Categories
hobbies productivity Random Musings

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.

Categories
Personal Random Musings Self Improvement

Welcome 2018!

It has been a good couple of years for me. I am extremely thankful and happy for what I have and how far I have come. Sadly the blog hasn’t seen much during this time and hopefully I will work on it better this year. I don’t have a new year resolution to post X number of posts or any such thing. But I do have a framework of what I want to do this year. My one keyword for this year is going to be HABITS. I plan to work on creating a quite a few good habits or get rid of a few bad ones over the entirety of this year. The idea is to focus on one habit every month and stay disciplined to create that habit at the end of the month. Most of these are going to be about small minor wins to be had on a daily basis.
This month I am going to try to Read at least a page of book first thing in the morning, every day of January.

Photo credits teestassi.