I used to check Slack before my feet hit the floor. Emails during breakfast, PRs during coffee. Then I burned out. Here’s the morning routine that brought me back.
5:30 AM — No Screens
The first 30 minutes are screen-free. I make pour-over coffee (currently obsessed with Ethiopian Yirgacheffe), stretch, and write three pages in a journal. It’s not profound prose — it’s brain garbage collection. Like running VACUUM on a Postgres database, but for your mind.
6:00 AM — Deep Work Block
This is my golden hour. No meetings, no Slack, no emails. I work on the hardest problem of the day — the one that requires actual thinking, not just typing. Architecture decisions, complex debugging, writing documentation that future-me will be grateful for.
7:00 AM — Exercise
A 30-minute run or bodyweight workout. Non-negotiable. The research on exercise and cognitive performance is overwhelming. I solve more bugs per hour on days I exercise than days I don’t. The ROI is absurd.
7:45 AM — Connect
Now I check Slack, review PRs, scan emails. But by this point, I’ve already accomplished the most important work of the day. Everything else is incremental. The anxiety of an overflowing inbox hits different when you’ve already shipped something meaningful.
Protect your mornings. They set the trajectory for everything that follows.
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