Over the years I've tried to have different morning routines to varying success. In the latest episode of the Bike Shed, co-host Steph Viccari mentioned her approach to a morning routine is to ensure that it:

...connect[s] to the part of you that makes you feel happy to be alive...

This seems blindingly obvious in hindsight, but in the past I've always tried to make morning rituals featuring things that I think I'm supposed to be doing; exercise, meditation, etc. Enjoyment was never really a criteria.

I'm not going to lay out a new morning routine here, as I need some time to mull it over, and life with a 1 year old doesn't exactly play nicely with routines. One thing I might try is to switch out my usual Twitter doomscrolling for perusing my RSS feeds with breakfast instead - something I used to do back in the Google Reader days. Learning from others is one of my joys in life, so I think that fits nicely.

I also realised, on reflection, that I'd encountered the very same issue in my efforts to implement morning routines, which have a way of becoming utterly deadening the moment you try to define them too strictly: "630am get up, 645am journalling", and so forth. Far better, in my experience, to draw up a "menu" of things you'd ideally like to do every morning, then select one or two of them each day. (Because it's less yoked to specific clock times, this approach is also vastly better suited to a life in which your routine is liable to be interrupted by small children waking and requiring your attention.)

This approach from Oliver Burkeman also resonates with me. I've been experimenting with [time blocking](/time blocking) recently, but I find that it if I miss one scheduled time block, everything else suddenly seems to have an invisible "(Optional)" added to in my calendar and my schedule falls apart.