Making First Moves

This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in: 

• Getting up and journaling to park ideas; 
• Getting up and writing directly into the computer; 
• Getting up and doing the day’s Worlde, then posting it to my family chat; 
• Getting up and brain dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day.

Of the four, Wordle is the worst option. Logging in to finish a Worlde puzzle only takes about three minutes, but it puts me in a social mindset because the next step is going into chat, and from there it’s a short skip to spending the entire morning answering email and tooling around on social media.

Journaling is probably my favourite kick-off, but the chain of events that follow that meditative writing often means I’m slow to build up steam for the rest of the day. It’s harder to transition into day job work (or, at least, it was harder to transition into my old day job work), and harder to actually launch into writing projects that aren’t drafting blog posts.

Waking up and drafting is often a good first step — I hit the ground running as a writer, then get coffee after finishing my first 500 words of the day. There’s nice, clean end points that tell me when it’s time to set the manuscript aside and focus on the day job. In many ways, it would be the ideal first move….were it not for the fact that I struggle to write on tired days, and that can throw my entire day out the window.

Writing is also loud, given the ferocity and speed with which I type, which means it’s not my spouse’s favourite first move given they’re usually trying to sleep while I’m hammering out words. 

My Omnifocus mindsweep was a relatively new approach, inspired by Kourosh Dini’s Creating Flow With Omnifocus. I picked it up during the chaos of pulling the BWF program in January, when everyone was working from home and our CEO was on leave, and it was great for wrangling my on-the-verge-of-breakdown brain and giving some structure to my day.

It was also great for eliminating the feeling that I was about to miss something important, but also hard-wired into my brain as a dayjob thing that I’m not sure I’ll grock it as a creative kick-off. I also fear that it’ll push me to focus on writing-adjacent tasks, such as publishing or editing, in spaces I’d normally reserve for drafting new work (which also begs the question: is this a bad thing?). Worse, it tends to blur the boundary between “day job” and “not day job” in a way that’s tricky to manage — it largely worked in January because I was working 11 hours days at BWF and there were no boundaries. 

Were I working for myself full time as writer and publisher, I suspect it would be the perfect first move. Right now, I’m pondering whether the flexibility of the new work-from-home dayjob makes it worth adopting once more.

I’ve been musing over all fo this for a few days now, and realised that routines are tricky because they’re as much about identity as everything else. Each first move reflects a different fascet of my self-identity, and throws the focus (and delivers solutions for) a particular aspect of the self. None of them are explicitly wrong (although Wordle is less useful), and each delivers benefits that are useful at specific times. 

My ideal routine — one jotted down as a thought experiment if writing and publishing was all I’m doing and money wasn’t an object — revealed some interesting gaps. In the scribbled notes I pulled together, the vision of myself in that situation would:

• Get up early and go through some kind of exercise/meditation combo to clear my head.
• Journal for a short stretch, breakfast
• Spend an hour tinkering with novel plans and making notes about future works.
• Write 2000 words directly on a computer
• Break for lunch, and possibly read a little.
• Go through the Omnifocus Mindsweep after lunch, to kick off my ‘work’ day in the afternoon., where I focus on publishing and editing.
• Walk.
• Dinner
• Meaningful consumption of media and experiences until bed.

I’m honestly surprised that both exercise and novel planning are so prominent in that list, given that they’re largely absent in my current process, but ideal selves aren’t working with any of the limitations that our real selves are negotiating as we bumble through our lives.

Stil, it’s got me thinking about whether a fifth first move is worth considering….