As part of my goal to be more organized, I wanted to document some of my morning routine. My day starts at night, in the sense that I have found the best way to have consistent mornings, is to have (as much as possible) consistent evenings. Knowing that I feel best with at least 7 hours of sleep, I try to ensure I am in bed by midnight, and try to avoid my phone too much in bed.

Waking up

While 7:00 is when I typically get out of bed, I will often wake up earlier, often due to a dual feline alarm clock. While there is no snooze button on this alarm clock (and I would not use a snooze on a digital alarm clock either), I try to stay in my room till 7:00 for their consistency, and to avoid the feline alarm slowing drifting even earlier. I do have a backup 7:00 alarm on my phone but it is rare that it is the one that wakes me up. Once I am up, it always starts with putting on my glasses, taking a leak, and doing a morning nfc checkin on my phone. Stepping into my living room, I am almost always immediately greeted by Kinu-chan and Saya-chan who will very clearly inform me of the status of their food bowl. Once I have corrected this injustice, it’s time to sit on the sofa and let my brain boot-up for the day.

Shower and Breakfast

Living in Japan, it’s often for people to take a bath in the evening to relax, but I often joke I take a shower in the morning for other peoples benefit. A warm morning shower also helps clear my head and allergies, though in the summer I know I will often need an evening rinse off as well. My go-to breakfast for a while has been a breakfast bagel that I like to think I have gotten fairly good at preparing.

I cook 3 half-strips of bacon for some flavor and grease, then I scramble two eggs with a little bit of green onion and garlic salt mixed in. This is topped with a bit of chopped jalapeño and sliced cheddar and placed on a toasted wheat bagel. While most of these ingredients are easy to find in the states, since I live in Japan, several like the bagel and cheddar and jalapeño I find at Costco.

Morning Game Check

I continue to play FFXIV and do bits here and there while waiting on the Evercold expansion. Typically I will check my retainer vendors, the daily cactopot, and any submarine voyages that might have completed.

Alfred, Dashboards, and a Markdown Checklist

I have a custom alfred checklist that I made, called ohayou (good morning) that I have configured with assorted links and apps. I start various apps that I tend to like to have running, like SwiftBar for information displays or my nagger focus apps. I also open several Grafana dashboards that I am using with my homelab. Using Alfred’s external script support combined with the macos open shell command, it is easy to have a list of dashboards or other files to open.

#!/bin/bash

# Dashboards
open https://grafana.example.com/dashboard-1
sleep 1 # Add a brief pause when opening browser
open https://grafana.example.com/dashboard-2
open https://grafana.example.com/dashboard-3
open https://grafana.example.com/dashboard-4

# Other things
open "https://www.wanikani.com" # Japanese Studying
open "noteplan://x-callback-url/openNote?noteDate=today" # Worklog checkin
open "~/Documents//morning-routine.markdown"

My morning-routine.markdown file is a checklist of other things I might want to check each morning. Some of the links are to my chore tracker to make sure I have checked off some morning tasks, some are to sentry to check for errors over night.

Like most of my projects, I keep my workflow scripts and routine markdown in git so that I can easily track how it changes over time. I use my git-pending script to remind me when I have made changes that I have forgotten to commit or push.

Morning Checks Finished

With my morning checks finished, now it is time to try to work through my inbox and the rest of the days tasks. I try to use noteplan through the day to keep track of what I have done, but I have also considered obsidian as another alternative. A naive part of me also wants to figure out my own worklog app one day.