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Category: hobbies

My morning pages habit

This is a recent #lockdownlearning that started in the early days of the lockdown with this video.

If I am not wrong I watched this video on the 1st of April in the morning and immediately started to write in a journal that I had lying around nearby.

The idea of morning pages intrigued me and here I am about 45 days later with over 40 days of writing a page every day. I have strived to write something or the other almost every day and almost all of it in the morning, but on a few occasions I have written it down in the evening to make this a habit. I have stuck with keeping the streak of missing the morning pages to 1, which I’m really happy about.

Just to give a brief about what this habit is (if you haven’t already heard/watched videos, etc), every day in the morning after morning duties and you write your mind into 3 pages (I have mostly done at least 1 page per day). Consider this a morning brain dump into the paper just like how we visit the washroom in the morning.

Some of the benefits that I have personally seen are

  • A sense of accomplishment, (big boost of confidence especially first thing in the morning)
  • A sense of clarity and focus, just like how one would feel after a good meditation session.
  • Improvements in managing my thoughts.
  • Improvements in writing.

While the lockdown was stressful for everyone, doing the morning pages was a real help to stay a little less stressed and anxious about. After a few weeks, it became something I longed for. It felt really good that I was looking forward to doing some writing the following day in my morning pages. While most of what I have written in my journal is crap, I do feel that my writing has improved and to my surprise, a very few of the journal pages can be turned into blog posts 🙂

While I will recommend putting pen to paper in the morning, you can do a digital morning page as well. Consider something like 750words.com. A private safe place to do your morning pages with a bunch of analytics and motivational badges to keep you engaged. Every time you finish 3 pages/750words You get elaborate metrics like this which is fun to review and learn.

I am not writing on 750 words at the moment as I am rediscovering writing on paper and enjoying the distraction-free analogue experience, but if I were to switch/experiment into digital morning pages, I would really use 750words.com.

To sum it up, I have enjoyed my morning pages so much that I am here writing a post about it. I can’t recommend it enough. If you don’t currently do this, you should give it a try.


Are there any such habits that you love that I should be trying out? Let me know in the comments.

Podcasts I listen-2020

My friend Aditya wrote this post on the podcasts he listens and inspired me to list down my own podcasts. I listen to a lot of them and have been for years now, maybe since getting my first iPhone in 2010. I have pruned the lists a bunch of times after overloads and yet I have so many of them. Here is a list of them. 

As I write, I have subscriptions to about 20 podcasts, but not all of them are regular publishers, and I don’t listen to all of them consistently. So I am just listing a few that I think everyone can try.

  1. Akimbo Podcast: A podcast by Seth Godin. I think that is more than enough introduction to subscribe to it. Yes, it is totally worth it.
  2. Accidental Tech podcast: A podcast with a developers perspective on the Apple eco sytem, tech, cars and anything in the host’s lives.
  3. Distributed podcast:Podcast show hosted by my company’s CEO. Totally recommended if you are looking at ways to improve your company by decentralising it.
  4. Hurry Slowly: A podcast on pacing yourself by Jocelyn K glei.
  5. IRL by Mozilla: A podcast by Manoush Zomorodi on privacy for the internetizens. There haven’t been any episodes lately, but their archives are still a treasure trove about online privacy.
  6. The talk show by Gruber. Gruber’s take on Apple and tech.
  7. The Tim Ferris show by Tim Ferris. This isn’t everyone’s favourite, but I seem to be enjoying it for the most part.

Besides these, I am trying WorkLife with Adam grant. I have listened to about 5 episodes and I am liking it so far. Maybe it is a keeper.

BTW I also subscribed to Seen and the Unseen by Amit Varma and have been enjoying it so far. This was a recommendation from Aditya and I am thankful to him for writing about this podcast.

Do you have any recommendations I am missing here?