There’s a long-standing misconception (in Ray Sidney-Smith's humble opinion) that habits are how you become more productive. But, it’s actually your routines that power your habits, and therefore, your personal productivity. In this episode of ProductivityCast, we discuss the power of routines, and specifically look at the morning routine. We discuss each of our morning routines and discuss some challenges facing building a good morning routine.

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In this Cast | The Morning Routine

Ray Sidney-Smith

Francis Wade

Art Gelwicks

Show Notes | The Morning Routine

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Why Rituals are Superior to Habits

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, PhD

A Workday in my Life With Evernote

Duolingo

Mango Languages

Raw Text Transcript | The Morning Routine

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00

Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place. Productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Good morning,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

everybody. And welcome to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith and I'm joined here today with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Welcome, gentlemen. Good

Unknown 0:28

morning, Ray waiting for this morning. Good

Unknown 0:31

morning, everyone. Good

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:33

to have you both. Today, we are going to be talking about routines. And specifically today in the next this in the next episode, we're talking about morning routines today. And in the next episode, we're going to be talking about evening routine. So we're going to talk about how we bookend our days to be more productive. So I wanted to start us off with the definition of routine and talk a little bit about why routines are important and how they benefit us, we're going to then go around and talk about our own morning routines, what really underlies what's the framework under underneath which we created our routines. And then we'll talk about some of the design challenges for implementing a morning routine, what what types of challenges any of us on the productivity cast team has experienced and how we overcame those challenges. Let's start off by discussing what a routine is. And I'm going to give my own take on this, and then you all can jump in. So my thought here is that many times people talk about habits and habits being something that can be a huge productivity enabler. And for me, I really fundamentally disagree in large part that habits are what we should be focusing on. Because habits are really difficult to develop habits are automatic, once they're done. And so they're, they're efficient in one way, but very ineffective. And another if you need to change in any way shape, or form or be flexible. And that's where routines fit in. And so routines are just a set of practices. It's a procedure in essence, that you that you regularly follow. So it's flexible, it's adaptive. And what we want to do with routine is, is, in essence, connect multiple types of things, which could include habits as an anchor for doing that thing, you get up every day, that's a habit, you know, you get up out of bed every day. And then you can execute a routine because it's all fundamentally tied to one another, right, it's a set of practices, you might get up and brush your teeth, you might then drink a glass of water, you know, go for a run, whatever the things are, that are connected in your morning routine, they're all fundamentally connected together by this by this procedure, well, Asian efficiency, which is a efficiency calm, and they, they, their blog has been blogging about habits and rituals for quite some time. And they talk about rituals as what I would hear the term routine. And I don't believe this is semantic, because routines are secular, they're not there's no kind of religious connotation here. Whereas rituals to has a specific religious or spiritual connotation. So I, I always shy away from using that term, because I feel like people who want to have a ritual are looking for something that's spiritual or religious Lee connected. And so it just doesn't, it doesn't click in my head to do or to have rituals in that sense, when when they're saying ritual. I'm presuming I'm just hearing me saying routine, because I think that they are different in that sense, but also in the sense that that what they talked about here, and I'm just I'm scrolling through the article here now just to pull up their pieces here. But they they in essence, are talking about routines or rituals in there saying, being specific, having the first step clarified, emotionally connecting with your ritual, understanding your motivation, I suppose. And then the fourth item being that you use, quote, unquote, sticky tactics to maintain rituals. So again, I think that rituals are something different. But routines themselves are at the heart of what probably makes a series of habits more easily attainable in a morning routine, but they're also what allows us to be able to be flexible when those things don't happen. For example, if you're trying to develop a habit and you miss some component of it One morning, that doesn't mean that you you lose it because you have the routine as structure for being able to support you going forward. I think

Francis Wade 4:49

you're I think your definition of a ritual is spot on. That is a deep question that you're getting at for the reason that were having the podcast is to this particular topic is to discuss why why set up a set of activities that become habits that turn into a ritual and I think the Why is the big sort of question that people come to this with, which is, why should what's the benefit to me from having a ritual? What purpose Am I trying to serve? And if I am curable, my purpose, then what design rules do I follow in order to achieve the result I want? And I think it takes a certain kind of presence to identify the end result of the routine ahead of time before you've achieved it, and say, Okay, let me go, let me know that I've settled on what I really want to feel and the state of being I want to accomplish, then how do I design all of the elements, but I think that, that, that knowledge of the, or the awareness or knowledge of the presence that you want to cause for yourself, take some introspection, it takes some thinking, it takes some,

I think it takes some reflection, because if you if you can look back at the past and say, okay, on Mondays, I tend to end up being frazzled on Tuesdays. And I tend to end up being calm on Wednesdays, I tend to end up being energized. And if you kind of look back and say, Well, this is all happening by accident, that's not by design, then the question is, what how do I want to end up on each given morning? And then how do I accomplish that. So I think the Y is sort of the big question that made people who talk about rituals don't they had a hint at it, but they don't help the user or the reader to define their way,

Art Gelwicks 6:54

I hear ritual and I hear routine and I look at it from a slightly more pragmatic position. To me, a ritual is something that is a series of steps that must occur in that sequence to achieve a specific end goal. It could be religious in context, it could be a recipe, I mean, it's it's that type of thing that they have to happen in that order. If they don't, you either can't achieve the end goal, or it doesn't have the same significance. So for example,

if you think about the ritual of getting up in the morning, and you get up,

you eat your breakfast, you brush your teeth, you if you change that ritual around. So now you brush your teeth, and then you have your orange juice, bad things happen, if you flip it around, and you have that same ritual, you're mentally setting yourself into a position a routine, to me are things that happen in a not necessary a specific sequence, but they happen together. So I look at like, for example, going to the gym, there may be a series of exercises that you do, and you want to do, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do them in a specific order, you might. And if you do them in a specific order, every time that becomes a ritual, because then it doesn't feel right if you don't, but if it's just a routine, it's just knocking out this group of things at a time to get to that end goal. I just, I feel that routines are a little more forgiving,

but they still need to happen, rituals are much less forgiving, and much more structured, at least that's my assessment.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:46

Yeah, thank you for that both of you. And, and I think it's good for us to kind of have the listeners know, where we overlap, as well as not overlap, RUN RUN concurrent with with regard to all of these kinds of words, you know, language doesn't make a difference. And as we talk about these things in the productivity community, not having a central definition of some of these things,