Defend Your Morning: A Guide to Liberation in 7 Steps

I was once backpacking through the Greek houses of Athens when I came upon a man belonging to the ancient fraternal order of Chi Phi. He told me something I will never forget.

“You’ve got to defend your mornings, bro.” He also said another thing I can’t quite remember about how great it is to cook right after waking up.

As I strolled beneath the sweltering Georgian sun to my Introduction to Astronomy lecture, I let his words sink in. I attribute much of my success to those words.

You need to defend your mornings. Why should you believe this? Because I’m writing it in italics.

Why should you believe me? I couldn’t have founded FibrCrunch, known as the Yelp of the Uber of cereal delivery, and steered the company through its initial round of parental fundraising, if I didn’t take this lesson to heart.

If you don’t believe me, believe Elon Musk. I sent a draft of this article to his publicist, who responded that he will try to get back to me in a timely fashion.

Before getting into how best to structure your morning, we first need to deconstruct some lingering myths about productivity.

27 Myths About Productivity

1. Work Hard

Modern corporate culture glorifies “grinding,” or working around the clock.

Even in popular culture, working long hours has long been seen as the best way to achieve goals. More than 60 years ago, The Beatles sang about loving a woman eight days a week. It would have been much more efficient for them to love her one day a week and to spend the rest of the week meditating and doing CrossFit.

FMRI studies have found that the brain can only focus on a task for one or two hours at a time.

The more we work, the less we accomplish.

There is actually an asymptotic relationship between the amount of hours we spend on a task and our ability to describe that work using mathematical metaphors.

This is why I spend only two hours, three days a week, actually doing work.

I devote most of my day to what I call “activation time.” During this time, I engage in lower cognitive impact activities to allow my brain to recharge.

This activation time is when the brain can make connections and arrive at creative insights that it cannot when it is focusing on a singular task.

I’ve had many realizations about my business triggered by activation time. The other day, I realized that our clients get frustrated when I only devote 30 minutes every other day to answering emails because I determined it was more efficient. I only realized this, and many other things, because I allowed my brain time to recharge. I am a better business owner because of that time I spent watching parkour videos.

2. Quantity Over Quality

If you go to any leadership conference, you will likely see many executives talking about how they got to where they are by narrowly focusing on how much of a thing there was, not how good it was. It is time someone dispelled this myth.

There are many people out there who think that quantity is better than quality.

I couldn’t tell you the number of people who come up to me on the street and say, “Hey, guy, quantity over quality.” Well, I could — it was one, and he was placing a bet on Quantity to beat Quality in a horse race, but my point still kind of stands.

For one thing, quality comes before quantity in the alphabet. If I made an alphabetical list of every word in the English language, quality would literally be over quantity.

For another thing, quality has seven letters while quantity has eight letters. It is a more efficient word. It communicates its meaning much more quickly and effectively than quantity.

The next time someone tells you that quality doesn’t matter, remember this.

3. There Are 27 Myths About Productivity

There are actually just two myths about productivity, and one myth about myths about productivity.

The First Hour of Today Has Determined Your Life

That’s right — if you didn’t productively use your first hour after waking up this morning, June 2, 2017, you will lead a bad life, probably contract some terrible disease, and die young and alone.

Studies have shown that using your mind productively in the first hour after waking up sets you up for success during the rest of the day.

These findings, combined with a close reading of certain Mayan apocalyptic texts, show that this morning has determined the rest of your life.

Although it’s too late to change things now, here’s what you could have done to ensure that you wouldn’t spend the rest of your earthly existence immiserated in a living hell.

My Morning Routine

Immediately upon waking up, I walk 10 paces due north from my bed and stand on one leg for exactly 45 seconds. This increases blood circulation in the body, which helps my blood circulate more in my body.

I then spend three minutes, 39 seconds scrolling through Twitter to catch up on the latest tech news.

Then I eat one banana and four almonds, no more, no less. This is the exact, scientifically-proven amount one must eat to maximize synergy production in the brain.

Exercise, Exercise, Exercise

Nothing increases neurotransmitter hypoxathy more effectively than exercise. Ever have trouble thinking through that tough problem at work? That’s because your neurotransmitters weren’t hypoxathizing enough, likely due to lack of exercise.

Not just any type of exercise will do the trick. Studies have shown that exercises that produce the most cognitive benefits are the ones which look like they could be found in a training montage from one of the Rocky movies.

After fueling up (I call eating “fueling up”), I take a Juno to the local junkyard, a short 40-minute round trip from my apartment, where I do high-intensity interval sets of tire rolls, rusty metal bar pull-ups, and trash dives.

The Shower

After working up a sweat at the dump, I head back to my apartment to wash off.

I have experimented with a number of different styles of bathing, including the ubatizo kuoga, an ancient Kenyan baptismal rite which I performed when I was traveling through East Africa.

I have found that nothing works as well as a “farmer’s bath.” A farmer’s bath consists of getting sprayed for three minutes with cold water from a garden hose.

Despite this being the most productive way to bathe, I now have to settle for a cold shower. My girlfriend of 10 years left me for someone with a “real job” (her words), so there’s now no one in my apartment to hose me down.

Tea Time

After taking in the news, fueling up, exercising, and bathing, it is now time to brew a few different varieties of tea. These strains of tea are packed with antioxidants and other vitamins and minerals that increase concentration and reduce stress, and are totally not placebos that are indistinguishable from Earl Grey sold at a supermarket.

I like to drink Organic Dandelion SuperHerb® tea because it stimulates the neurons in the brain that improve cross-promotional marketing. Feel free to buy some by clicking on the above link.

If I don’t have enough Organic Dandelion SuperHerb® tea in the morning, I will notice myself losing concentration towards the early afternoon. At this point, I’ll shout to my assistant to brew me some more Organic Dandelion SuperHerb® tea, remember that I don’t have an assistant because I work at a coworking space in my apartment, then get up to brew some more tea myself.

Wake-Up Time

Before discussing how to efficiently structure your work day, I have to give my most essential piece of advice for any morning routine.

Wake up late.

I’ll say that again, but this time I will italicize and bold it.

Wake up late.

It is a myth that most successful people wake up early. I wake up everyday at 11 AM.

In the early morning, the brain is in what’s called a post-somnolent state, which has been popularly dubbed “being tired.”

In the early afternoon, the brain enters a state of post-phosphoric-perspicacity, in layman’s terms, a state of “not being tired.”

I have learned that by waking up later, you can actually skip this “tired” state and be “not tired” the second you wake up.

Time to Work

Now that I have put myself in the best possible position to make the day a productive one, it is time to work.

If you follow my morning routine exactly, you will be finished and ready to get to work at around 3:30 PM. By this point in the day, your body will be getting hungry for lunch. In order to really cement those productivity gains you achieved in the morning, you need to fuel your body.

You also need to fuel your mind. The best way to fuel your mind is to follow my multi-hour Mid-Day Routine, which I will be discussing in a future post available only to my Patreon supporters.

Defend Your Morning

If you follow the above lessons, I guarantee that tomorrow you will be a better version of you than you are today. This is assuming, of course, that you have a time machine and can redo the morning of June 2, 2017, otherwise each day after today will be just one more painful step in a slow march to the grave.

Why am I calling for people to defend their mornings? Because our mornings are under attack.

They are under attack by our children who want to be served breakfast and driven to school.

They are under attack by our spouses who want us to help out around the house so they can get to work faster.

They are under attack by people who fail to realize what the purpose of a morning really is — to spend a couple of hours engaged in weird, esoteric and selfish pursuits so that we can trick ourselves into thinking that we are more productive during the workday.

Until we realize that our mornings are our fortress, our dungeon, our encampment, our bunker, our base, our place where armies protect themselves from other armies, we will continue to be just 97% what we could be at work, and in life. And that is unacceptable. Buy my book.