Against the optimised morning

A friend sent me a video of a man's morning routine and asked, sincerely, whether I approved. He assumed I would, because I write about slow living and the man in the video was doing slow-looking things: stretching, journalling, drinking something from a small glass, standing outside at dawn with his eyes closed.

I did not approve, and it took me a while to work out why, because on the face of it he was doing everything I would recommend. Then I counted. Between waking and his desk there were eleven distinct activities in ninety-four minutes. He had optimised his rest.

The tell is the timetable

You can spot it in any routine of this kind: every element has a duration attached. Ten minutes of this, twenty of that. Once a restful activity has a duration, it has a target, and once it has a target you can fail at it. People genuinely feel guilty about a bad meditation. That is an extraordinary thing to have built.

The optimised morning is a productivity system in a dressing gown. It takes the logic of the working day, which is that time is a resource to be allocated efficiently, and applies it to the hours the working day does not own. There is nothing calm about it. It has simply moved the anxiety earlier.

What I do instead, and why I am reluctant to tell you

I get up. I put the kettle on. I stand about. Some mornings I read for forty minutes and some mornings I do not read at all, and the difference between those two mornings is not a failure of discipline, it is Tuesday.

I am reluctant to describe it because the moment it is described it becomes a routine to be adopted, and it is not one. The variability is the point. A morning that is the same every day whatever the weather, the season, the sleep and the mood is not responsive to anything, and being responsive to things is most of what I understand calm to be.

The reasonable objection

The obvious counter is that structure helps, especially for people whose mornings are otherwise chaos, and it does. I am not against habit. I am against habit that has been given metrics. There is a real difference between "I read in the mornings" and "I read for twenty-five minutes each morning and log it", and the difference is that the second one can be lost.

If you want a test, it is this: if you skip the thing entirely for three days, do you feel rested or do you feel behind? Feeling behind on rest is the clearest sign that the rest has been colonised.

A smaller ambition

One unhurried thing. Not eleven. No timer on it. Permission to skip it without accounting for the skip. That is the whole of my morning advice, and I would rather it sound insufficient than have it turned into a chart.