I’m obsessed with morning routines. I constantly tweak my morning (and evening) routines, with the goal of doing them without thinking. I want to get all of the miscellany out of the way so that I can get to mentally demanding tasks after having made as few decisions possible. That leaves me with more energy to write books. I’ve found that the key is to make the routine frictionless, especially in the morning. My willpower is always low in the morning, so I’m prone to slacking off rather...

For me to be productive, I find it’s important to have a strong morning routine, and to never break it. The less decisions I have to make early in the day, the more cognitively rested I am for the important work (in my case, writing) I want to do after I’m up and moving. The reason for this is that humans are cognitive misers. A simple way to explain this: Imagine that the number of decisions you can make in a day is finite. Those decisions are your mana...