AI made morning pages worth doing again.

A few tricks that made morning pages more useful.

I’m gradually moving past my own sourness about AI and, instead, finding ways that it helps people write. A close friend of mine says of this AI era: “We’re in a freakin’ writing renaissance!”

Yes, maybe we are.

What I’m doing below takes the idea of morning pages and changes them. Some might say it perverts them. In particular, morning pages is supposed to be a goal-less practice and the thing, apparently, that I needed was to make the practice more useful.

The commonly held understanding of morning pages is that they are a healthy brain dump that wipes away your mental clutter in order to make room for creativity. In the official practice, you write longhand with a physical pen, aiming for a stream of consciousness until you have filled three sheets of paper.

Clearing away mental clutter sounds great in practice. But that only matters if I actually do the practice, which I don’t.

Writing morning pages by hand makes my hand cramp. I feel like I don’t have time, in part because I don’t know how long they will take. Mostly, though, morning pages don’t feel urgent. And yes, I know the advice from meditation probably applies to morning pages: “Meditate for one hour. If you don’t have time, meditate for two hours.”

The thing that turned me back to regular morning pages is that AI helps me do something useful with them afterward. They aren’t just a brain dump, they’re a launch pad for my entire day.

Here’s the setup I’m using:

• I write my morning pages in an AI-enabled editor. You could use anything, probably even ChatGPT. I’ve been using Medium’s TK editor as part of getting it ready for release. (Instructions for getting early access are here.)
• I time-box the practice to 15 minutes. This makes the practice easier and more predictable. If you’ve ever run into BJ Fogg and Tiny Habits, then you’ll recognize that I’m choosing consistency over perfection.
• I regularly delegate the questions that pop into my head to the AI assistant. This keeps me from getting distracted or task switching.
• When I’m done, I have the AI assistant read my morning pages and pull out anything that sounds like a todo. That way, my morning pages become the start of my daily todo list.

I’ve thought about other, more complicated setups. But this feels like the simplest and least fragile way to do it.

In this setup, I get the same benefits that I used to get from traditional morning pages. My brain feels better, clearer, and less cluttered. My anxiety over having too many thoughts dissipates. Often, I have a small epiphany along the way

But what I needed in order to make time to do this consistently was a more direct connection to getting things done. This is just accepting my own motivations instead of fighting them. Because this version works for both mental health and productivity, I’m more likely to do it.

Any AI-enabled writing tool will work for this, but I’m using Medium’s TK and should explain the state of that project.

We started working on TK in order to have a place to experiment with what writing will look like in the AI era. The Medium ethos is humans first: writing is healthy for humans, and there’s no end of humans wanting to hear the stories of other humans. That’s a tricky spot for AI.

We know AI is going to play a big role in the future, but we wanted a writing app that reflected our own strong opinions that this AI future should elevate human thoughts and ideas. TK is in very limited beta for Friends of Medium. We haven’t even announced that yet, but you can technically get in by upgrading.

The typical digital version of morning pages is to type 750 words. I’ve timed myself. If I’m hustling and truly embracing stream of consciousness, then I’ll finish in 17 minutes. But my computer is a distraction device. So there are all sorts of ways that trying to type 750 words can turn into reading notifications, multitasking, or sometimes just spacing out. So I’ve had digital morning pages take almost an hour.

I just find that the practice is a lot easier to schedule if I know exactly how long it will take. I’ve settled on time boxing it to 15 minutes. That is enough time to push past my surface thoughts and start to surprise myself by delving into my subconscious. To me, that push into the subconscious is really the defining difference between a mere journal and morning pages.

I get a lot of distracting thoughts during my morning pages that don’t just go away merely because I write them down. Sometimes I want an answer so badly that I am tempted to go to a new tab and track them down. But this is the kiss of death to my practice—well-meaning multitasking that breaks my flow and turns into procrastination.

Having an AI assistant means I never have to go to a new tab. I can just ask the assistant a question and keep typing. That addresses my need without breaking my flow. Most assistants live in the sidebar (for example, the Dia Browser does it that way). But we built TK to be able to call the AI assistant inline with the rest of your writing. For example, I’m always wondering what the weather is going to be, and so I’ll write:

Then I’ll keep writing while the AI churns. That’s let me keep my fingers on the keyboard so that I keep my stream of consciousness. Sometimes I’m looking for a quote or using the AI as a thesaurus.

We did morning pages with the entire company and someone on the team used the AI to convert his morning pages into Klingon and then back. That’s an interesting thing to do, but I doubt it helps your productivity.

Instead, I focus on the AI as another way to offboard my thoughts. Seeing a question delegated lets me let go of it.

Once I’m done, I have the AI do an analysis. This is the crux of my AI morning pages practice.

The main thing I’m asking the AI to do is use my morning pages as the start of my todo list. Here’s the prompt that I give to the assistant:

Make a task list of any things that I said I needed or wanted to do in the current note plus any unfinished tasks from yesterday's journal. Format it as a task list.

It turns out that my morning pages are always filled with things that I think I need or want to do that day. I’m sure pre-knowledge of this prompt also shapes what I end up writing down.

I also got a lot out of asking AI to analyze trends in my morning pages:

Can you search my morning pages and tell me about my personality? Does it fluxuate?

These are the types of “And Then” benefits in the AI era that are making it easier to justify the time to write more.

Thematically, what I’m going for is writing that makes me smarter and (fingers crossed) also makes readers smarter. But there’s growing research that using AI can make you dumber.

MIT found ChatGPT users had 55% lower brain activity during writing. A Wharton study showed students using GPT-4 scored 17% worse when AI was removed.

My current theory is that it depends on how you use it.

When I delegate to AI, I feel dumber. For example, when I moved to the East Coast, it took me months to realize that Boston is east of NYC. That’s because I’d delegated all driving directions to Google Maps, and even multiple drives between NYC and Boston didn’t clue me in to the actual geography. (You might also blame the US education system, but I can’t fairly say that I was always an attentive student.)

However, with this morning pages practice, I’m using the AI to look up facts and words. But mostly, I’m using it to motivate me to do my own writing because I now get more value from it. So in this case, I do think AI is making me smarter.