TMM – Week 1 (pt. 1)

Sunday:
It is now 7:20 AM. I’m trying this new morning routine called The Miracle Morning (haha, “morning”, not “mourning”, Praxling). The idea of the routine is that you wake up an hour earlier than you need to, and spend that hour going through a routine intended to give you energy, motivation, and focus for the day. Considering how I’ve been dunning for a majority of my life, and that I am at a point where I am applying to PhD programs and getting ready to graduate, I think it’s time to stop dunning. Or at least, not dun so much.

Honestly, I am a little bit skeptical of the routine just because the creator of TMM and the author of the book (The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM)) was an employee at Cutco — and a very successful one at that. Having worked there briefly during one summer, and having come to the conclusion that it is likely a pyramid scheme, it was a little difficult to trust this author. However, I actually rather enjoy waking up early — it’s just the act of following through that I’ve always had difficulty with. So after hearing about this routine and the book about it, I figured that there’s no harm in at least giving it a try.

Part of the TMM routine is “scribing” aka journaling. So hey, that’ll also help me blog more often! I anticipate some of these daily entries being pretty short, so for the moment, I plan to post these daily entries as one single weekly entry.

This is actually day 3 of me getting up early at 6, but I haven’t done the full routine until today — after all, you’re not seeing any blog entries before today, amirite??? — so today is my official Day 1 of the TMM. Here’s to hoping this one sticks, ’cause I’m actually really enjoying it so far.

Monday:
I got a little bit of a late start to my TMM this morning (and yes, I realize it should probably be “MM” not “TMM” because the latter is not grammatically correct). I’ve been leaving my phone charging on the bar counter outside of the bedroom since there’s not really “across the room” space in the bedroom. Plus that adds motivation since Toto always howls when my alarm goes off or I get a phone call; really don’t want him doing that for very long at 6 in the morning. But I digress — I laid back down in bed today after shutting my alarm off, so I didn’t start my routine until about 30 minutes later. But hey, I’m still doing it!

Getting up this early is getting easier, but I probably need to start taking a nap later in the day. I think my body needs more than ~6 hours of sleep — then again, I have also been falling asleep earlier, so hopefully that helps. I just don’t want to get drowsy since all my commutes are longer than 20 minutes.

Oh yeah, I got a new job — quit my old one. More on that tomorrow, though. :)

Tuesday:
Day 5 of getting up early at 6, only day 3 of doing the full MM routine. The first seven days of forming a new habit are the hardest, right? If I can make it to Saturday, it’ll start feeling easier after that. I actually woke up this morning before my alarm, worried that it somehow hadn’t gone off. Checked my watch and it was 5:30.

Part of me thinks that starting this new habit of waking up early and doing the MM routine in the winter was not the best idea. We still haven’t started using our heater — and I always relied more on space heaters and my electric blanket whenever I lived alone — so it’s pretty cold when I wake up in the morning. Everyone knows that all you want to do when you wake up on a cold morning is to just bury yourself deeper in the blankets. Setting up my space heater by the couch (where I do the MM) and/or wearing my cow kigurumi helps with that a fair amount, at least.

I’ve had to shut in the Terrorist (Remi) in his kennel during my MM, otherwise I have to struggle with meditating and exercising and whatnot with two dogs playing around noisily. He hasn’t had much of a problem with it until today, but he only whined occasionally.

So, I got a new job. It’s at this small lingerie/loungewear boutique on 75 called Soma. About the same distance from my apartment as Talbots was, but at least this way I don’t have to take the tolls to go to work. Plus, it’s closer to campus in case I have to work before classes. I’m going to be a regular associate there, not a keyholder, so I’m getting paid less; but on the other hand, their extended holiday hours aren’t really extended, and their stock room is small so that I don’t have to worry about having to come in early at 6 to do floorsets anymore. I’ll miss a lot of the people at Talbots, though. They were fun to work with. The store manager who hired me left because she found a better position that was also closer to her house, and the interim acting manager — as nice as she is — kept trying to implement changes to my store’s working structure when she was only supposed to hold down the fort and help us with shift coverage.

Sunday was my last day at Talbots and also my first day at Soma; the shift at Soma was just a store meeting though. I got to meet pretty much everyone who works there. One of them is the former assistant manager who recruited me for Talbots — she got into a bit of an altercation/there was a big misunderstanding with the acting manager, so she decided she didn’t need that stress in her life and left to work at Soma. So she decided to steal me away from Talbots in the process, though I mainly decided after finding out how small the shop is/how easy the work is/it’s the same distance but without having to take toll roads.

Seems like I’m writing more than I thought I would for each of these daily entries, so I think I’ll post bi-weekly so that these entries don’t turn into massive walls of texts. I guess also let me know what you’d prefer — once a week or twice a week.