We had a monk on the podcast this week. Vaisesika Dasa, who left for the monastery at 15. And of everything he said in an hour, the piece I’ve used most since is the least mystical thing in the whole conversation: put your things in order the night before.
He still does it. He lives in a house now, and he told us he wakes up, sees everything laid out, and thinks, “Who did this?” Then he says thank you. To the guy he was last night.
I laughed, and then I had to admit something on air. I wish I could say I do this every night. I don’t. But the nights I do, I’m a lot more likely to get to the gym the next morning. And if I miss the gym, I at least get a calm cup of coffee by myself, instead of waking up feeling like I just got shot out of a cannon.
Same guy, same alarm. Completely different morning, and the gap between them is about 5 minutes of boring work the night before.
There’s a study I’ve quoted for years on why this works. Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso looked at 1,112 parole rulings by Israeli judges (published in PNAS in 2011). Favorable rulings started around 65% at the top of a session and slid to nearly zero right before a food break. Then the judges ate, and the number jumped back up. These were experienced people making serious calls, and they still ran out of gas.
Morning me is that judge right before lunch, except it’s dark out and the case in front of him is whether to go find his shoes. Make him think about it and he rules against the gym every time.
So this week’s rep is small on purpose. Tonight, before bed, set up one thing for tomorrow morning. One. Whatever you want the first move of your day to be, make it so easy you could do it half asleep. A system so simple it’s hard to fall off of.
I’ll probably skip a night this week. If you do too, give yourself grace for it, which is a different thing than handing yourself an excuse. Then set it up again the next night.
What’s the one thing you could set up tonight that tomorrow-morning you would thank you for?
Thursday’s Three Things has more from that conversation. Friday, we debrief.
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