2. THE SECOND MORNING ROUTINE
What happens after this depends on how much time I have before I have to wake up my kids. But lets imagine that I woke up 6:30 when the lights turned on in my room.
A) BATHROOM, SCALE, WATER
At this point I get out of bed and go to bathroom (well, toilet, really). I have there another NFC tag that I read with my iPhone X. This runs a “Toilet” shortcut that offers me a list of options: Pee, Poo, “Bidé shower” (?), Teeth brushing.
Yes, I track my pee/poo because I want to see how my bathroom activity is linked to my weight. I’m in the process of getting back to my normal weight after gaining 6 kg (about 11 pounds) in two years, due to too little physical activity and aging.
Whatever I do is tracked again to Airtable base “Time Management” (which I accidentally call in some posts below “Time Tracking” base – the literal translation of “Ajanhallinta” is time management though).
I take a glass of water with me and go back to upstairs to my bedroom. I step on my Withings WIFI-scale, then read NFC tag on my dresser and get a list of options related to bedroom, including “Weight”.
I press that and open a Shortcut that first opens the Withings Health Mate app, so that it gets my weight info from the scale (while Shortcuts app waits me to return back to it).
When I return to Shortcuts, it gets my newly measured weight from Apple Health app, asks for a comment (like why I think the weight is in that morning what it is) and then uploads the information to “Time Management” Airtable base.
Then I drink the water and get back to bed.
B) MORNING PAGES IN REMARKABLE
I sit in my bed, having a bright light lamp (and the Philips Hue lights on blue-tinted bright setting) in front of me and write my toughts – basically a stream of consciousness – to my ReMarkable “paper tablet” device. I name the notebook as “PKyyyymmdd” – so for instance today my note was called PK20200118. PK comes from the word “PäiväKirja” – literally “Day Book” aka Diary.
I usually write about 3–5 pages, depending of the amount of thoughts I have and how much time I have. This technique comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artists Way.
I save the diary but don’t yet export it, because I will write more to it in the evening.
C) FEELINGS
At some point after I wake up and before I go to wake up my kids, I run my “feelings” Shortcut, that asks me four things:
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Feeling (from 1-5 where 1 means I feel somehow horrible and 5 means I feel in some way amazing)
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Focus (from 1-5 where 1 means I can’t focus on anything and 5 means I feel I can have a laser-like focus)
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Energy (from 1-5 where 5 is the most energy I can have)
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To choose emotions from a long list of words I have grouped/sorted by the quality of emotion that makes sense to me).
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Comment/thoughts related on my feelings at that moment.
This information is first send to my “Time Management” base at Airtable and then as a new note to Day One app.
D) MORNING PLAN
Next I run a shortcut called “Morning Plan”. Usually I do this after I’ve taken my kids to preschool/school, but if I still have time before having to wake up my kids, I do it right before I go to wake them up.
This Shortcut first asks for following things (in Finnish, the following translations are just rough translations):
- “Today I want to feel…”
- “The best thing that could happen today is…”
Then it gets a json-file where I record once a week/month my monthly and weekly goals/themes, shows me what those were and asks:
- “I’m going to advance [these goals] by…”
- “ToDos I remember right now…”
- “Today’s most important goal is…”
- “What can prevent me from reaching the goal is…”
- “I’ll ovecome that obstacle by…”
- “I’ll overcome that obstacle beause…”
Then the Shortcut shows me a text where it has all my answers written as full sentences (like: “Today I want to feel peace and harmony”) and asks if the text is OK.
I often dictate the answers, so if there are some spelling mistakes or such, I have a chance to fix them. Plus I feel that it is useful to read through the whole plan.
Then the Shortcut saves my answers as a json dictionary-file named with the date (today was 2020-01-18.json) to a “Plan”-folder at iCloud, sends the todos to Things app, the whole thing to “Time Management” Airtable base and creates a new note to Day One app with the full text.
E) WAKING UP MY KIDS
I wake up my kids by going into their room that has had its light turned on by Philip Hue about 20 minutes before they have to wake up. I turn on a bluetooth speaker and scan a NFC tag on the desk (again by telling Siri to “open” so that it opens the NFC reader app).
The NFC tag starts a Shortcut that recognizes that it is morning, makes the light in the room as bright as possible and starts a “Kids’ morning” playlist, that has their favorite songs. The music helps especially my preschooler to wake up and get up in a better mood.