Darby Vickers, Ph.D.

When I needed to start working on my dissertation in earnest, my adviser told me I should get up at 5am and write for a few hours before starting my day. I thought about it and I actually tried for about 6 weeks over the summr (although I got up at 6am rather than 5am). It was a disaster.

At 6am, every morning, I was cold, miserable, and my brain felt heavy and useless. I dreaded getting up and facing my document. I dreaded even more that someone else in the house would get up and distract me (rendering my misery pointless). I still didn’t usually make any real progress (more than a sentence or two) until 10 am. But on many days, I had given up by 10 am because it seemed so pointless. Objectively, things weren’t that bad, but my morning misery left me emotionally wrecked and hostile by noon everyday. Worse, by 6pm I was exhausted and already dreading getting up the next morning. It was a horrible summer.

When I searched for other sources of inspiration, everyone else gave similar advice: get up and immediately start writing (Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, Becoming an Academic Writer, and Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day don’t specify a time, but all discuss the benefits of morning writing). I wondered whether only morning people were cut out to be academics. All of the joy I had experienced writing my dissertation was gone.

After some weeks of this misery, I found a book called My Morning Routine. Most of the book simply report successful people answering questions about their morning routines. Like everywhere else I looked, most of these people were morning people in the strongest possible sense (the I’ve-gotten-up-before-sunrise-for-as-long-as-I-can-remember morning people). However, the overarching method in My Morning Routine spoke to me. For me, the big take-aways from this book were the following: (1) make your morning routine something you look forward to (rather than dread), (2) incorporate some kind of exercise to help get you going, and (3) cultivate the focus and attitude you want for your day. Using these general principles, I designed the basics of a morning routine.

I couldn’t fathom what would make me look forward to getting up in the mornings. I brainstormed some things I really enjoyed. One of the things I love most is to have a quiet latte and a pastry or slice of toast at a café while reading a book or listening to an audiobook. Of course, it would be too expensive and too time consuming to do that with any regularity. However, I did have a cheap espresso machine. So, I decided that I would recreate this scene at home. I indulge myself for breakfast. I make sure that I always have something pleasing that I will enjoy eating. Unless it’s a weekend, I make sure that the breakfast is actually made the night before; I don’t want to prepare anything more complicated than toasting or warming something. However, I do make myself a latte every single morning and I look forward to it, starting at about 8 pm the night before.

The morning routine has gone through various tweaks. I will probably make a more specific post on morning routines in the future where I will go into more detail but here is the broad sketch. I generally wake up sometime between 7-8:30 am. I judge my wake up time by two factors: (1) what time I need to leave the house and (2) what time I need to be somewhere (I always try to wake up at least 90 minutes before I have to leave my apartment in the morning). In that time I wake up, make myself a latte and some toast, read/listen to something interesting, do 15-45 minutes of yoga, get ready, and head to wherever I need to be. Essentially, I allow myself to relax and enjoy my morning, which means I rarely dread getting out of bed, even if I have a lot on my plate.

However, you’ll notice that there is a conspicuous absence of writing in this schedule. Isn’t one supposed to write in the mornings, according to pretty much every productivity manual available? Yes. I’ve found that I end up writing in the morning about 60% of the time. I managed to do this because of The Daily Writing Log, which is a part of the Writing Workshop I joined in Fall 2018. I will write a series of blogposts on Professor Barbara Sarnecka’s Writing Workshop and how it has increased my productivity (and improved my quality of life). The Daily Writing Log is a component of the workshop in in which, each week, writing workshop participants fill in weekly and daily writing goals. If we wrote on any given day, we put a “yes” in the column to indicate that we wrote (or if not, log “no” in the same column).

I find that I’m tempted to log into the Daily Writing Log during my time in the morning. I think that I feel like if I log “yes” into the Daily Writing Log, I’ve officially accomplished something for the day. It also means that, several mornings a week, within the first two hours I’m awake, I open a major writing project (most often my dissertation) and write or edit a few sentences. Sometimes, I leave off after a few sentences and go back to my standard morning routine. However, sometimes, I get into a groove with my writing and I spend anywhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours (if I have nowhere to be) writing. No matter what, I’ve started some writing for the day and, when I have to inevitably go back to that document later in the day, I feel less anxious about it.

While I may never be a morning person or a morning writer, I tend to have a writing session of at least 15 minutes at least one morning per week. The best part is that I’ve done this while eschewing the stress of my mornings and decreasing my stress about writing over the course of the rest of the day. It may not work for you, but it might be worth a shot!

To create your own Daily Writing Log:
1. Open the Daily Writing Log
2. Click on “File” in the top left corner and choose “Make a Copy”
3. Once you have made a copy of the document, title it for yourself
4. Recruit a group of friends/colleagues/writing partners to join your writing group and share the document with them (remember to change the permissions so they can log in their data too)
5. Fill in your weekly writing goals and your daily writing goals at the beginning of each week
6. Each day, log your writing into the log. At the end of the week, write a short reflection on how your week went
7. Feel free to use the comment feature to spread solidarity and encouragement to others in your writing group!

Potential Modifications to the Daily Writing Log
– Create an extra column to log in which projects you worked on that day
– Change the “grateful for” column to something new each week. Ideas include: something unhurried (what did you to today that you didn’t rush), act of kindness (either done or witnessed), savor something (a visual, auditory, taste, etc. experience)
– Add a modification to the spreadsheet such that if someone writes “yes” in the central column, it turns yellow and if someone writes “no” in the central column, it turns orange (or some other color scheme).

One addendum: some people in my writing workshop have found that a different scheme works for them. Under this scheme, you keep your laptop next to your bed and set up some document for the morning. This way, when you wake up, you can open your laptop and immediately begin to work for a few minutes before the morning dread sets in. Now, for me, this scheme makes me want to just roll over and go back to sleep. However, some people swear by it because it allows them to write before their writing resistance sets in for the day.

I hope this helps motivate you to write in the morning! Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or to send me an email with ideas or questions.