My morning ritual consists of making tea and spending at least an hour reading on my phone. The calm ambiance of the morning makes for probably the best time of the day to soak in quality knowledge. My experiments with super productivity keeps evolving with time; for instance 5 years ago my daily productivity schedule looked very strict. Here’s a sneak peek into my recent focus on outcome based outlook. I have also shared my current productivity bundle.
Over time, I’ve set up different utilities to aid my morning reading routine. Now, I don’t have to spend time trying to discover what to read, it’s already served on my plate every morning. Thanks to some nifty little tools. Below are the details:
1. Pocket reminders
I keep saving interesting content throughout the day on my laptop and mobile to Pocket. But Pocket doesn’t have a reminder functionality. So I created one, you can follow this simple tutorial to enable it for yourself.
2. Newsletters
I used to subscribe to newsletters using my Gmail id. But it’s a tedious way to read email newsletters; you will have to sift through a barrage of emails to find the relevant newsletters. You can use filters to sort them, but I found this nifty product called Stoop. (Update: I am using another app now, named Slick) It’s like a Podcast app – but for email newsletters. The best part is that it provides you with an alternate email address that you can use to subscribe to all your favourite newsletters. That keeps your primary Gmail neat and tidy, while making newsletter reading experience a thing to look forward to in the morning.
3. Business, startup, tech & entrepreneurship news
Daily email digest: I have setup a few IFTTT recipes that curate and deliver the best content to my email every morning at 7AM. E.g. If a story on Hacker News makes it to Top/Best, it gets added to the daily email digest.
Manual browsing: I usually start with Techmeme and follow any link/tweet that grabs my attention. While they do provide a daily email newsletter, I like visiting the site for no apparent reason.
4. Telegram messages
Few of my IFTTT recipes are setup to notify me with important events throughout the day. It sends me a message on Telegram with the link. These messages get piled up while I sleep at night. So I go through them in the morning.
5. Books, if time permit
On rare days when the content volume is low, I continue reading books on my phone. Currently reading: The Elephant in the Brain.
It’s not perfect, but it works. How does your morning routine look like?
Cover photo by Maliha Mannan
About Tonmoy Goswami
Founder, Storypick.
Read • Travel • Create • Experience⚡
