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Category: productivity

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.

Hyper key on MacOS-Sierra

Have you used the caps lock key as hyper key on your mac? Hyper key is an additional key that you can create on the mac which is a combination of  Ctrl +Alt+ Option+ Shift in one key.  I had my Caps lock key working as a Hyper key ever since I read about it on a blog post in 2014.  Ever since then, the caps lock key has always been a hyperkey on my mac until Apple decided to revamp the keyboard configuration files for touchbar support in Sierra. I dearly missed the feature for about two weeks after I upgraded to sierra and that is when I realized how interwoven the hyper key was with my workflows and mac usage. Nearly every workflow that I had broke. I was on the constant lookout for getting the hyperkey back and used the custom build of the karabiner elements here until I found this easier and streamlined workflow.

The reason why you should use this latest  work around instead of the custom build is that you can update karabiner elements. Using the custom build restricts the updates. The config file (json) is pretty simple and has just the options for the hyper key, which makes life so much simpler. If you are like me, just using the caps lock key as the hyper key, the json file here will save your life.

If you haven’t tried the hyper key, you should defintely try it.

 

Importance of Wasting time.

Here is a intriguing read on wasting time. Guess what, you aren’t wasting time actually . 😜.

This struck a chord for me. Don’t forget to read the full article.

Wasting time is about recharging your battery and de-cluttering,” he says. Taking time to be totally, gloriously, proudly unproductive will ultimately make you better at your job, says Guttridge. But it’s also fulfilling in and of itself.