Peter M. Ball

There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to make my spouse happy is having a cup of coffee waiting for them the moment they wake up, perched on their bedside table beside the phone delivering their wake-up alarm.

Fortunately, this is pretty easy for me to provide, given that we live on slightly different schedules (I get up early to write, they sleep in because they find it harder to fall asleep than I do).

Unfortunately, drinking coffee first thing in the morning is actually a pretty terrible thing to do to your body.

The logic here comes down to cortisol, aka “the stress hormone”. Despite it’s nom-de-plume as a stress marker, bodies naturally produce three cortisone surges throughout the day, and the first of them is right as we wake up. This phenomena — the Cortisol awakening response – means we’re 50% to 77% more cortisone within a half-our of waking up each day. Think of it as your body’s acknowledgement that waking up means shits about to get real, so you’re primed to be alert and deal with the shift from relaxed to engaged.

Except there’s a bunch of stuff that can affect the level of cortisol in your bloodstream upon waking up, ranging from whether you’re a shift worker, whether it’s light out, whether you’re a lark (who naturally produce more cortisol) rather than a night owl, and whenever you have ongoing pain conditions.

It turns out the caffeine in coffee interrupts this cortisol production, causing the body to produce less of the hormone and rely on the coffee instead. Instead of getting the morning energy boost from cortisone, we’re getting it from a substance that we quickly develop a tolerance to.

In this light, optimal coffee consumption usually happens later in the day, when our cortisol levels ebbs (Can’t stomach the thought of going without a hot beverage? Tea might make an interesting substitute — Arthur Chu has a twitter thread on the impact on theanine in tea alongside the caffeine, and why it makes a difference),

Of course, if you’re enjoying your morning coffee, none of this is really meant to be an admonishment and a demand to stop. I read all of this — and wrote all of this — with the mindset of someone who figured “you’ll take my morning cup of coffee out of my cold, dead hands, assholes.”

Except…well, here’s the thing: I do regularly skip the coffee first thing, which has less to do with the science above, and more to do with crime writer Elmore Leanard’s morning routine when he was initially building his career. Leonard would wake up before work and write, and he motivated himself by refusing to drink coffee until he’d written his first 750 words of the day.

I adopted that habit myself when I started a full-time work last year, and the result is that I’m usually y awake for an hour or so before the first cup of coffee hits my system. And it’s definitely taken an edge off my mornings, and made the routines a little easier to cleave to, so long as my day-to-day stress levels aren’t off the charts.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be one of those people who waits two hours for my morning coffee, but I could well be on the way to becoming someone who doesn’t wake up to a cup of Joe first thing.

While I’ve done a bunch of routine hacking in the past, this week marks the first time I’ve actually *logged* what I do in the morning, so I can start being really conscious of what I’m doing. Today, I went through the following steps:

• Woke up
• Switched on the desk lamp (interestingly, I think this is the anchor habit I need to build up, as it’s the point of variance from yesterday)
• Fed the cat
• Went through the morning ablutions
• Finished today’s Worlde and posted the results to the family chat
• Wrote a page of my journal
• Grabbed my laptop 
• Did set-up for some vignette projects I’m working on
• Wrote 500 words
• Made coffee and chatted with my spouse
• Wrote another 300 words
• Showered
• Went to Officeworks to pick up a webcam
• Ate breakfast
• Made another coffee
• Started work at the day job.

I then sat down to do a little more writing over lunch, taking full advantage of my work-from-home-with-one-hour-lunch-break deal to do another 200 hundred words, bringing my total wordcount to 1028. 

Not my best writing day ever, but given that I’ve spent over a month not writing, I’ll take it as a good sign. 

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 brian dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day.

As mentioned a few weeks back, 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/meditiion 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 direclty 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….