Key Takeaways
- The best morning routine is the one you maintain during bad weeks, not just good ones.
- The first decision of the day should be the most important one, not the most urgent one.
- Sleep is more important than what you do in the first hour after waking up.
The morning routine advice ecosystem has become a genre unto itself, and much of it is aspirational rather than practical. Founders who read about four-hour morning routines filled with meditation, journaling, exercise, cold plunges, and reading often try to implement the full stack and abandon all of it within two weeks because it is incompatible with the actual demands of a startup schedule.
Saim Abbasi's morning routine is considerably simpler and more consistent than anything on a podcast.
Consistency Beats Optimization
The most important property of any daily routine is consistency across different types of days. A morning routine that works on good days when you slept well and have no early meetings is not the routine you are testing. The routine you are testing is the one you maintain when the day before was hard, you have an 8am board call, and you are already behind on three things before 7am.
Saim's morning practices are specifically designed to be executable in 20 minutes on the hardest mornings and expandable to 60 minutes when the schedule allows. The 20-minute version is the floor, and the floor is what matters.
The First Decision Principle
The specific practice Saim considers most valuable in the morning is spending the first 10 minutes of the workday on the highest-priority decision or task, not the most urgent one. The morning decision quality is generally the highest of the day. Using it on email, which is someone else's priority, or meetings scheduled by other people, is a suboptimal allocation of the best cognitive window of the day.
What Sleep Actually Determines
The morning routine question is, in an important sense, the wrong question. The quality of the morning is mostly determined by the quality and quantity of sleep the night before. Optimizing the morning without optimizing sleep is optimizing the downstream effect while ignoring the input. Saim's most consistent health practice is not a morning routine. It is a consistent bedtime, maintained even when the work is not done, because the work quality the next day is more important than the marginal output of the late night.
"A two-hour morning routine you do twice a week is worse than a 30-minute routine you do every day."