Creating Morning Habits & Implicit vs. Explicit Journaling

This past weekend I came across a blog post from Steve Corona titled Morning Rituals – 1/10/100 that I found particularly motivating. In it he talked about one of his morning rituals, which primarily focused on writing. As a current member of the “roll out of bed and wander over to the computer to start working” club, as well as someone who falls into lazy writing habits from time to time, I felt some motivation to create a healthier morning routine myself.

One of the pieces he talks about is journaling. It turns out that in one way or another, we already accomplish this through various means of social media. If you were to aggregate all of your Facebook & Twitter posts, Instagram pictures, Yelp reviews, Foursquare checkins, etc., you could create a true timeline of your life (at least since the inception of those applications). Timehop does a pretty good job of this if you only care about a particular day; however, all of those mediums are geared towards the public rather than personal recollections of events. I have decided to coin the difference between these ImplicitExplicit Journaling, unless someone else has already come up with something fancier.

In any case, the idea of creating a collection of thoughts is what has me particularly interested in trying out Day One, and application geared towards very quick journaling. I’m fully aware of my short attention span, but writing down a couple sentences seems like a repeatable action. I’m really intrigued to see what direction I take it once on the initial honeymoon phase of chronicling everything is over.

The other item in his blog post that stuck out to me is spending some time each morning brainstorming ideas. I hate to say that I leave my brainstorming for the moment that I want to think of some interesting project to work on, and it is particularly difficult for me to come up with ideas on the spot. While I do come up with fun little ideas here and there, taking some dedicated time to let me brain be creative may just pay off in the long run. And if nothing else, I’ll have a laundry list of hackathon ideas.

I’m hoping to combine these with some exercise related morning goals, as it’s far too easy to find excuses to not run after work when trying to coordinate schedules and make dinner. Hopefully it leads to some additional success on the New Year’s Resolution front, and some more diligent blogging.