Success: Develop A Morning Ritual To Prime Yourself For A Productive Day

How to Build Your Own Ritual

To start on your own morning ritual, you’ll first need to find a method that lets you get up early enough to have ample time before your first real commitment of the day. You can try the method I described above, or find something else that works for you.

After that follow these 5 steps to implementing your ritual:

1. Review your goals (maybe look at your Impossible List?) and figure out which ones you can make progress on with small, daily amounts of effort. These are perfect for morning rituals.
2. Figure out how much time it will take you to finish them all in the morning. This will probably require some trial and error to get right.
3. Once you’ve figured out your required time block, start waking up that much earlier.
4. Start practicing your morning ritual!
5. Make adjustments as necessary. If you eventually hate doing something, re-evaluate its importance to your life.

I also recommend getting into the practice of tracking each of the habits you build into your morning ritual. Looping back to The Motivation Hacker’s explanation of success spirals:

“Success spirals – backed up by the simple tracking of success – were the key habit for me. Starting tiny, tracking success, and slowly strengthening the habit of building habits: this is how you tend your success spirals.”

When I started practicing my ritual in earnest, I used Lift to track all of the tasks in it – plus some other habits I was trying to build, like flossing every day.

These days, I’m using HabitRPG as my main habit tracker and daily/near-future task manager. For me, the video game mechanics – like gaining experience for my character whenever I practice my habits and get things done – provide a great source of extra motivation. Plus, it’s just fun (especially since I’m in a party with my roommate Martin).

Whether you want to keep it simple with something like Lift, or get really geeky with HabitRPG, find a way that lets you track your progress.