Have you ever wondered how other people start their day? Morning routines are usually private, witnessed only by family members if they're awake, and yet these routines are very important for setting a productive tone for the rest of the day. Especially when mornings are cold and dark, there is something fascinating about discovering how others get out of bed each day.
This is the intriguing concept behind a website called My Morning Routine (MMR). Founded in 2012 by Michael Xander and Benjamin Spall, MMR has interviewed more than 218 people about their early-morning habits, always asking the same basic set of questions. Every Wednesday an inspiring routine story is published online.
MMR has a statistics page that was started after 133 morning routine interviews were completed. It's now updated every week. The statistics illustrate the common denominators across all interviews. Here are some of the key findings.
Coffee is king among the participants, with water coming in a far-off second as their favorite drink in the morning, and nearly everybody hates email. Do you answer email first in the morning or leave it until later in the day? Of all the questions they ask the participants, this is the one that never fails to stir up an emotive response. So why do we read about other people's morning routines? Well, first of all, it's fun. Perhaps your first impression is like mine—skeptical that such a thing how could possibly be interesting. It is, quite literally, catching a glimpse of a part of people's lives we don't normally see.
Second, I think many people harbor a secret desire to improve their morning routines, to get better at starting the day off right. The idea behind MMR is to influence readers to make adjustments to their own routines and to take bits and pieces of other' successful routines and incorporate them into their own.
