Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about a morning productivity hack and a morning hack for greater presence and ease. So this hack actually involves something you do the night before. What I've found for myself and many of the people I work with is that a lot of attention we experience in the moment, at any point in the day, not just in the morning, often comes from not knowing what we should actually be doing in that moment. We have endless things on our to-do list and it creates a lot of internal agitation just trying to figure out what should I be doing right now.

And then we're doing something and then we remember something else we should be doing. And it's like, Oh, should I be doing this? Or should I be doing that? And so much of that distress just comes from a feeling of dissonance with where we are and where we think we should be or what we're doing and what we think we should be doing. And so the thing you can do the night before that can really set a good tone to start your day, really help you experience more ease in the morning and help you be more productive if you're working, is to schedule out the first five hours of your morning. And this you do the night before. Just getting very clear, specifically on those first 30 minutes.

What are you going to do as soon as you wake up? What's the first thing you do when you get out of bed? Is it, do you get a drink of water? Do you go on the meditation cushion? And do you go to the bathroom? Do you take a shower? Do you put the coffee on? And having that clarity of what you're going to do in the first 30 minutes really helps facilitate where your energy is going to go upon waking. I know we've all been there where the alarm clock goes off and it's like, yeah, do I really have to get out of bed right now? And maybe it's ambiguous. Like, we kind of feel like we should, because it's healthy for us and we could get going on the day. But yeah. We don't really know what we have to do yet and we probably have some wiggle room, so we just press snooze.

But if you knew clearly, it's like, no, you know, as soon as I wake up at this time, 5:30, 6:30, 7:30, uh, from that period until the next half hour, I'm going to be doing my meditation practice or I make my coffee, I sit down with a book and I have this time for myself before the kids wake up. And then sketching beyond there, you could go up to five hours, you could do three hours. Thetim, the time is not as important. I like to do the first five hours just cause it, it gives me, uh, a good roadmap for the early part of my morning. Then you just roughly fill in the things that you'd like to be doing.

And this could be recreational, this could be self care, but it could be work-related. And what I've found, and there were many productivity people that also recommend this technique, is it just helps orient your attention, your focus and your energy, so that you're not caught up in all these different ideas of, Oh, I could be doing this or it could be doing this, or maybe I'll just snooze since I don't really know what I should be doing anyway. The outline is clear. You don't need to use that mental energy to figure out what to do. It's just surrendering to what is on the list and going full in.

So try this out. For tomorrow, see if you can spend, uh, about 10 minutes the night before, tonight, planning out what you'll do the first five hours, especially that first half hour and see how it informs your morning. I think you'll find that it allows you to be not only more productive, but also more present because you don't have to consume as much energy thinking about different things. So hope this helps. Thank you for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.