Aaron Agius is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the award-winning global marketing agency Louder.Online.
Wake up at 4:30 a.m., meditate, run six miles, and drink green tea with yak butter. Or should you wake up at 5 a.m., do 25 kettlebell swings, then yoga, followed by a cup of organic coffee and an hour-long journaling session?
Sound familiar? The obsession with the perfect morning routine has gotten out of hand. If you want to have one, that’s great. But productivity involves higher-level decisions and more nuance than a militaristic schedule to start your day.
You simply don’t need a morning routine to be successful. In fact, it might even be counterproductive. Here’s why:
A strict, isolating routine can stifle creativity.
Morning routines often prescribe strict periods of isolation after waking up. The logic is that your mind will have space to think. But a 2010 study found that high-IQ, high-achieving creative people were actually more likely to allow “distracting” stimuli into their daily work.
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In other words, by isolating yourself from inputs or distractions, you might actually miss out on thoughts or opportunities that can lead to creative breakthroughs. These findings are far from the philosophy that your mind is a fragile house of cards that must be protected from casual conversations, social media, television or other sources of “non-important” input in the mornings. In fact, the data shows that adhering to a rigid morning routine could actually result in less creativity and achievement.
Plenty of successful people don’t have morning routines.
Entrepreneurs and otherwise highly driven people love to gobble up articles about the “5 Traits of Successful People” and the like. And that’s fair — emulating incredibly successful people is one way to achieve success yourself. But you could put together a list of five Fortune 500 CEOs who like to wear blue shirts. It doesn’t mean that wearing a blue shirt is the secret to their success. The same goes for morning rituals.
For instance, multi-millionaire financial guru Ramit Sethi doesn’t meditate or do yoga first thing in the morning (both highly touted components of morning routines). Instead, he checks his Instagram — one of the worst, most distracting things possible, according to morning routine purists.
And how about mega-billionaire Elon Musk? He checks his emails right after waking up — that’s a cardinal sin in the realm of morning routines. What a shame. If Elon simply avoided emails and instead did 53 pushups in a cryo-chamber at exactly 6:21 a.m., he could be more successful. He seems to be doing okay though.
Morning routines focus on the wrong optimization.
If you’re trying to hyper-optimize every second of your morning, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. The implication that your day is so packed that you don’t have a few minutes to spare means you’ve got bigger problems. Trying to accomplish a million things in a day isn’t sustainable. And it isn’t productive.
Instead, you should focus on the few priorities that truly matter. What one or two mission-critical things do you need to accomplish to move the needle in your business or creative process? When you answer that, you should find that you have plenty of time in the day to accomplish them. If you don’t, then re-shift your priorities instead of trying to save 12 minutes during breakfast.
Different people have different golden hours.
A study published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found that the best time for productivity varies depending on your age, social habits and own biological clock. It makes sense. Some people love to work or create at night, others in the afternoon, and still others in the morning. They discovered that the average “golden hour” was around 1:30 p.m., putting to bed the idea that everyone should get their most important work done in the early morning.
This goes to show that while people can be more productive with morning routines, there are just as many who should focus on an afternoon or evening routine — if they have one at all.
It depends on pure willpower.
There is only so much willpower available to you throughout the day. If you use 80% of your motivation just to get out of bed at 4 a.m. and take a cold shower, is that really the best strategy? How long can you live like a Spartan before finally breaking down and sleeping in until noon anyway?
What if, instead of relying on iron willpower, you wake up without an alarm? What if you focus on doing what makes you feel happy, rested and unrushed on a daily basis? That way, you create a positive psychological state that prepares you to tackle your biggest challenges.
Every day is different.
The world of business doesn’t revolve around your schedule. This is especially true in a globalized market, where you might have customers in various countries.
What if you have a huge potential client in China that wants to hop on a call at 6 a.m. on Thursday? And what if you have another big client who wants to chat at 7:30 a.m. on Friday?
If your morning routine is from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. every day with no wiggle room, you can kiss those deals goodbye. Not a good way to grow your business, is it? Entrepreneurs need to be flexible. The challenges and time frames you have will change every day.
The bottom line: Morning routines are not the key to success.
Creating processes to achieve your goals is key to being successful. However, what those processes look like is unique for every person. Having a rigid morning routine is just one of a thousand possible strategies.
The true key to success is knowing what you want and taking action toward that. If a morning routine helps you, all the better. If not, forget about it.
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Author: Aaron Agius, Forbes Councils Member