I think it’s time to revive my old morning routine—and when I say old, I mean, from earlier this year. The routine I came up with is based around a methodology called Getting Things Done (or GTD), which I’ve blogged about before.) Here’s a video of my routine:

And here’s the story behind the video, and why I was happy to watch it again after having dropped the routine for a few months…

This past spring, I turned a friend on to GTD, and she jumped in with both feet. Hearing how much she was enjoying the process inspired me to have another go at it—”it” being, simply put, to keep track of all my projects, obligations, to-dos, etc., in some external “system” where they can be stored, tracked, and managed.

Since I last wrote about my adventures in implementing GTD nearly two years ago, I’ve had many ups and downs with the GTD approach. I had some big successes because of it, but the system always seemed to fall apart for some reason, and I had some long periods of apathy toward the whole thing. It’s definitely “easier” to just “let it all hang loose” and not keep track of everything. But it has it’s downsides too; it’s harder to keep focus and direction, you get nagging feelings of “forgetting something,” you feel more scattered and disorganized… sometimes you don’t know what to do with ideas, other than just implement them, which may not be the best idea at a given moment. So, now that I had a friend starting fresh with GTD, I thought I’d have a fresh start at GTD as well.

Key to my success in this most recent round of GTD has been the morning routine, where I basically review everything on my plate. Having such a grounding routine at the very start of the day put me on the right course for the rest of the day. It was wonderful!

And then, I went to teach at kids’ music camps during the summer. Alaska for one and a half weeks, Hawaii for three weeks… both experiences were wonderful, and left me refreshed and inspired, but by the time I was back home in September, I was starting over from scratch with no daily rhythms to fall back on. And no morning routine.

Since then, frustration at my renewed scatteredness and lack of focus has been building inside of me. I’ve tried reimplementing GTD, but it hasn’t “stuck.” Just then, I came across this video that I made four months ago (which I hadn’t gotten around to blogging yet) and thought, “Yes! That’s what I’ve been missing!” So I thought I’d finally blog it now. And tomorrow, I’ll start my new morning routine.

(Apologies for the likely double-digit Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level score of this post.)