It used to be that every morning as soon as I got out of bed I'd sit down to clear my email and check twitter. The idea was that if I could take care of that first thing in the morning, it'd distract me less throughout the day. That idea is actually valid, but it comes with a cost.

I find that whatever I do first thing in the morning sets the tone for the day. By checking email and twitter as my first activity, I was basically spinning a roulette wheel. Some mornings I'd have a message waiting for me that inspired me, other times there were things that irritated me or just made me feel down. Even if those emotions arose just from some minor issue, I found they'd stick with me throughout the day. After a while I got sick of the rollercoaster ride and its effects on my productivity. I needed a more consistent morning activity to balance things out.

A couple months ago we set up some planter boxes to try our hand at square foot gardening. Below you can see what it looked like when we first started building them.

Because I work from home, I could pick any time of day to focus on working on the garden. But I sort of accidentally got in the habit of going out and working on it as soon as I woke up, for the same reason that I used to check my email: I was excited to see what the changes were. Now, I've never properly gardened before, so what I didn't realize is that change happens FAST. The picture below is from only maybe 5 weeks after we planted seeds and tiny starter plants.

As I continued to work on the garden, I noticed a major change in my overall mood consistency. Sure, some times I'd go outside and see some bad news. One time I woke up to find one of my buttercup squash smashed in half and about 40 feet away from my garden. The zucchini plants you see in the picture above, after giving us a great yield eventually got a disease and I had to rip them out. But for the most part, I'd see things that were good news. The plants would grow bigger, new vegetables would come in. The bees would be pollinating new flowers that had bloomed the night before. But for better or for worse, the garden was a fixed universe with real limits on the range of possibilities for good and bad news in the morning. This is a huge contrast to email, which can bring news that affects your entire life.

Building a garden wasn't an intentional exercise in personal development. Instead, it was an activity that fell into my life simply because I wanted to grow my own vegetables. But when I noticed the positive effects it was having on me, I re-enforced the habits that I was starting to form around the activity. Now, it has just become part of my daily routine and I don't need to motivate myself to work on it. I find that this 15 minute buffer zone between me and my inbox is more than enough to at least partially immunize me from the rapid moodswings that clearing my inbox can cause. I wonder if there are other small hacks like this that I should be applying in my life, because this one certainly worked!