Month: June 2014

My morning routine

Posted on June 18, 2014July 23, 2014 by Doug Belshaw

Update: this is now cross-posted on the My Morning Routine website here!

I came across a website recently called My Morning Routine. Its stated aim is as follows:

Inspiring morning routines to set you up for a more productive and enjoyable day.

Understandably, a lot of them are idealised routines, but they’re nevertheless thought-provoking. Like another of my favourite interview-based sites, The Setup, each person answers a set of structured questions.

Now that I find myself with an established routine, I thought I’d have a go at answer the questions as well. But in my case, this isn’t idealised, this is literally what I do every day. 🙂

What is your morning routine?

I wake up sometime between 6am and 7am, depending on when my children wake up or whether my wife’s going for a run. I have a Lumie Sunrise alarm clock which sometimes wakes us up, sometimes doesn’t. Our kids, however, can always be relied upon! My wife and I used to take it in turns to go running on alternate days, but I found (bizarrely) that it seems to be a trigger for my migraines. It’s a real shame, as I used to really enjoy it.

It’s usually me who goes downstairs with my two kids (ages 3 and 7) to get us breakfast while my wife goes for a run or gets ready. I have a combination of fresh fruit, a special nut/seed mixture my wife puts together, and Greek yogurt. I also have a cup of tea. (I’m down to one cup of coffee with my lunch, these days)

When we’re finished I get our youngest dressed and then tag-team with my wife. I have a quick wash and do my exercises (including press-ups / sit-ups / stretching) and then head downstairs to help our eldest with either Khan Academy or Duolingo.

After that, I put together the things I need for the rest of the morning and we all walk our eldest child to school. I then head to the library to do some work and then either go to the gym or swimming before lunch. After exercise is when I have a nice, peaceful shower. 😉

How long have you stuck with this routine so far?

Ever since we moved into this house, which was February this year. I’m on a different team at Mozilla now, which means I’m travelling less and able to get into more of a routine. It’s good to get into a groove, sometimes.

The upside of this is that I’m starting to recognise and talk to people in my community, which is great. We’ve got friendly neighbours and we live in the kind of place where people will stop and have a chat with you.

How has your morning routine changed over recent years?

I didn’t really have a routine when I was on the Open Badges team at Mozilla. I was travelling almost every week, which has a knock-on effect upon getting into a routine.

Previous routines I’ve had were dictated by institutional hours (school/university) and commuting time. Not having to commute is amazing. It’s really good for my mental health to be able to choose which days to really crank and which days to take it easy. It’s even better deciding when to take PTO (Paid Time Off – or ‘holiday’ as we call it in the UK). When I was teaching I got more time off, but it wasn’t necessarily at times I needed it.

What time do you go to sleep?

I’d like to go to sleep about 21:00, but a couple of things stop me doing that. First, because I’m part of a geographically-distributed team I usually have work to do after I’ve put the kids to bed. Second, I like to watch something on Netflix with my wife before we go to bed. That usually means that 22:00 is the earliest. And then, of course, I like to read.

So, I guess that 22:30-23:00 is usual for me to go to sleep. Which explains why I’m often tired and need to exercise to keep my energy levels up.

Do you use an alarm to wake you up in the mornings, and if so do you ever hit the snooze button?

As I said above, I use a Lumie Sunrise alarm clock. It’s great – especially in the winter. However, if I’m travelling and if a different timezone, I need the reassurance that I’ll be up in time. On those occasions, I use the wriststrap of my Fitbit One and use the ‘silent alarm’ feature. I then wake up through vibrations, rather than alarm. That’s important, as when I’m travelling I often wear ear plugs.

Do you see to email first thing in the morning, or leave it until later in the day?

I usually check email while I’m getting breakfast ready. I use an app called Twilight on my phone to shift the screen colour towards the red end of the spectrum so it’s not so harsh for me when I wake up. Again, because I’m part of a distributed team, I want to make sure I’m already processing what I need to do that day.

So my email ‘on’ hours (both work/personal) are around 07:00 to about 21:00. I know some people complain about email, but at least it’s a stable, easy to understand platform with threaded conversations. I just have an ‘ACTION’ folder and an ‘Archive’ folder. Once you’ve triaged your email (i.e. got it out of your inbox), you don’t have to reply to it until later.

How soon do you check your phone in the morning, either for calls/messages or social media and news?

The first thing I do is check BBC News, the Wikipedia front page and Hacker News on my Kindle’s web browser. When I first wake up and I’m getting used to the fact it’s a new day, my eyes can’t take anything with a backlit screen.

While I’m getting breakfast ready and checking emails, I also check and respond to messages on Twitter. My Twitter network is even more distributed than my colleagues!

What are your most important tasks in the morning?

The first priority is making sure the rest of my family is ready – which includes their emotional well-being. My second priority is taking my ’emotional temperature’ for the day. If I’m feeling less than optimal, then I’ll read Baltasar Gracián’s The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence or some of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

On days you’re not settled in your own home, are you able to adapt any of your routine to fit in with a different environment?

I go to sleep a lot earlier when I’m away on my own. That’s for two reasons – to try and claw back some of my ongoing sleep debt, but also because the stimulation of being in a new environment means my brain needs to work harder even when ‘resting’. That means it needs to process connections while I’m asleep. So I sleep more.

What do you do if you fail to follow your routine, and how does this influence the rest of your day?

Interestingly, we’re thrown a curveball every week as my wife works Fridays as a primary school teacher. On that day, we get up at 06:00 and try not to disturb the kids. Then, my wife gets ready to leave just after 07:00 and I do everything until my mother comes to look after our youngest at 08:30.

In general, as my routine is our family’s routine, we keep each other right. However, if I miss my morning exercises – especially the stretching – I can tell for the rest of the day. I bought a training mat recently to ensure that I didn’t use our hard wooden floors as an excuse not to do them!

I’d love to read your version of this. Why not write a blog post answering the same questions?

Image CC BY Koshy Koshy

HOWTO: Ditch Gmail for self-hosted webmail

Posted on June 15, 2014January 1, 2015 by Doug Belshaw

Update (January 2015): Although the self-hosted approach detailed in this post worked really well for the six months I tried it, I’m now using Fastmail.

Introduction

On Friday, I decided to ditch Gmail. It had been a long time coming, to be honest.

I’m not really interested in having a debate whether or not I ‘should’ do this, or whether it’s objectively a good thing to do. I just had an epiphany when I realised that almost all of my data (e.g. search, email, analytics) was going via Google’s servers. It’s like some kind of legitimised man-in-the-middle attack.

Instead of Gmail, I’m using webmail on my own domain and (shared) server. It was a pretty straightforward process. Here’s how to do it:

Set up self-hosted email inbox
Forward (and archive) email
Import folders and email
Update email addresses around the web

1. Set up self-hosted email inbox

I’m using Reclaim Hosting, which comes with something called ‘CPanel’ installed. This makes it much easier to install and maintain apps and services.

Click on the ‘Email Accounts’ option. Fill in the email address and password – for example, I chose [email protected]

You can now access your new email inbox by appending ‘webmail’ to your domain name – e.g. dougbelshaw.com/webmail. You have a choice of interfaces to access your email inbox. I chose Roundcube:

2. Forward (and archive) email

The first thing you want to do is make sure that you continue to get the email sent to you in one place. To do that, you need to forward all of the email that comes to your Gmail account to your new self-hosted email inbox.

In Gmail, click on the gear icon and go to ‘Settings’. Once there click on ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’:

Choose ‘Forward a copy of incoming mail to…’ and input the self-hosted email you set up in Step 1. You’ll have to confirm that account by clicking on a link that Google send to your new email address.

I chose to ‘archive Gmail’s copy’. It’s up to you what option you choose here.

3. Import folders and email

This is the bit that takes the longest. In fact, you can leave this running overnight and/or be doing Step 4 while this is happening.

Unless you’re declaring email bankruptcy, you’ll need to transfer your existing emails and folders from Gmail to your new self-hosted email account. Step 2 only redirects all new emails received.

First, you’ll need to use an email client like Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform) to download all of your Gmail folders and emails. To set it up, download Thunderbird and then launch it.

You’ll see something like this:

You’ve already got an email address, so click ‘Skip this and use my existing email’.

Add your Gmail account first by entering your name, email address and password. Remember, if you’ve got two-factor authentication turned on for your Google account, you’ll need an ‘App password’ from your security page.

The default option is to connect via ‘IMAP’ which is what we want so leave it as it is and press ‘Done’. You should then see Thunderbird importing all of your folders and emails. This will take a long time.

Note: ‘folders’ in Gmail are known as ‘labels’.

Now you need to add the self-hosted email account you set up in Step 1. To do this go to the menu and choose ‘New’ and then ‘Existing Mail Account’:

You’ll see the same box from when you added your GMail account. This time add your email address and password to the account you set up in Step 1.*

Click ‘Done’ and you now have both your Gmail and self-hosted email account syncing with Thunderbird.

Now you need to select all of your Gmail folders/labels and drag them to your self-hosted account.

Be careful to drag them onto the email address rather than ‘Inbox’ – otherwise the folders you drag will become sub-folders of your inbox rather than folders in their own right. Of course, you can always just drag them to ‘Archive’ if you don’t care.

Now wait. Possibly a very long time if you’re on a slow connection and/or you have lots and lots of emails and folders.

4. Update email addresses around the web

While your email and folders are transferring – and, to be honest, over the next few days/weeks – you’ll need to update your email address with the accounts you have around the web. There’s no great hurry for this, as your Gmail messages will be redirected to your new email inbox, but it’s nice to get things sorted.

You may also want to do one or more of the following:

send a ‘please update your addressbook!’ email to your contacts
use an email auto-responder on your Gmail account for a while
add a message about having a new address to your email signature

EDIT: Remember, if you don’t tell people about your new email address, your emails will still be going via Google’s servers (thus negating the point of the exercise…)

Conclusion

Did you manage to follow these instructions? Have you got a different/better way of doing it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below (or via this Hacker News thread)!

*Apart from believing in Open Source software (and working for Mozilla), one of my reasons for using Thunderbird is that it provides auto-setup for a much wider range of services than other mail apps. Also, the reason you see ‘SSL’ here is because I set up https on my domain using StartSSL. That’s outside the scope of this tutorial, but is also probably unnecessary if you’re planning to access your inbox via the webmail interface.

Banner image CC BY David Huang