The morning ritual question.

For four years I tried to build a morning ritual. I tried the cold shower, the journal, the long walk, the protein smoothie, the silent ten minutes. I tried two of them at once. I tried all of them at once, for one particularly stupid week.

None of them stuck. I would do the ritual for eleven days. On the twelfth day I would resent it. On the thirteenth I would skip it. On the fourteenth I would tell myself I had failed at having a morning, which was both melodramatic and, more importantly, untrue.

The thing that finally stuck is embarrassing, because it is not a ritual. I make coffee. I drink it slowly. I do not do anything else.

The ritual that lasted was the one that asked least of me. It turns out asking little is what made it possible.

This is, I think, the actual lesson of every productivity book ever written, hidden beneath the part about the cold shower. The morning is not a project. The morning is a room you wake up in. The ritual that lasts is the one that does not ask anything of the room.

I am suspicious now of any morning that requires equipment. I am suspicious of mornings with timers. I am very suspicious of mornings that have to be tracked. The morning that survives a bad night, a sick child, a delayed train, is the morning worth keeping. Everything else is a kind of theatre, performed for an audience of one and, usually, not enjoyed by them.