Your Morning Routine Is Eating Your Best Hours

About six months after I retired I had this morning routine I was incredibly proud of.

Lemon water, 20 minutes of meditation, journaling, cold shower I dreaded every single morning, breathwork, gratitude practice, dynamic stretching, light mobility work. 90 minutes, start to finish, before I sat down to do anything that mattered. I'd read all the books, listened to all the podcasts, built the stack.

And I was perpetually behind before 9am.

Then one day -- and I don't remember what triggered it, maybe a bad night of sleep or just running late -- I skipped the whole routine, sat down at 6:30am, and started working on a keynote I'd been struggling w/ for a week.

Finished the outline in 45 minutes. Clean, sharp, the kind of thinking that usually took me three grinding afternoon hours to produce. Just bc I'd caught my brain before the clutter got in.

And I thought -- wait. This is exactly how training worked during competition.

5am wake up, at the rink by 6, on ice by 6:45. No elaborate preparation ritual, no journaling about my feelings, no lemon water. Just get on ice while my brain was still half-asleep bc that's when I had ice time and ice time wasn't negotiable. And those early sessions were often my best. Before the noise of the day, before anyone else's opinions could get in my head, before I had time to overthink anything.

The 90-minute routine I'd built after retiring was doing the opposite -- I was preparing to perform during the hours I should've been performing.

Should your morning routine come before or after the real work?

I tried the other extreme too, so I'm not going to pretend this is simple. Woke up and went straight into deep work every single day for about six months. Productive as hell. Also completely fried by the end of it -- relationships suffered, health declined, getting things done but falling apart everywhere else.

The answer isn't 90-minute ritual OR wake-up-and-grind. It's sequencing.

The body & mind need recovery. Meditation, movement, whatever restores you -- that stuff is real and it matters. The question is when. Doing it before your most important work means you're spending premium cognitive hours on maintenance. Doing it after means you're recovering when your brain needs recovery, and producing when your brain is primed to produce.

What I do now: night before, I set up the next morning's most important task. Everything ready to go, zero decisions required. Morning -- that task gets done first. Phone in another room, no inputs, no checking anything. Usually 60-90 minutes before I surface.

Then the recovery stuff. Movement, meditation, whatever my body's asking for that day. It shifts -- some mornings I need to move, some mornings I need stillness, some mornings I need to call someone & talk about nothing for 10 minutes. I let it be inconsistent bc it should be.

The difference in output quality is not subtle. And I'm not working more hours -- I'm working the right hours in the right order.

I think about my younger self w/ that elaborate 90-minute ritual, feeling so virtuous about it, not realizing I was burning the best fuel on the warm-up lap. The athletes I know who are still competing at the highest level don't do elaborate morning routines before training. They just go.

The preparation is the night before. The morning is for the work.

At least that's what I've found so far. I change my mind about this stuff more often than I'd like to admit.

I write about this in Hard Pivot -- performance mechanics, not productivity hacks.

I go deeper in the book.

--AAO