The Flexible Part of My Fixed Routine - I Thought I Was Building a Better Me

What happens when you’ve built the perfect morning routine and realize it’s just armor against the most uncomfortable feeling: being you.

A few weeks back, I was digging through old projects and found something that made me physically want to vomit.

I felt Fremdscham of myself to be honest…

An interview I did years ago about my morning routine.

I debated not linking to it. But fuck it… here it is. The whole glorious disaster.

Screenshot of the actual interview - Don’t I look happy?

Let me give you the highlight reel of who I used to be:

I made my bed every morning “to show my brain that I did something I didn’t want to do”. I drank a full glass of water “on Ex (aka chug it down), whether thirsty or not”. I meditated for exactly 15 minutes using Headspace. I filled out the morning section of my 5-Minute Journal. Then I did 15 minutes of exercise, which I called “the flexible part of my fixed routine”.

Read that last bit again.

The flexible part of my fixed routine.

The cognitive dissonance is beautiful, isn’t it?

I followed this exact sequence seven days a week. Weekends included. I admitted in the interview that if I missed parts of it, I noticed “lower productivity and worse mood setting in”. 🙈

Looking back now, I can see it clearly: This wasn’t self-improvement. This was self-harm with a productivity veneer.

The Control Freak’s Disguise

Here’s the thing… I did learn from all of it.

The meditation taught me mindfulness and made me hang a post-it on the door of my bathroom that said: “Be aware”. Fun fact: it still hangs there 9 years later even though I don’t live in that apartment anymore.

The journaling built a habit of reflection and actually taught me gratitude.

The early morning movement probably did good things for my body. Or at least it made me really hate myself because I did not like my body at all back then.

But all in all… the energy and pain I invested to maintain it? The constant vigilance, the guilt when I “failed,” the white-knuckling through days when I just didn’t want to?

That cost was absurdly high for what I got back.

And underneath it all was something I couldn’t see back then: I was using optimization as armor.

The tools of transformation Me “becoming” a better me?

Every rigid routine, every tracked metric, every “must do” on my list… it was all a way to avoid sitting still with the most uncomfortable feeling possible.

Being myself.

I wanted to be different. More productive. More disciplined. More reflected. More successful. But not being me. I wanted to be XYZ, some fantasy version I constructed who had his shit together in a way I clearly didn’t.

The morning routine was force. MUST. Willpower deluxe. If you don’t do it, you suck. That was the internal soundtrack.

I thought I was “working on myself”. Really, I was just working very hard to become someone else.

The 100% Problem

A few days ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop, flat white and yuzu sparkling (kinda a thing here right now in Asia) in front of me, iPad in my hands, doing what has become my “sometimes happens morning routine”.

Coffee shop setup with flat white and iPad The sometimes happens morning routine

Notice that wording: sometimes happens. There’s no schedule. No streak to maintain. I go when I feel like it, which is often, but not always. Depends on where I am and how I feel.

And when I’m there, I read. Because reading is fun. Not because I need to become smarter or better or… you get the point.

That morning, I was reading Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality. Cool book by the way…

He has this concept he calls the 95/5 rule. When he ran Eleven Madison Park, one of the best restaurants in the world, he managed 95% of his business ruthlessly, down to the penny. But he deliberately left 5% to “spend foolishly”.

That 5% is where the magic happened. Like the time he bought a $2 street-cart hot dog and plated it between courses for guests who’d never tried one. They freaked out.

Not because it was expensive or technically impressive, but because it was spontaneous, personal, and joyful. Pure hospitality, zero calculation.

As I read this, sipping my flat white in a coffee shop on no particular schedule, the contrast hit me.

Old Daniel… the one from that morning routine interview, was managing 100% of his life.

There was 0% left for magic. 0% for spontaneity. 0% for sitting in a coffee shop reading because it felt good.

Every single minute was optimized, tracked, and assigned a purpose. Even the “flexible part of my fixed routine”.

Which meant there was no room for the thing that actually matters… joy.

Not even 5%.

The Unraveling

I wish I could tell you there was a breaking point. Some dramatic moment where I threw my journal across the room and declared freedom.

It wasn’t like that.

The first crack was probably the meditation.

At some point the paradox finally snapped… I was gripping tightly to a practice about letting go. I was bruteforcing my way through “being present”. The harder I tried, the more absurd it felt.

So I started making excuses. “I need to work”. “We’re on vacation”. At first, the guilt was there, that voice saying I was slipping, losing discipline. But nothing collapsed. No productivity crisis. No mood spiral.

The Headspace subscription kept auto-renewing for three years after I stopped opening the app. Every time I wanted to cancel it, I saw my cheap old subscription and thought… “Maybe I need it again”. I never did.

The journal? I went on a trip and forgot it at home. Realized it too late. Waited for the panic to hit, the sense that I was losing my grip on self-improvement. It never came. I just… didn’t miss it. It’s gathering dust in a box in my parents attic.

But something interesting happened… I filled the void with more work. Because of course I did. If you’re not optimizing yourself, you might as well optimize something else, right?

I got pretty good at it too. Built my work to a point where I actually had free time.

And then I felt horrible. Because what do you do when you’ve engineered your life for maximum efficiency and suddenly there’s nothing urgent to do?

You have to actually sit with yourself. And I realized I had no idea who that was.

That’s when the real work started, I guess. Not the morning routine kind. The messy, unstructured, “what the fuck do I actually want?” kind.

We’re talking about nine years from that interview till today.

I can’t give you a timeline of epiphanies. It was just… slow. So slow I didn’t even notice it happening.

The body stuff was one of the last things. I tried everything… jogging, gym routines, all of it force, none of it fun. Then two years ago I was in Thailand and thought, fuck it, let’s try Muay Thai.

I hated it at first. Everything hurt. But something kept pulling me back. It was painful, but also… fun? I kept showing up because I wanted to, not because I’d decided I should.

Same with yoga. (I’m an old German oak trying to become at least a 5% young birch.)

I still make the bed sometimes. When I feel like having something nice to come back to. Most of the time? Who cares?

And somewhere in those nine years, the guilt just… starved. Not because I killed it. I just stopped feeding it.

That’s the thing with change: you don’t notice it while it’s happening.

You notice it when you’re sitting in a coffee shop at 11am on a Wednesday reading a book about hospitality and realize you haven’t checked your task list in hours. And you don’t care.

I stopped trying so hard to become someone else.

I started doing things because I wanted to, not because I’d decided I should want to.

The Shift (Not a Fix)

I’m not going to tell you everything flows effortlessly now. That would be bullshit. Some days are still hard. Some projects still require pushing through resistance.

But the sensation is different.

Back then: Tense. Buzzing. Constantly “on”. Everything required willpower and force.

Now: It’s lighter. When I sit in bed at 9:36pm and open my laptop to write not because it’s on a task list, but because I feel like it… there’s no internal argument about whether I “should” be doing something else.

Laptop in bed with the article open The impulse and draft version of this article

I’m not trying to be anyone. I’m just here, doing this, because it’s actually fun.

And that difference? That’s everything.

No Formula, Just a Question

I’m not here to tell you morning routines are bad or that structure is the enemy. Some people genuinely love and need their systems. Good for them.

I also can’t give you a five-step guide to being yourself. To offer you a fixed routine now would be the ultimate irony, rebuilding the forced outside structure I wrote about.

But if you have the feeling you are using optimization to hide from something, if every minute of your day is accounted for because sitting still feels dangerous, then maybe the question isn’t “How do I optimize better?”.

Maybe it’s: “What would I do (or not do) if I gave myself permission to waste time?”

Not to achieve something. Not to fill the time. Not to become someone.

Just for the doing. Just for the joy.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: I couldn’t optimize my way into being enough.

I only got there by stopping. By letting go. By doing things that make no sense and bringing me no closer to any goal except this one:

Being myself.

And it turns out, that brings a shit ton of joy.