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This post is inspired by me explaining to my friends why I keep two phones, one for the morning and one for the rest of the day. I figured that if they liked the idea, you all would as well! Let’s get into it.

Before we begin, it’s important to quantify the why or the real problem at hand. I define it as this:

You open your eyes in the morning to wake up.

After establishing you are indeed awake, your mind starts racing. “What happened with that deal?”, “Is that problem that I was worried about last night still a problem?” — just to name a few.

Good news, there’s an answer. Your magical phone.

Without thinking, you get your left arm and reach for your phone. The notification previews start to answer all your questions and give you a dopamine hit or increase your cortisol levels.

Your mind, now stimulated, is on a full race to dig deeper, understand reasons and apply full throttle to process this new information.

Oh while you’re at it, might as well do a quick doom scroll on Crypto Twitter and trigger even more emotions in your tiny monkey human brain.

That’s just Twitter. Let’s repeat the process for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and 5 other social media platforms that let you scroll to no end.

When I realised this, I wanted to figure out how I could solve this problem in a systematic way that leaves nothing to chance. Using discipline is a losing game, I needed a better system to combat this problem.

After thinking through it frame by frame, the problem isn’t actually in grabbing my phone. If I want a better morning routine where I want:

• Some gentle music to play in the background

• To know what’s happening in my calendar to plan my morning

• Use my meditation app to have a more mindful day

The problem isn’t with me grabbing my phone, I actually need it to be the person I want to become. The problem instead, lies in the fact my notification centre has previews of all my sources of excitement and anxiety and it’s simply one swipe up away.

I spent time trying to disable it using all of the iOS focus mode features and doing my due diligence on alternatives. Turns out there were none. Resorting to more extreme measures, I realised I actually had a spare iPhone that was collecting dust.

Boom. That was it. If you don’t have the apps, you can never get the notifications or the information even if you use your phone. I got to work and started setting up Morning Phone with the bare essentials of what I needed. These include but are not limited to:

• Music app

• Meditation app

• Calendar app

Under no circumstances, will the following apps be installed on Morning Phone:

• Social media apps

• Email/IM apps

• Mindless games

• Doom-scrollable apps

Not only does Morning Phone work in the morning, it’s also really useful before going to bed for any minor utilities you need.

Okay, so with all that out the way. Here’s what my mornings look like now with morning phone:

1. Wake up in the morning

2. Use same arm to grab phone, realise there are no notifications at all (except my meditation app telling me to meditate)

3. Decide that I might as well put some chilled out music

4. Brush my teeth, freshen up a bit

5. Realise I might as well meditate now that I’m in a decent state

6. Finish meditating/doing anything else I want to do

7. Go to my office and grab my real phone in a much more psychologically calmer and stronger state

8. Place Morning Phone next to bed-side to ensure it’s charged

9. Before going to sleep, putting my real phone in a different room and switching to Morning Phone-life.

Willpower is overrated. Design systems that predict your future self’s behaviour and steer it to be the person you want to be.

I hope you found this helpful!