Re-creating My Morning Routine

I've been a morning person for as long as I can remember, I guess since before I started driving. I would spend the night at my grandparents on a Friday night, wake up at 0400 Saturday morning, and go up to the farmer's market with my uncle and grandpa for a 12+ hour work day. After that, a 0400 - 0430 wake-up became normal in the army. Since then, it's just part of what I do.

Most times, I'd even consider it the best part of the day. Everybody else is still sleeping, so there are no distractions and it gives me several hours to focus on whatever it is I need to get done. I also find it nice when you realize that most people are just waking up at 8 or 9 o'clock and you already have 4-5 hours on them.

What I do, during that period, has changed over time as my goals change and I experiment to find what works best. For a while, I would go into the gym to teach a 0530 fitness class.

When I landed my first development position, I spent that time working on personal projects and online courses to improve my skills.

While I was doing the power list and 75 hard, I would do the outdoor workout and complete my daily 10 pages of reading. Speaking of which, I probably need to do that again...

I've always had a hard time coming up with ideas though - whether it be for side projects, game dev, 3D models, blog posts, or stories. So I decided to try something new and, so far, it seems to be working fairly well.

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A while back, I came across Ship 30 for 30 - a program to help you start writing online and publish every day. The creators of that also have a Start Writing Online group. I tried it out a year or so back, but stopped because a lot of the effort was focused on publishing small, 250 word "atomic essays".

I prefer longer form content, which doesn't lend itself to daily publishing. I did try writing every day - I just ran out of ideas and didn't want to use AI to come up with all of my topics.

I checked back in though, just to re-review some of the content they had. There were two items that I've been trying out over the past week.

Homework For life

The idea here is to summarize your last 24 hours and use that to look for a story.

Crash and Burn

With this, you spend time writing anything that's on your mind. If you don't have anything on your mind, just start listing words until something triggers.

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So how have I incorporated these into my morning routine? First, I feed the animals and have some breakfast. Then, I pull up Obsidian and spend about an hour on four different tasks:

Reflection

Here, I spend at most 5 minutes thinking about the past 24 hours and summarize what I did or what happened during that time.

Stream of Consciousness

Next, I spend another 5 minutes spitting out anything and everything that's on my mind. Most times I have a lot to write, but occasionally I've had to list 4-6 words before I take off on some tangent again.

Stories and Topics

After my 10 minutes of reflection & mind barfing, I take another 10 minutes to review what I wrote and list ideas that I can use for stories.

Writing prompts (Or training)

With my ideation tasks completed, I then spend at least 20 minutes practicing - sometimes practice might be writing a story from a random prompt, describing a character or scene, or creating an outline for a story I want to work on. It could also be spending time on one of the game dev courses that I purchased from gamedev.tv

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Over the past week, as I go through the "Stories and Topics" section, I've come up with a minimum of 5 ideas each day - sometimes more. Now, I have 35 ideas or topics that I can use in my writing. Two of which I've chosen for my first short stories.

In my opinion, not too bad for someone who could never think of what to write about!