Ask HN: What's Your Morning Routine?

My current mornings are pretty relaxed. I wake up an hour before I have to go to work, drink a glass of water, have a coffee while listening to some music and I might be browsing something on the internet. No socials though. Then I fill a water bottle and put it on my desk, take a shower and get dressed/etc. I work from home so that's nice but I do get ready as if I have to go out, i.e. I make effort to look smart and even put on some cologne. I do need to wake up relaxed though, I f*king hate waking up and having to rush.

When I was in between jobs, it was mostly similar but I got up an hour later than I would usually and wouldn't hit the shower until like 10 am. Maybe work on some project or watch something, eat lunch around 12 and then either go out for a walk or get groceries done. Only in the afternoon I would job search, call back people. Its only a few hours but I had to learn not to try to constantly job search, because there simply is no point and it would just make me feel like I was failing at it.

I'd say you're right to want some structure, but you're perfectly fine not having it all be productive.

Wake up, brush my teeth, sit on the toilet with phone in hand to multitask taking a shit and keeping up to date with the day's quota of news curated especially to make me feel better for at least not being the poor chaps getting bombed and massacred last night. Take a shower with a bucket and mug with water warmed with a 2$ external tungsten heater.

Avoid mirrors so I can delude myself into thinking that I am "growing" and not witnessing my darkening and drooping face indicating the rot from the inside from all the toxic water, toxic food and toxic air my body is subjected to every single day.

Get out of the house, walk two kilometers to my local railway station dodging filth, rodent carcasses, feaces both human and animal, armies of crows and pigeons, lepers, crippled and deformed beggars, rabid dogs, drug spit and vomit.

Wrestle my way into the overcrowded train like how you push down the stuck dirt in the kitchen sink for my daily "personal space" detox. Wear my bag the other way round because my company laptop is worth more than my life and I can't have it get stolen from behind, the butt-humpers breathing down my neck an acceptable cost.

Get off, fighting for my life in the process as I dive against the stream of people trying to get in through the same doors I am getting out (did I mention these doors stay open throughout the journey, even when the train is moving?)

Walk again to the next platform, repeat the whole charade with another open-door overcrowded train.

Take a 3-seater rickshaw shared with five people to my office.

Arrive at office with a big smile, to my big happy family that pays my bills and loan installments and allows me to exist for yet another month in this blessed existence.

2 hours a day is a near eternity. Roughly 30,000 hours if done from early 20s to early 60s.

That's enough to master 3 things if you believe the "10,000" hours rule, or gain working proficiency in dozens of foreign languages.

I sleep and wake at decent times (bed by 11 usually, awake by 7-8), but I am basically dead to the world until afternoon. Sometimes I don't even become productive until 2-3pm. Curious if others have this problem.

Suffice to say no one wants to hear my morning routine, but I am curious to see all of yours.

Wake up ~5:30am. Get dressed, brush my teeth, and make a black breakfast tea. go for a 20 minute walk. Change into workout clothes, workout til ~6:30am (I have a full garage gym -- strength is Mon, Weds, Fri, and conditioning is Tues, Thurs, and Sat). Shower, morning face and hair routine, get dressed, get my wife and kids stirred and moving. Get downstairs, get breakfast started, pack lunches, out of the house by 7:30am to get my twin girls to school (I take them Tues, Weds, Thurs, my wife takes them Mon and Fri) or leave the house at 8:15am to get my son to school. On Tuesdays, I meet a friend at a climbing gym near work at 9am. We climb top-rope or do some bouldering til around 9:50am. I get to the office around 10 or 10:10am, check email, check overnight processes, check ops dashboards. Standup at 10:30am. Focus time from around 11am til 12:30pm when I take lunch. Work through the afternoon, leave around 5pm to get kids. Generally home around 5:30pm and we start our evening routine which runs us til 8pm. If there's work to finish, I finish it. A few nights a week my wife and I will watch some TV together, discuss family / household stuff, etc... The other nights I practice my Mandarin, read, walk, listen to podcasts, light YouTube stuff, or some combination of it all, and then I'm generally in bed by 10pm.