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I want to take you through something that I’ve been practicing daily since the last 2 years and has had a really good impact on the quality of my life
Let’s get to it.
You can use this on either Roam or Notion or any other tool for thought. How I access it is using a text expansion template like
morn1There are 7 parts to this morning routine.
- Morning Pages
- What am I grateful for
- Daily affirmations
- Recall Specific Positive Memories
- Visualize the Future
- What is the one thing I need to get done
- List Tasks
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So let’s unpack them
Morning Pages
Morning pages are stream of consciousness writing. In simpler words, it’s these free flowing thoughts that are in your head. The aim is to write a page or more (250+ words) of anything that’s in your brain. As a writer or creator, you can always use the words in your brain as input for some creative task (needs improving)
I use this section to either externalize troubling thoughts so that it is out of my mind. Or I use it to creatively export some ideas that I am thinking about onto paper, I mean screen, haha.
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What am I grateful for
Here I write down 3-5 things that I am grateful for and by further elaborating the reason I am a grateful for it.
I’ve learnt that it’s also useful to add why you are grateful for something
They can be simple things like the cup of coffee that you had this morning, or about your friends, family, partners, etc.
I’m grateful for today’s coffee because it makes me feel fresh, I am grateful to work on projects that I like doing, I am grateful for my friends and family because they make me feel loved
Daily affirmations
These again work subconsciously. It’s just reaffirming positive aspects of you. Because our mind has a tendency to think too negatively of ourselves. We need to balance it out with sprinkling some positivity about ourselves.
The format is “You are …”
You are is said to work better than “I am” because it feels like you are telling a third person this. When you are likely to be more gentle and calm. We tend to be more critical of ourselves rather than others.
You are smart, you are helpful, you are kind
Recall Specific Positive Memories
The idea here is to remember a specific day in your life and remember to a large detail. I dont know how it works exactly but remembering specific details of your life improves your mood instantly. Again goes back to the concept of being more negative tinted than positive tinted.
Future Visualization
THis is like manifesting the future. Picture an ideal day in your life in the future. The way this thing works according to me, is that you have a concrete picture of how you want your life to be. And this will drive you to work towards it. It wont magically happen, but you’ll ensure that you put in all efforts towards it.
Example: I imagine that I am walking on a beach with a dog with several exits under my belt
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What is the one big thing that needs to be done
It helps to boil down the day’s tasks into one big thing that needs to get done. Usually we end up procrastinating on this due to some sense of anxiety about the outcome. It helps externalize this one task so that you know what’s the highest leverage task that you can achieve.
Tasks
This is nothing but a laundry list of tasks that you need to do. Once you write them here you can move them to your todo list app and timebox them. I use Todoist for this purpose and it works very well.
For e.g. I need to get XYZ done today.
That’s it! It’s a longer list of things to think about. I don’t always do all 7 everyday.
I try to do 2-4 regularly, and it really helps improve the quality of my life and productivity.
The link to get the Notion and Roam template to duplicate is in the description and the pinned comment. Check it out.
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If this helps, follow me on Twitter @kavirkaycee
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