Your Morning Routine Isn’t a Habit. It’s a Diagnostic Tool.

How a daily haiku taught me that the point of ritual isn’t only about productivity — it’s self-knowledge.

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The first thing I do each day is write a haiku and then share it on about eight or nine platforms.

And I have a process for this. It’s not a formal, documented one — just a series of steps honed by repetition over five or more years.

The exact steps are irrelevant. Suffice it to say that my process involves updating my master haiku-tracking spreadsheet, finding or creating images, starting posts, copying and pasting information or links, and hitting the Submit button, in a specific sequence that allows me to do all this efficiently.

As I said, the process isn’t what matters here.

What does matter to me is how closely I follow that sequence.

Most days, I go through the steps almost on autopilot, with muscle memory doing the majority of the work.

But there are days when I do things out of order, or hit the wrong button, or make some other silly mistake.

There is an obvious downside to this: it takes me a little longer.

But a few additional minutes are largely insignificant.

This was my key insight: a simple process I perform every single day is a litmus test for how I’m feeling.

Not the feelings you can necessarily, well, feel, but the ones below the surface, the ones that have no name at first.

On really bad days, when I get the entire process arse about face (as we Brits are wont to say), it’s a sign I need to step away from the computer and go for a short walk, sit outside and meditate, or drink a cup of herbal tea.

And that’s useful because it allows me to do a “system reset” early in the day so that I can work more effectively for the rest of it.