The Shape of a Good Morning

I distrust morning routines. They arrive in lists of twelve steps and promise to make you more productive, as if productivity were the point of being awake.

One hour, unclaimed

What I keep instead is an hour with no purpose. Coffee, a window, a book I am not reading for work. The phone stays in another room until the hour is over.

A good morning is not something you optimise. It is something you protect.

What the hour holds

• One cup of coffee, made slowly.

• Ten pages of whatever I like.

• Five minutes of looking out of the window at nothing in particular.

It does not make me more productive. It makes me more present, which, on most days, turns out to be the better bargain.