first thing he does when he jumps out of bed as he puts on his running gear. And I wasn’t in that resonated because I had heard your story saying the same thing march. The interesting angle to this that he mentioned, which I think is really powerful is the setting expectation side of it. So He created a default for himself, which is, I’m going to get in my running gear, but he said when he goes down and then I had breakfast with his family, it sets expectations with the rest of his family. Like, Oh, dad’s in running gear. He’s about to go for a run. I’m not going to ask for him to drive me somewhere right now.
Darren Austin — 00:48:34 — That’s is really smart.
Ian Mikutel — 00:48:35 — It’s so smart. So like I think having external ways that you can find to do that are super, super smart and really powerful. So
March Rogers — 00:48:44 — I love it.
Darren Austin — 00:48:44 — Yeah, for sure.
March Rogers — 00:48:45 — Um, I have, uh, I have a couple that are, are sort of big tips from me and then a couple of smaller ones. The first one, and I only discovered this about three or four months ago on advice from a friend of mine, but it’s really powerful and I’ve done it every day since then and uh, it’s called a body scan. And so basically what this is, it takes, maybe it takes 60 seconds, it’s not a long thing, is at some point in your morning routine, stop, close your eyes, take a breath, and just sort of focus your attention at the top of your head and then slowly move down through your body. So you’re like, you’re doing a scan of the inside of your body with your attention and really you’re just looking for any kind of tension or, or like a feeling of stress. Maybe it’s hot, cold pain, not something. And just to go, oh, well, you know, what’s going on, be curious about it. What is, what is that thing?
March Rogers — 00:49:39 — And sometimes it’s, it’s kinda like a, um, an intuitive version of the aura ring, right? Like, it’s giving you feedback of like, Oh, you should take it easy. You’re a little stressed. Oh are you? Maybe you’re going to get sick. You know, maybe you should do something about that. But sometimes I, this is what’s most helpful for me is sometimes I’m carrying around a stress or a worry and I don’t even know it. And the body scan, I’m like, oh, what does that tightness in my chest? And I just Sorta, I, I, in my head, I’ll say this is a little vague language. Like I poke at it, you know, I sort of like product, but I’m not like physically prodding it. Although you can see if you could see me on camera. You could see him, I’m like actually prodding my chest right now, but uh, but it often will, that’s just enough to make me become aware again of Oh, what is that thing that I’m stressed about? And either I can do something about it and go, okay, I need to pay attention to that or I can let it go. And that 60 seconds has incredibly powerful for me.
Ian Mikutel — 00:50:31 — Oh yeah. What’s funny is the meditation App I use, that’s how they start out. Every meditation they say do a body scan and they walk you through that. And the one thing I noticed which is interesting is not just doing it on a, on a daily basis or in an individual a day, but it’s looking, you start to notice patterns. So like I noticed for after I did it for 10 days in a row, I’m like, wow, why is it that my neck is always sore, right? Or whatever. And then you’re like, oh, what am I environment is causing that? Or is it a, is there an issue I need to check out what the doctor or whatever. So yeah, being mindful, there’s a huge help
Darren Austin — 00:51:04 — Yeah, for sure.
March Rogers — 00:51:05 — My, my second tip is actually related to that, which is I used the recurring reminders on my phone to fire a little notifications to help build the memory of the habit of doing it. So I have one that goes off every morning at 7:00 AM that says body scan and you know, nine times out of 10 I remember now, but maybe when I first started one time out of 10 I remembered in nine times out of 10 I needed the notification and now it’s like switch the other way, but it’s really powerful sort of little tool to trigger you just at that moment because you’re sort of sending yourself a message into the future. then the last one for me, and this is for all of you people out there that they get a little sad or a little slower or a little sleep here in the winter. Like me, we’re all like Pooh, five percent bear and we all would rather just hibernate a light therapy. It’s amazing. Thirty minutes, 45 minutes in the morning in front of a like a 10,000 Lux. Full spectrum daylight lamp. These aren’t that expensive.
Ian Mikutel — 00:52:02 — Like a light bulb therapy. Not like some light like with a therapist.
March Rogers — 00:52:06 — No, no, no. Right, right. No, this is a. This is a lamp. The lamp emits light.
Ian Mikutel — 00:52:12 — Somebody that makes repeat. Yeah. Got it.
March Rogers — 00:52:14 — Yeah, totally. You know, it’s like light beer, but for 30.
Darren Austin — 00:52:19 — Hey man, if it works, it works.
March Rogers — 00:52:22 — That’s right. It’s a Budweiser light therapy, but it’s a lamp.
Ian Mikutel — 00:52:27 — Do you know about the by the way that they now make the not just the blue light morning light things, but they make these sunlight. Sunrise lamps. I saw a bunch of morning routines. People say they’re buying these and using them so it simulates a sunrise or sunset for your bedroom and it’s. It’s all A. I don’t know. It’s interesting.
March Rogers — 00:52:42 — So I actually upgraded my light therapy lamp recently and I got one. It’s. We’ll put a link in the show notes called a Beurer TL70UK and it is a daylight lamp, but it does and it’s actually a nighttime lamp as well. You can actually, it will tune into the frequencies of, of sunset if you want to. And you can also put a timer on it of like day and night and stuff like that. So, um, and it’s a very soft diffused light, which I like. It doesn’t like hurt my eyes, but anyway. So I think that’s really helpful. It’s incredibly simple and easy to do. What’s nice about the light therapy thing, because it should be like 30 minutes of continuous time in front of the light at a minimum, is that it actually builds this little unit of time when all you have to do is sit with this lamp shining in your face. Right? So what else are you going to do at that time? And you’re going to do a little journaling. Are you going to do a little reading? You can do whatever you want. I mean you could have your coffee and check Facebook if you wanted to. But because it’s a little bit more of intentional time, you can fill it with something that’s a little bit more rewarding and useful to you than than the check and the Facebooks.
Darren Austin — 00:53:49 — I could not agree more, March. I have to say like this is one of the things I was going to suggest with, with the tips is like when you find the routine that works for you, the advantage of getting into the autopilot mode is that the trivial things don’t occupy your mind and the extra time that you get in the extra mind space you get frees you up to use your mind for other things. So I love the idea of using that time for something that’s more meaningful. I always like to, you know, pause and appreciate the morning. I noticed the color of the sunrise. I watched the neighborhood start to wake up and I watched, you know, if it’s garbage day or whatever, I watched that start to happen a little bit. It’s just like two minutes to pause and appreciate life. It’s so, so rewarding.
Ian Mikutel — 00:54:35 — I did that when I started waking up at sunrise that summer, last summer was. I started taking a picture of a sunrise and just posting it to my Instagram story and it was really fun and really just meaningful and it took like 30 seconds. Right. It’s crazy. Nice. Yeah. Um, so one doesn’t take one tip. Darren. I wanted to wrap up with what you had listed and I think it’s powerful even though it’s very simple. Was the whole starting your morning the night before and I was just curious. Do you guys do anything to actually do that? I know my parents always used to like set the coffee filter in the thing and like prep that the nightbefore. Yeah. Do you do anything like that?
Darren Austin — 00:55:07 — My Dad and step mom do that. I do. I pick my clothes out the night before and I looked through the, my calendar because I want to be prepared for what’s going to happen when my eyes opened.
March Rogers — 00:55:18 — Yeah. I looked through my calendar and I look at the weather app because I like to exercise outdoors and so it’s always going to be like, okay, what sort of, you know, is it going to be a galoshes run or is it going to be a sunglasses run?
Ian Mikutel — 00:55:32 — That’s so funny you mentioned that we can maybe end on this. Uh, the Jake Knapp interview that I read on the morning routines, he had a joke about the weather app and he said that he said he uses the weather app in the morning and that’s one of the only apps he uses. He tries to really stay away from things and he said, you know, because as Paul Simon said, quote, I can gather all the news I need on the weather report. So
Darren Austin — 00:55:55 — Yeah, I love that song, that song was playing on the Pandora last night as a matter of fact. That’s funny.
Ian Mikutel — 00:56:02 — Alright guys. Well let’s, let’s wrap this one up. I think, um, there’s a lot more we could talk about here and I would love to have a follow up episode. We didn’t even get into some of the other tips and tricks and hacks I have, there’s so many, but I hope that this episode serves as a, a good intro to morning routines and it gets you interested if you don’t have one.
Darren Austin — 00:56:22 — And I’d like to hear the. I’d like to hear from the audience if you’ve got a morning routine, jotted down a few bullet points and share it with a sauna on social media. We’d love to hear about it and share your tips and tricks.
Ian Mikutel — 00:56:34 — Absolutely. Alright, so, uh, let’s wrap this one up. So if you can, uh, if you want links to all the stuff we talked about today, a false transcripts to show notes, March, where can people go to find that?
March Rogers — 00:56:44 — Where you can fire up your favorite web browser and go to www.bettershow.io. And you’ll find links to all of our shows there, including all of those wonderful goodies. One little shout out I’ll give is that we mentioned a few different things that we’ve actually done shows onto the past. We’ve done a slow a show on sleep. We’ve done a couple of better bites on things like the five minute journal and the productivity planner so you can feel free when you go to a better show.io to dig into our archives and you’ll find a bunch of content related to the things that we talked about today.
Ian Mikutel — 00:57:13 — Awesome, and Mr. Darren, what is the number one thing somebody can do to help out the show?
Darren Austin — 00:57:19 — Oh, spread the love. If you’re enjoying what you’re hearing here, tell somebody else and help them appreciate it as well. We talked in a previous episode about an easy thing you can do. If you’re listening to us on your favorite podcast APP, pick that APP up and look for the share button and decide to share this with somebody that you think might be interested. Somebody that’s looking to optimize the morning routines or is into productivity or anything like that. Drop. Drop a little note to them and let them know that this is a good show to check out. Once you do that, a five star review would be great as well. It helps us, helps other people find us, and that’s the best thing you could do for us.
Ian Mikutel — 00:57:54 — Awesome. Alright. For the better show, I’m Ian Mikutel.
Darren Austin — 00:57:57 — I’m Darren Austin
March Rogers — 00:57:59 — And I’m March Rogers.
Ian Mikutel — 00:58:00 — We’ll see you next episode. Thanks for listening. Thanks again for listening to the show. Three quick notes before we go. Number one, we really hope what you heard today can help you on your journey to getting better, and if it did, it means the world to us. If you could head on over to iTunes or wherever you found the show and leave a review. This is one of the best ways to help grow the show and ultimately the community that we’re trying to build together. Number two, for links to anything you heard in today’s episode, just head on over to bettershow.io. While you’re there, sign up for a better show newsletter where each week we send a summary of the latest tips, tricks, and hacks and cool articles that we’ve come across in our journey to getting better. And finally, number three, join the conversation and let us know how you’re getting better on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Just search The Better Show. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next episode.
Ian Mikutel — 00:59:03 — So March, are you saying your, your goal is to be.
March Rogers — 00:59:06 — I was saying, yeah, my, my, my aspiration as I grow older is to continue to become more and more like a slightly demented professor at a university like Cambridge or Oxford. I want to shop. I want to wear cardigans where I’ve patched the with little letter of patches and I shuffled around in my slippers and don’t quite know what’s going on and I have insane eyebrows. That’s, that’s, that’s really what I’m hoping for.
Darren Austin — 00:59:34 — It’s a good thing. Look, the, the insane, insane a professor.
March Rogers — 00:59:39 — like muttering to myself and people come up to me and, and I stare at them blankly for a second before I collect myself.
Darren Austin — 00:59:47 — Yeah, it’s pretty liberating, right? Just got to let go.
Ian Mikutel — 00:59:52 — To be fair. It definitely had one of those when I was in college. And then that guy was probably one of the most creative though. So you know, there’s, there’s pros and cons. Oh Man, I’m sure he didn’t get invited to as many parties, but you know, it was probably actually,
Darren Austin — 01:00:11 — but he also didn’t care
Ian Mikutel — 01:00:12 — making bank.
March Rogers — 01:00:13 — It was that we didn’t care. It’s true.
