Lately, I’ve found myself settling into a slightly different blogging workflow to my usual one.

I’ve been getting up at 6.30am to write.

In the morning, our kids have to stay in their rooms until 7am. I’m not quite sure how we managed to get them to do that but it works… for now.

I often find my body wakes me up a bit earlier and previously, I’d just doze and dream a little for that half an hour, drifting in that fuzzy state between being asleep and awake.

A few weeks ago, I realised that in that sleepy half hour I was actually getting some cool ideas. I’m not sure why it’s so but I often find that after a good night’s sleep, my first few thoughts of the day have the most clarity.

For example, a few weeks ago I was grappling with a talk I’ve been preparing for a conference. I couldn’t quite get the flow right. One morning, during the waking up phase, it just clicked. I was able to get up and jot down the outline for the full talk in about 3 minutes flat! It was almost as if I’d been thinking about the problem too hard and by having a good night’s sleep, I took the pressure off. From there, it just flowed.

That day, I decided I should get up a bit earlier in the mornings and make that half an hour a time to write. I’ve been doing it for a few weeks now and have had some good mornings and some not so great mornings. Overall, I’ve found it helpful.

The approach I’m taking is to not set an agenda for the half hour but to simply sit down with my journal or laptop and write. I don’t set a topic. I just write what comes to mind.

So far, around half of my weekday mornings (I only do it weekdays) have produce something useful. The other days haven’t really amounted to much, but that’s ok.

The days that were useful produced a variety of results.

• I use my output from a couple of the days as parts of blog posts.
• One of the days, I turned what I wrote into a reflection, I then posted on Google+
• Another day, I wrote something that ended up in a presentation I’m giving.
• Another day ended up turning into some thoughts I sent one of my team members about a project we’re working on.
• One last day, I wrote something more personal that had a big impact upon motivating me in an area I had been wrestling with.

I’m not sure how this experiment will last but I figure that even if it only has a 50% success rate at producing the above kinds of results it is going to be very, very worthwhile to do!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

My Experiment with Early Morning Free Writing Sessions

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