Finding Focus: How I Fortify My Day With A Morning Reading Habit
Life holds a certain dissonance, even in the best of times. Joy comes with pain. Growth with sadness. Not to sound too much like Master Yoda here, but hopefully, you get my point. Life is messy and full of responsibility. People depend on us, and to be successful, we need all the help we can get.
In my own life, this is undoubtedly true. To help fortify my day, I take 15 or twenty minutes each morning to read a daily passage from several books and to review a selection of highlights from past reading. Aside from starting the day with a sense of accomplishment, it also offers me fresh insights related to essential roles in my life.
To accomplish this, I’m using my recently acquired iPad mini, whose primary purpose is to act as a personal reflection tool. I use it for reading, journaling, highlighting, and light note-taking.
The Books
Here's what I'm reading as part of this routine, as well as the corresponding role that it's aimed at improving:
The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids by Ryan Holiday
The Better Parent and Partner
This is the newest addition to my daily reading list. I'm on my first read-through and started it on January 1st. As the title implies, this book is helping me build my toolset as a father. The role of a father is among the most important to me, and as a stay-at-home parent, it's where I spend most of my time on a given day, so having this book as part of my startup is really helpful to remind me of my desire to be a helpful and loving father and husband.
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday
The Better Human
Now on my fourth read-through, The Daily Stoic is the book that began my interest in Stoicism and daily learning, helping me realize that a few pages a day can be an antidote to the powerful feelings of self-doubt that lurk just outside our field of vision. The Daily Stoic helps to fortify me against my lack of control over external events and reminds me of my power to understand and shape my reaction to those events.
Daily Creative: Find Your Inspiration to Spark Creative Energy and Fight Burnout by Todd Henry
The Better Creative and Professional
My friend Jim suggested this book during one of our regular calls last year, and I enjoyed reading passages sporadically but didn’t quite commit. This year, I'm making it a part of my daily ritual. This feeds my creative self; I'm a better writer and thinker when that gets attention.
After finishing my morning reading, I switch to the second part of this routine and jump from the Kindle app on my iPad Mini to my preferred app that helps me manage and organize highlights from ebooks, articles, and email newsletters, Readwise.
Making and Reviewing Highlights
Much of what I think and write about is sparked by my reading. To manage highlights from things I've read, I use Readwise. I like that I can access all of my saved highlights via the app or the web, and they regularly email me with highlights and summaries to review. You can read more about how I use Readwise in this piece I wrote as part of the PKM Toolkit series.
While I'm reviewing highlights, I have two shortcuts at the ready. The first allows me to easily send a topic idea to a Craft document where I keep possible ideas of interest to write about. The second opens a mind map in Mindnode for a similar purpose. However, this is less focused on specific topic ideas and more on adding bits and pieces to projects or topics already in active development.
Building The Fortification
My daily reading practice is a powerful way to start my day in the right direction and help me build a foundation upon which to work to be a better dad, husband, human, and creative. While this habit is just part of my morning routine, it's crucial to any success I find during my day and offers an outsized reward for my time invested.