99: My Morning Routine—How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired with Benjamin Spall

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the Only Move that Matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am really excited to be here today with Benjamin Spall talking about one of my favorite things, morning routines. Ben is a writer and the founding co editor of My Morning Routine. Originally from England, he moved to the US two years ago for love and they eventually got married and now he has a book coming out with his co author Michael Zander called My Morning How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much for having me, Jenny.

I remember when you guys reached out to me years ago to collect my Morning Routine story and I remember thinking what a positive experience it was to kind of unpack everything about my day and then to go see you guys. Over five years of running the website accumulated over 300 interviews. It's amazing.

Yes. Yeah, we, we've definitely, we've heard that a lot people saying that actually the process of writing it down is one of the most valuable things to actually interviewing them. And we've actually found that many people have noted that after they have been on our website they've kind of, they got, you know, an index card or a post it note and written down like the very basic bullet points of their routine and like put it up on their computer screen or put it somewhere where they see it every day just as kind of a reminder to actually do the things that they said they do.

What inspired you to start collecting morning routines?

Yeah, so it was actually, to be honest, it was, it was Michael's idea in the, in the beginning. He emailed me about a month before we launched the site just over five years ago and I had the idea of a productivity based thing whether a website or a book or something and he just came to Me with the idea of morning routines. And at that time, it was nowhere near as much of a thing, nowhere near as popular as it is right now. So at that moment, I was like, yeah, why isn't anyone doing this? So, yeah, we put it together. He's more of the coder and designer, and I'm more of the editor. And so we complemented each other pretty well. And in the beginning, we just interviewed our friends, but it quickly picked up steam, and we always had a little form on the website where people could suggest themselves or suggest other people. So we were never at a loss for people to interview. And then over time, we just got to interview more and more interesting people. And, yeah, it's just gone from there.

What would you say is one of the most surprising things that you Learned in over 300 interviews, or let's say maybe a unique part of someone or a collective group of people's morning routines that you now have incorporated as a result of doing the site and the book?

Well, I'd say the most unique thing from any one interview, and this is by no means an endorsement of it, and it's definitely the only person we heard who does this for the book we interviewed. Dave Asprey. I knew you were gonna say that. You read that one. Yeah, I know, right?

As you were saying this, I was guessing which of the 64, and I'm like, I bet anything it's Dave's. Okay, continue.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, he's a very nice man, but parts of his routine, I was like, I don't know if I would do that. I can't remember the exact number, but he takes well over 100 vitamins a day on his quest to live to be 100 and something.

180.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is cool.

We didn't hear that from other people, to be honest. So I often get the question, what's the most surprising thing you hear? That's definitely one of them, but it's definitely not one that's replicated over and over. One thing that has been replicated a lot, and it's something that we absolutely live by, is we believe that if you. If you need to get up at a particular time, absolutely, you should use an alarm. If you don't need to get up at a time, then don't. But if you need to get up, use an alarm, but do not use the snooze button. Do not hit it. Do not even have it activated on your phone, if possible. We believe that is the case just because it really messes with your mindset in the morning, and it doesn't really get you in a motivated state to get up and do what you're supposed to be doing.

That is pretty consistent. We certainly have some people in the book and we have a little reversal section where someone speaks about how they actually enjoy the snooze wedding. But for the most part, not snoozing is the way to go.

I can understand that. So were you a former snoozer?

I did a little bit. Yeah. My. My morning routine itself has kind of been, you know, up and down over the years. Obviously, getting married changed that, and we'll discuss that later. But it's. Yeah, I definitely used to snooze a lot more. I definitely used to get up much later. I'm not. I'm not a crazy early riser right now. I get up at about 7:30am Which I'd say is somewhere between the two of early and late risers. Which is another point we make in the book, is you don't have to be an early riser to actually have a morning routine and make the most of your morning. It's just your morning routine is what happens immediately after you wake up. And at that point, you can just go about your day. Even if you work a night shift. So you get up at 6pm you still have your morning routine in which you can do things before you actually have to be somewhere that often be in work.

Okay. There are so many great things in there that I want to come back to. And I love what you just said that anyone can have a morning routine. You don't have to be a morning person to have a set of rituals that start your day on a note that is meaningful to you. We're going to talk about morning people and night owls in a second. Also, on the Dave Asprey front, I debated whether I should bring this up on the podcast. But one of the most shocking things I felt from his morning routine is that he gives his kids coffee.

Yeah.

And I was so curious to know how old these kids are. But he's giving them some amount of coffee with bulletproof. His bulletproof stuff brain octane and anyway, collagen protein.

Like what? Yeah, I have to say, like, when we received his routine, he took 2.

Ounces of bulletproof coffee to help them turn on their brains and give them steady energy throughout the morning.

I even have that much. No, honestly, we checked the legal status of the book before we were. But while we were collecting all these interviews and we were like, okay, this is okay, we'll just. It's everyone's opinion, you know, everyone like yourself as well, everyone we interview in the book. It is their opinion. We'll just let them put that out there.

But yeah, it's unique. I actually want to read an excerpt from one that I really loved. This is from Anna Marie Cox, who's a political columnist and culture critic. And she says, you ask the question, anything else you would like to add? She says, when I read other people's routines in this kind of roundup, I always compare them to mine and always find my own discipline lacking. It gives me lots of delicious new reasons to beat myself up. Oh, she runs a mile. He reads the whole front section of the New York Times. She dispenses with her entire email queue. I'd like anyone reading this to know that these things are always aspirational. I've battled depression from time to time, and in those periods I've needed to remind myself that simply getting out of bed can be a victory. What we are capable of changes from day to day, and it's important to recognize and honor that. It means celebrating yourself for who you were able to be and what you were able to do that day. And then I loved this part too. She says, when you come up with a morning routine, understand that you're undertaking it in order to do something good for yourself, not to meet some stranger's standard of productivity. This is why prayer is such an important part of my routine and probably the only thing next to coffee that I never fail to include. Prayers remind me that today is a gift no matter how I use it. I really loved what she said about, you're not trying to please any perfectionism God out there. Your morning routine is for you to feel good.

Yeah, isn't that fantastic? I believe we also quoted part of that in our introduction because it's just so perfect to what we're trying to make. Because a lot of articles, for example, online about morning routines, they're all about here is this morning routine. You have to do it. You get up at 4am and it will make your life perfect. But we're trying to make the point that, you know, this book is for everyone, even if you're not a morning person or you're a parent of young kids or you have like a very demanding full time job. It's, it's a book that really shows that people are different and people have these different morning routines. Certainly if you go through the book, you'll find that many, like Dave Asprey, for example, Many are more complex than others, but it works for them, you know, and it kind of, it gives you a peek into the lives of like these busy, successful people and it kind of shows that many of the things they do are very simple to replicate. And, and once again, if you're waking up at 6pm it's just as simple to replicate as if you're waking up at 6am and we thought that was very important to show and we think the Anna Marie Cox quote kind of shows that perfectly.

I love how you, a couple points in the book, like you said, you kind of debunk this myth of the perfect morning routine. And in fact there are several pretty big disruptors moving in with someone, having kids, having a pet, and even travel. And I have to say I'm, I was guilty, not guilty, but I definitely fell into the perfectionism trap around my morning routine and even rigidity where when I lived alone it was very easy to have it just be exactly as I wanted it to be. And when I filled out my interview for your blog, the first time I filled it out, I did live alone. And then as it came to editing and revising the story for the book, everything had flipped completely upside down. Like I do live with a night owl and I know you do too. And it took me months of resisting so many change to my bedtime, to my wake up time, to my routines. And actually it would probably be even still a slightly different interview though much is the same. But that adjustment to when things don't go as planned is actually a crucial part of flexibility, as you say in the book.

Yeah, it's, we found like I say with my own wife, she's a night owl and I am.

Yeah. Tell me how that works, how you guys work that out.

Yeah, so I'm not like, I'm not like a very early morning person, like four or five. I'm more of a like recently my wife has actually been going to yoga in the mornings. So we get up at 6:30. So that's kind of flipped a little bit. But for a long time we were getting up at around 7:30 and to me that was a little bit late and to my wife that was certainly very early. And yeah, you kind of just have to compromise if you want to spend that time together. And we actually, in the book we interview Caroline Paul and she is a morning person. She's a writer and a former firefighter. She is a morning person, but her wife Wendy is definitely a night owl. So Wendy likes to stay up pretty late and Caroline likes to go to bed pretty early, but for the most, partly try and compromise. So even though Caroline still goes to bed before Wendy, she goes to bed a little later than she would like and Wendy goes to bed a little earlier than she would like. And you could say that's a lose, lose situation, but I would say it's a win win in terms of you just get to spend that little bit extra time together. But it's definitely difficult. Like you say yourself and me and my wife, it's definitely very disrupting. But honestly, it's definitely worth it just to spend the extra time together.

I agree. We were doing that where we both compromised. I, in his ideal world, he'd go to bed around 3 or 4am and I was going to bed at 8pm when I met him. So we had such a long way to compromise for both of us. But now, interestingly so, there were times where we would both go to bed at, let's say, 11. It was later than I would have liked, earlier than he would have, but it worked. But now this thing has been happening where sometimes I'll go to bed at 10 and he'll stay up till 3. So as long as I can learn to sleep. We live in a studio, so we don't even have a bedroom door. But then in the morning I actually get a quiet chunk where I can do all my morning routines while he's asleep. And he gets this evening chunk. So it ended up being that the morning person, night owl balance, made it so that yes, we have dinner and maybe watch a show together at night, and we have that together time. But then we also each somehow found our own little pocket, our own little magic window where the house is quiet and everyone else is asleep.

Yeah, I've definitely found that work sometimes with my wife, for example, for the holidays, we stayed at her parents for about a week. And during that time she would stay up. We just decided that we were going to do this. She would stay up to one or two reading or doing something online and I would go to sleep at about 11 or something like that. And then I would get up early mostly to edit this book, to be honest, and then she would sleep in. And it kind of. Even though it did take a little bit less time than we normally would have because we weren't working throughout the day as much because it was the holidays, it kind of worked out. But yeah, it is nice if someone's a morning person or someone's a night owl for them to have that time, because everybody needs a lot of time. To themselves. A lot of time to unwind. And if you don't get that, it kind of isn't going to make things great fun anyway. So I think it really helps to compromise in that direction as well sometimes.

One thing you suggest that readers do is to zoom out and look at your morning routine from above. What do you see? Say more about that exercise?

Yeah, so we actually, I think I noted in the point, I kind of stole it from the idea of people, you know, imagining their funeral and zooming out and, like, looking down at their funeral and, like, wondering what people would say about them. And it's really an exercise in character. You kind of. You know, people don't say how many clients you had, for example, they don't say how hard you worked, but they generally say about what a good person you were, what a good parent you were, what a good son or daughter you were. So the idea of that point was just to say that if you look independently, if you take yourself out of your body for a second and look at your morning routine, you could probably find many more faults and also many good points than you can when you're just imagining it as yourself. And we think that exercise is great because it actually just makes you more aware of the situation and more aware of what you should take out. Want you to add in. And then hopefully on our website, and also within the book itself, we offer a lot of points that can then be added in.

It is fun. It's really fun to just be a voyeur and kind of look at 64 people's morning and how they spend it. I want to read another. There's two more that I love, these little clips that I'll read. But first, was it hard to narrow it down to 64? How did you choose?

It was hard. It was very hard. We actually counted up yesterday how many people we contacted to be in the book, and in total, it was over 600 people.

Wow.

Yeah. Not all of those got back to us, of course, but many did. There's many people that did get back to us and either eventually we did interview and they just didn't make it.

But that was one of the toughest parts of the book, actually having to tell people they weren't going to be in it. That wasn't fun. And narrowing it down was very hard. The fact that it came to 64 shows that we were never aiming for a particular number, just basically how many we could fit within the page count we'd been given. But, yeah, it was very tough. And there was Definitely some last minute calls where we just had to take a couple out at the last minute. And that wasn't fun at all. But yeah, the main point of all the interviews was not to show you the most productive or the ones with the best workouts and such. It was to really give a vast overview, as much as possible of all the different types of routines. And the book itself is broken into different chapters where we actually each chapter kind of focuses on a different area. So for example, your routine is in the evening, evening is in the evening routines chapter. Because you talk about that a lot in yours.

But we also have the tagline for mine is when your evening routine begins at three in the afternoon. I laughed out loud when I saw that. I was like, okay, yeah, well, I tried. Doesn't happen every day.

Yeah, that's a pretty early one. That was kind of funny to us. But yeah.

We have a wide range of chapters. So for example, we have a whole chapter on parents where we interview five or six parents about their morning routines with their young kids. We have a chapter on sleep, evening routines, focus and productivity. And a really good one is different environments, which is basically how do you stick to your routine when you're away from home? That doesn't really mean vacation so much. It kind of means like business travel or travel in general. So we tried to hit as many points as we could with each of the chapters. And then on the other side of the chapters, kind of with the chapter sandwiched between it, we kind of give our own thoughts, which is based off of our own beliefs and such, but also based off of all of the routines, all of the people we've ever interviewed for the website as well, and try and just correlate what all these people have said and get to the point that people say the most.

Yeah, I want to read one. This one's from Austin Kleon, who wrote Steal like an Artist.

Yes.

And he says, almost every single morning, rain or shine, my wife and I load our two sons into a red double stroller and we take a three mile walk around our neighborhood. It's often painful, sometimes sublime, but it's always essential to our day. It's when ideas are born, when we make plans, when we spot suburban wildlife, when we rant about politics, when we exorcise our demons. We almost never miss this, and I consider it the most important part of my day. I don't take morning meetings or go to morning meetups or whatever because it would mean I'd miss this walk. I love how, yeah, that's a pretty good one. Yeah, just this is essential, rain or shine. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it isn't. But I loved, especially at the end, he says he doesn't even schedule morning meetings. It's not like, oh, I'll skip the walk that day. This is the non negotiable. So it was also fun to see what people's non negotiables were.

Yeah, so that's a good point. And yeah, we definitely noticed that. But when you think of a morning routine, and like I mentioned earlier of all these articles about morning routines right now, a lot of them are based on working out and being productive in the morning. And we just noticed, like reading these and editing them, that it's comforting to know that not all productive people are waking up at 5am and immediately running out the door to work out. Many people are just starting much slower, kind of enjoying the morning with their spouse or with their kids or just by themselves. And it's nice to realize that you can have that element of self care in your morning routine as well. And that's okay. You don't have to be working out to actually have productive morning.

I'm really glad you said that because again, this brings us back to that conversation where somehow morning routines got hijacked by the gods of productivity, where it's like the morning routine is about optimization and peak performance, but actually the morning routine can absolutely be about self care and why shouldn't it be? Like for me it is about waking up without an alarm, meditating, reading, having tea. These are rituals that have. And yes, they do make me more productive later on. But the point of them isn't productivity, it's the intrinsic reward of those activities. And it's actually the only time that I. Not the only, but it's easier to feel frenzied or guilty later in the day about what is or isn't getting done.

Yeah, we think it really shows you that there's no one right way to start your day. Which again is what many of these articles trying to point out. And when you kind of go through the routines one by one. And I found this myself reading it later on after editing it. So it's kind of been out my head for a little bit while my editor wrote this beautiful line which made it into the introduction of the book. And it was quote, the book is a patchwork study of who we are and how we live. End quote. And I just thought that was so perfect because it really is. You go through and you just. It's kind of like an escapist, voya kind of situation. You're just like diving into people's days and much of the book instead of the website, so much the book as you're turning the page from one to another, you really just feel engrossed in these people's lives. And yeah, it's just a really nice experience to go through them.

So speaking of all these articles.

Everyone you interviewed, 53% meditate, which is something that we see thrown around all the time. And I'm guilty of it. But like, okay, meditation, it's such a great way to start your day. Were you expecting more or less to say that they meditate every day?

I don't think I was expecting either way.

I think many more people feel like they should meditate than actually do. So for example, I meditate for about 10 minutes a day, not necessarily in the morning, but I've only been doing that for a couple of months and I run the website about it. So it's kind of.

I think the number would be much higher if it was like how many people feel like they should be meditating. But yeah, I'm not too surprised. It's only, only about halfway. But a lot of people in terms of meditation, it's not just one way or the other. It's not just like sitting cross legged on mountain kind of thing, like doing the oms. Some people do that, some people meditate for an hour or so, but many people literally just meditate for five to 10 minutes. And that is probably what many a lot of that number is.

I also loved Leo Babalda has a non routine. I like that his was not to have a routine that was fixed on any one thing, but to kind of go with the flow.

Yes, I think he was making a point because I know that he published because he's had his blog forever, but I think he published a post eight or nine years ago where he talked about his morning routine. So I think he was now making the point that now it's much more casual. But yeah, that was great as well. Just to get how you can kind of. It doesn't have to be rigid. It can really be something very casual. And by going through this book you can come up ideas for, you know, crazy workouts and crazy like productivity hacks and such. But you can also just figure out that actually it can be a very calm morning. Like my personal morning routine is very calm and it doesn't have to tell us your routine.

What is your morning routine?

Yeah, sure. So like I said, it changed recently as My, My wife started doing early morning yoga, but for the most part we normally get up at about 7:30am and I just, I just come into the kitchen and I make some breakfast quietly. And the one thing I try to do is just be calm. And I do not check email, I do not check Facebook or anything like that. And occasionally I will check Instagram because I personally find that to be quite calming. I've curated my feed so it's just nice pictures for the most part. But if I can, I will read. And it doesn't always happen, but if I can just sit and read while I'm making breakfast, that makes me so calm and so prepared for the day ahead. And yeah, it's just a very calm morning. And then my wife will come into the kitchen, we'll eat breakfast together and then we'll just head out the door and it's nothing, nothing special. Like I said, I usually meditate a little bit later in the day. It's just very calming. And like we have all these chapters in our book. I think mine would definitely fit into the self care chapter because even though I do nothing special, I just try to make this hour or hour and a half in the morning just as calm as it can possibly be because I feel that that helps me later on in the day where, as you know, of course, the day itself isn't as calm.

Well, and what you're highlighting there is a core value. I love the idea of assigning a value to the morning routine. Like calm.

Was like, wait, you know. Yeah, that was his was like peak, you know, peak perform essentially. And yours is calm. That's so beautiful to hear how it drives your morning. And that's the ultimate aim.

Yeah, I'm definitely one of those people and I think more people should be like this if they're not who wake up and it's just like, okay, today is a new day. This is great. And I feel my best in the morning. So I kind of want to keep that going as long as possible. And you know, there's the old saying, like you can check your email and you may have some newsletters that you might want to read, but for the most part there's many things that you can't really do on your phone. If you have a meeting in the morning, then sure, check your email to make sure it hasn't changed. But there are many things that if you check your phone immediately, you're just going to get sucked into your email. That is just not a great way to start your day because you're going to get those feelings of stress and such later on in the day. Just leave your morning to be as calm a space as possible.

You mentioned in the book that it can create a cascade effect of follow up activities that you don't want to be doing yet. Like, oh, you see this email? No, you need to do this task and all of a sudden the day runs you.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And you certainly, you do not want other people's priorities to kind of like put themselves on you before you even have a chance to barely open your eyes in the morning.

I love Kevin Kelly's suggestion. In one of his books, he proposed email senders should have to pay like a certain amount. I don't know if it was $0.01 or $0.05, just like a postage stamp for sale. And then, and then if you accept the request, maybe they get a rebate or something. But where there's kind of a cost to just throwing out all these requests.

Yeah, I've definitely heard that before. Not the idea of just considering it as if you're using a postage stamp and then just thinking, maybe I won't send this one. And I try that my best. Especially when I'm in an email thread with many people in copy. I'll try my best to, if I'm just literally thanking someone, I'll try to take everyone out of copy who I've not thanked someone.

Just to try and help them a little bit. But you know, for the most part people don't respect that and you just get a lot of email.

I liked. Recently you tweeted about a New York Times article of a guy who does this experiment that I do and I just would never have thought to write about it. But he stopped reading news online and only got his news from print newspapers. And I do that. So I subscribe to the New York Times Saturday Sunday edition and I used to get the Wall Street Journal, but I stopped even that. And I don't check news during the week. I only read it in the Saturday and Sunday paper. And I didn't realize as I was reading his article and we'll put it in the show notes, I was like, oh yeah, there is a sense of calm where I'm also not starting my day with the insanity of the news media, whether by we don't even have cable tv but even online that now the Internet is just such a source of constant news that we can't even know what's accurate, what isn't.

Yeah, I definitely find I don't do that. But that was a great article by him. But I definitely find that if I'm trying to work on something that I'm not really into and I just really don't want to be doing it, I will find myself opening a new tab and typing in T. And then Twitter will come up and I'll go straight to it and. And yeah, for five minutes, I'll just be highly stressed out. And it's a stressful place to be. Like the Twitter homepage, all the hashtags down the side. And yeah, I totally. Although I don't do it yet, I could totally see the benefit of just getting your news once a day or once a week. And I love the point that he made in the article as well, is that a lot of these things sort themselves out. So if you go to the New York Times now, they'll tell you about something that's developing or something that might do something, and then if you check it in the paper edition the next day, they'll tell you what happened. And it's a nice way to just save yourself with those little moments where you can just get the roundup later on the actual result.

You mentioned that you moved to the US for love two years ago. How did you meet your wife?

We met in Spain, actually. I grew up in the uk. She grew up here in the Bay Area, and we both happened to be in the same Spanish town at the same time.

And yeah, that's where we met. And then I was actually working freelance in the UK at the time, so she had to go back. She was studying in Spain, so she had to go back to the US and then I had to go back to the UK and then over visiting each other backwards and forwards. And then we eventually got married and then I moved here. How many years? Two and a half years ago now.

Did you know my third friend to meet his wife in Spain? Spain.

Oh, really?

Yes. Fellas, take note, their two wives are Spanish, so yours is American, but still, that's the third. That's so cool.

Wow. Yeah, we actually went back to the same town for our wedding anniversary last year, and it was amazing to go back. Spain's just a wonderful country.

As we start to wrap up, what is your biggest hope for people that they will know or do differently after they read my morning routine?

Well, I'd say I'd like the biggest takeaway from the book and from the website itself also, is that it's all about kind of starting your morning with intention. And, you know, you want to bring these wins that you get from your morning routine. Into the rest of the day. And once you do that, you figure out that your morning is actually a more important time of day than the rest of your day. And I'll expand upon that in the sense that it really, like I was saying with my calm morning earlier, it really makes the rest of your day go better if you kind of have that calmer morning or in the case of someone who works out, if you actually get your workout in first thing, because then you know that you don't have to do that later on. And another point that would keep up is that keeping your routine short and easy to accomplish, especially in the beginning, is going to greatly increase your chances of actually sticking with it. And of course, one of the main problems with one routine or anything really is that. But often you do not stick to it. You'll go really hard and fast in the beginning and then you'll just stop it because it's too hard. So the point we're trying to make is that it really can be very simple and very easy. And you should find a healthy balance between sticking to your routine. And while not taking it too seriously, we find that when you do that, you stick to it to the longer term and you learn that you can adapt to it a little bit over time as your needs change.

That's our main point, just that you should keep it easy to accomplish. And there are many examples of that. As I said, we have many, many routines that are like much less stressful than the others. And I think you can get a lot out of those just as much as you do out of the other ones.

Reminds me of Marie Kondo. I've often adapted her. Does this spark joy to fit work and projects? I feel this is my biased, humble opinion, that the morning routine ingredients ideally spark joy, that there's no failure to stick to them, but that they're intrinsically rewarding on some level so that you, you want to do them like whatever makes your heart sing is the core of the routine. And then sure, maybe there are nice to haves as well that are more functional, but something should spark joy in there.

Yeah, we certainly make the point in the book that if you're consistently failing to do something, like let's say you wrote down on a post it note or something, your ideal morning routine, if you're consistently failing to do one part of that, that's probably because you don't want to do it and you know you should keep trying. We say definitely don't give up immediately. At least give something a couple weeks or Three weeks or something. But keep trying. And if it's really not coming to you, then maybe you just don't want to do that. And as you say, it should spark joy. It should be a joyous time in the morning. Like I say, a calm morning or.

Such, even if your morning is at 6pm like those nine owls that we love.

Yeah, I can certainly see how that might be harder, like if you have a overnight work shift. But the point we're trying to make is that you shouldn't be just getting up and immediately going in with your day or going to work or such. You should actually have some quiet time in the morning, even if it's a very short amount of time. And in our parents chapter, we point out that of course for parents this is much harder. We're not trying to pretend it isn't, but we're kind of like giving ideas that we got from other parents to try and bring this time into your day and try and make that more of a calming experience for you.

Yeah, it seemed like in the parents, because I'm with you all, all would be changed, that a lot of it for them was mindset, like finding what to enjoy about it, knowing it's temporary, for better and for worse. So you've talked about intention and building small, achievable things in terms of morning routine. You also talk in the end about small experiments. And I like to leave listeners with one piece of homework or one assignment. So if you could, if you could encourage people to do one thing after listening to this episode, what would it be?

That's a good one. I would say. Well, the first thing I would say, if you currently use the snooze button, stop doing that. You can even just set your alarm a little bit later. So let's say you normally set your alarm for 7:30 and you snooze it till 8. In that example, just set your alarm for 8 and just don't snooze it. And I would say, secondly, just try to wake up five minutes earlier every day. And I mean every day for a week. So for one week you wake up five minutes earlier than you normally did would, and then the next week you add another five minutes. And even though we always point out that you don't have to be an early riser to have a morning routine, having a little bit more time in the morning certainly helps. And just taking five minutes really won't make a big difference to your sleep, but it will make a big difference to the calming effect of your morning and actually being able to have time to do things. So yeah, I would definitely say try to wake up five minutes earlier every day.

Awesome. I love it. Ben. Thank you so much. Where can people find you if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

Yes, to find out more about the book you can pre order it. It comes out on May 15th in the United States. Go to mymorningroutine.com book and then of course if you just go to mymorningroutine.com, you have all the information on there and my website is just benjaminspall.com amazing.

Ben, thank you so much and for sharing this wisdom.

That's fantastic. Thank you. Jenn.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivotlist, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter @jennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.