The ritual of the commute may not spark other folks like it sparked me, but having become a guy who largely works from home—be that on my own projects or on contract work—I have started to understand not just the value, but the need to have a morning groove.
(As an aside, it hasn’t helped my routine that I also gave up coffee a couple months ago—for health reasons.)
Without ritual, without pattern, without routine I often find that my day struggles to really start. I’ll sit in a cozy chair in my pyjamas (really) and at some point look up and it will be nine-thirty, and though I’ve poked around on some files or done some pre-work, my day feels decidedly unstarted.
On the other hand, if I plan to be out the door and sitting in a cafe by 8am with a hot drink in front of me and my laptop open to a word processor, then by nine-thirty I’ve often already written something, posted something, or at least made progress on a project of some sort.
The difference is stark, and all that accounts for it is the routine of a morning plan.
Terms FROm this POSt
- cafe
- Chances are the words you are reading were written in a small local cafe on a quiet morning with a hot cup of tea at my side. The places we work and create have a huge influence on what emerges.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
