You may have heard that building a writing routine increases your productivity. What no one talks about are the poor personal and creative habits affecting your morning writing routine that could ruin all your hard work if left unchecked.
What’s Your Creative Morning Routine?
Creative morning routines are a series of scheduled creative activities you have lined up to accomplish in the morning before the world awakes and distractions filter through.
It is an effective personalized system you develop to accomplish creative goals and tick off items in your writing schedule before tackling a new day.
What Are Personal Habits?
Personal habits are things you repeatedly do that can make or break you as an individual.
You subconsciously develop these habits and they lean toward being of either good or bad influence on your daily routines.
Examples of personal habits include drinking water, meditating, and exercising.
What Are Creative Habits?
Creative habits are writing habits cultivated to foster a system that guarantees productivity, consistency, and mastery in your writing craft.
These habits are conscious actions developed and nurtured to help you grow as a writer, make progress on a steady scale, achieve targeted writing goals, build your craft, and create a routine that effortlessly blends with your daily life.
Examples of creative habits: writing/ journaling daily, researching, reading, training your focus, etcetera.
How Does Indulging Poor Personal and Creative Habit Affect Your Morning Routines?
Unconsciously developing poor personal and creative habits bleeds into your morning routine, disrupting your workflow systems or halting it entirely.
This causes glitches that could widen over time and affect your creative capacity as a writer and derail your goals.
I have made a list of 5 poor personal and creative habits affecting your morning writing routines and obvious solutions to tackle each.
5 Poor Personal And Creative Habits Affecting Your Morning Writing Routines
Stress is a trigger for experiencing burnout.
Although sometimes unavoidable, going to bed stressed is a poor personal habit affecting your creative morning writing routine.
Constantly allowing your body to stretch beyond its limits without making out time to rejuvenate and practice proper self-care will eventually force your body to repair itself by shutting down entirely. Read these 5 DIY mental wellness tips for writers.
Often when this happens, it’ll take a lot more than courage and motivation to get back into your creative routines because there’s already an existing in your routine.
This may also give rise to feelings of procrastination, writer’s block, lack of consistency, and productivity toward your creative goals.
Ensure that you practice mindful self-care routines to ease your body and mind off the stress of the day before bed.
You could make a habit of going for short evening strolls, listening to soul podcasts or music, watching a movie or relaxing comedy, or taking a warm bath.
Poor Eating Habits
Neglecting to provide the nourishment your body needs to stay active, vibrant, and productive will bleed into your creative morning writing routine.
Imagine trying to concentrate at 3 am without having had any form of nourishment the previous day. It is a disaster waiting to happen.
It will slice your concentration in half and make your thoughts erratic. The constant reminder from your growling belly will only make staying up unbearable if you do not eventually succumb to its demands and go food hunting.
Maybe skipping your meals a few times won’t degenerate into this, but consistently indulging your poor eating habits will eventually affect your creative morning routine as a writer.
Not only will indulging in poor eating habits affect your morning routine, but it could also cause abdominal and clinical problems like indigestion, and ulcers, amongst others.
To curb this habit, you can create a daily meal plan for yourself and support it with a planner or checklist to ensure you stay accountable.
Cumbersome Creative Morning Work Plan
One of the best ways to have a productive writing morning is to make a creative work plan that is achievable within your creative time.
If don’t design your work plan to produce SMART results, it will affect your creative morning routine as a writer.
Instead of aiming to write 5000 words between 3 am to 5 am, choose to add writing 2000 words to your list as your smart goal.
This ensures that your morning work plan is simple enough to stimulate your creativity instead of stifling it with anxiety. Hence, you can confidently set out to write 2000 words in two hours.
If eventually you surpass that plan, it’ll become a bonus for your daily progress.
Obeying the rules of simplicity is better. Planning for less and aiming for more is much more achievable than planning for more and achieving less.
Cluttered Work Space
Waking up to a cluttered workspace taints your creative morning. It is an absolute mood killer.
It is as irritating as it is distracting to spend part of your scheduled morning creative time trying to make room for creative work when you have handled that task the night before.
It is a poor personal and creative habit to leave your workspace cluttered and unprepared for productive work the next day.
This habit not only eats into your time, it sometimes turns off your creative flow and creates room for distractions to follow.
Always ensure to leave your workspace de-cluttered before bed, to allow you to dive straight into work when you get up in the morning.
Project Heavy lifting
A simple word for project heavy lifting is lack of a working outline.
Predictably, you won’t get any productive work done if the outline of your work isn’t ready.
Imagine scheduling to write a blog article between 3 am to 5 am, but you have no topic to write on?
Scheduling to do your project heavy lifting within your creative time will give rise to creative fatigue because you’ll rapidly stay stuck in that research cycle instead of writing, which doesn’t count for having a productive morning except that was your plan for the day.
You can avoid wasting your morning by preparing your work outline beforehand. That way, you only channel your focus on completing your scheduled work for the morning.
Endnotes:
Having a productive, creative morning is achievable when you set your priorities in order before it’s time to work.
Stop allowing these habits to ruin your hard work and bleed into your creativity.
It may seem like nothing, but a combination of two or three poor habits could have devastating effects on your productivity and consistency in the long run.
