Morning pages

We overestimate what we can do in a week. We underestimate what we can do in a decade. And decades are made up of years. And years are made up of months. And months are made up of weeks. And weeks are made of excel spreadsheets on cardstock paper folded into thirds. And I keep mine in my back left pocket.

Hello Emerson, from My life runs on excel spreadsheets printed on cardstock paper folded into thirds

Do you write morning pages? I remember reading about them in some bullet journaling communities a while back, which I then discovered were linked back to The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The Artist’s Way is a multi-week exercise for creative types, which I’ve attempted off-and-on over the last few years. I struggled a bit with the exercises overall, but the morning pages have relatively stuck for me. Not every morning, mind you, but I’ve found they’re fantastic for those days that I try to settle in to get some work done and then struggle to focus, or think of what I even need to do, or just have too much noise in my brain.

Within the directions of the book you’re supposed to write 3 pages – physically write, not type – and it’s meant to be a stream of consciousness. Basically, whatever comes to your mind no matter how jumbled or incoherent or disorganized it is. It’s not meant to be a proper journal that you’ll come back to years later and re-read about your lovely vacation and wax poetic about the day. A lot of times, my pages start out with complaining about how tired I am despite getting 8+ hours of sleep, and then I move onto telling myself that I don’t know what to do today… at which point I start making a list of all the things I could or, even, should be doing, and before too long I’ve gotten the jumble of thoughts out of my brain and, ultimately, something from the list on my pages says “check me off this list!” and I end up tackling that thing.

I don’t always write 3 pages, and I’m not bothered by it. Some days I have only 1 page of things to get out of my head. I tried, early on, to force the 3 page rule. I’d sit here at my desk for over an hour trying to come up with something to write and it felt like a bigger waste of time and frustration. So, now, I write what I write and don’t stress myself out to hit a target.

Last night I came across Hello Emerson’s Instagram and his own morning journaling and was really intrigued by how he uses his habit tracker and includes it in his journaling, which then led me to his website, at which point I found the post where he talks about his habit tracker (linked above in that quote). The older I get, the less sometimes it feels like words really hit me in the same way they did a decade or two ago, but this did just that. “We overestimate what we can do in a week. We underestimate what we can do in a decade.” Ain’t that the truth?