Why you should change your finely tuned morning routine if you are a freelancer
Morning routines have been on everyone’s lips for several years. All great self-help gurus stress the importance of starting the day consciously and preparing mentally for the tasks ahead. Meditation, journaling, gratitude exercises, workout — all this should be done shortly after getting up. Only after that comes work. I don’t think that’s the best way to start the day. In this article, I explain why I believe that.
What is the top priority of your day?
As a freelancer, this question doesn’t really arise. The top priority of your day is always to do your job.
For me, as an author, the most crucial goal of the day is always to reach my daily word count. Neither meditation nor gratitude exercises or journaling are my top priorities.
This does not mean that these components of a morning routine are unimportant — quite the opposite. Meditation, journaling, and gratitude exercises can make us positive and help us to approach our tasks in a focused and relaxed way. They are effective tools.
But tools are useless if we do not work with them on a concrete object.
The energy follows the attention
“Energy flows, where the attention goes.” Milton Erickson Founder of Hypnotherapy
I’m sure everyone has heard this remarkable sentence before. But what does it mean in concrete terms? The best way to understand its meaning is to imagine an everyday example.
We are sitting on the couch, and suddenly the doorbell rings. Our attention is now on the doorbell. Until a second ago, we sat motionless on the sofa, watching our favorite series on TV.
But now we get up and go to the door to see who comes to visit us. So we set ourselves in motion and spend energy.
The bell has drawn our attention to the door, and as a result, we are moving physically towards the door.
What does this mean for our morning routine? When we meditate, make entries in our journal or do our gratitude exercise, we also expend energy. We do mental work.
But where does this energy flow to? It depends on what lies at the very top of our consciousness at this moment. If we have just got up, there may not be much. Our thinking is then less goal-oriented, and we give away much of the potential that these tools have.
Sure, it feels good when we meditate, and our mind is calm and empty. It is an uplifting feeling when we have written down ten things for which we are grateful, and ten minutes of freewriting in our journal reveals insights that can be very valuable.
But without context, these techniques can only unfold a fraction of their potential benefits.
Creating context — the most important thing first
If your work as a freelancer is the most important thing for you, then your morning routine should also start with the work.
So instead of meditating first after getting up, doing a gratitude exercise, journaling for ten minutes, and doing a workout, you should first work a little on your current project.
I know, I know: Nobody wants to get fully into work right after getting up. Most people need time in the morning to wake up and get going.
That’s perfectly all right. At this point, however, it is not at all about getting fully involved in the work. It is enough for you to spend five to ten minutes actively working on your current project.
All we want to achieve with this step is to draw your attention to your work.
Then you can get up from your computer and do your usual morning routine. This seems to be just a small, insignificant change, but in reality, you have multiplied the chances of a productive day.
If you now meditate and write your journal, your subconscious mind is already set to focus its energy on solving your work-related problems.
In journaling and meditation, your subconscious mind will now preferentially release ideas and insights related to your current projects. When you get back to work, you will progress faster and easier than if you had done your traditional morning routine.
Conclusion
In the hype surrounding the buzzword morning routine, the focus is too often on the tools and too rarely on the goals we want to achieve.
Meditation, journaling, gratitude, and workouts do not necessarily make us more successful or satisfied. If we use these tools without context, our lives may not change at all.
It is possible to meditate every morning and still not achieve one’s goals.
By putting work back at the center of our morning routine, we return to the original purpose of the morning routine: we start the day focused on the right things and create more with less stress.
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