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Morning Pages thoughts
Kind of a random post, but I have been doing a practice called Morning Pages more-or-less every morning since 17 October. It's been an interesting experience, so I thought I would write up some of my experiences and findings so far having done this for about six months.
I first heard about Morning Pages on the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout Discord server -- someone mentioned The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and wanted people's opinions on it as a writing advice book. A lot of people either didn't like it or said they gave up once it started getting a bit too religious/Christian/spiritual, but multiple people said they liked the Morning Pages technique and that was their main takeaway from the book. I was intrigued at this universal approval for Morning Pages, so I looked up more information online.
I found two blog posts: the first one, VanillaPapers.net: What Are Morning Pages? (And 20 Easy Tips To Start) seemed a decent enough rundown on the technique and what you have to do at the minimum for it to be helpful that I felt I could start.
The second one was not helpful but I share it because it's funny. ChrisWinfield.com: Morning Pages - A Clearer Mind, Better Ideas & Less Anxiety -- this whole blog post is so opposite my aesthetic and is so vapid in a specifically bro-y business-major grindset optimizer sort of way that, if I hadn't gotten those extremely positive endorsements from the GYWO server, this alone would have been enough to make me think Morning Pages aren't worth it, lol. It's not a good blog post, but it is worth taking a look at just to boggle at how pure a type the author is.
But anyway, since I DID have those positive endorsements, I decided to get an 8.5x11 (well actually, A4 since we're in Europe)-sized notebook and try this out and see if it was helpful to me. I started this on October 17th, have currently written over 415 pages of these Morning Pages, and gone through 6 pens, having done this almost every day except when (1) I was feeling very sick with a cold, (2) I was not planning on working in any way (i.e. hanging out with family), or (3) I had decided that the cost of spending ~2 hours doing a Morning Pages session would not be worth it/cut too much into limited daytime work hours (so probably about 10-15 days skipped in the past six months). (Usually, I use my Morning Pages to plan out my day, but not only did I have difficulty when sick coming up with anything I wanted to do that day aside from "sleep," but just trying to find the concentration to write three pages of *anything* was too much. Not to mention, I slept through the morning so by the time I woke up, it was late in the afternoon and I didn't feel much like doing "morning" pages anymore.)
Wait, it's all priorities?
Anyway, at the beginning, I mostly used my Morning Pages in order to organize my brain. During that period, I was buried under a lot of work and also managing a lot of different deadlines simultaneously, both for my job but also for fandom things (I signed up for too many exchanges last year...), so when I started doing Morning Pages, the main thing I wanted to figure out by writing them is, like, why am I so busy right now? At what point in the future will I feel free enough to take on some responsibilities I dropped earlier this year? What do I absolutely *need* to accomplish in the next few months? What is important/high-priority and what is droppable? What can I do to change my processes so that I spend less time on drudgery and more time on things I actually enjoy?
At the beginning, I took a look at all the things I wanted to do in the next few weeks or next couple of months and thought that I would feel more at ease if I could arrange things so that I could "steal" work from future me. That way, future me would have less work to do and therefore be less stressed out. What quickly became apparent, though, is that this isn't how most of my work works. Except in certain limited situations, I don't have a finite amount of work I have to do after which I can just relax and not do anything. Rather, I have an infinite amount of work, and finishing things and getting them out of the way only results in things lower down on my list that I considered myself too busy to do moving up again into the spotlight.
This is true for both work and hobbies. For work, while it seems like it would be closest to "finite amount of work after which I don't have to do anything," in fact, how it tends to work is that while there *is* some finite work I absolutely have to do, it is way beyond my ability to tackle in 40 hours a week. At any point in time, I basically have a huge amount of tasks that would be "nice to do" staring me down, but which I often have to drop if I'm behind on the "absolutely essential" tasks. So being ahead on "absolutely essential" doesn't mean it's relaxation time -- it means I have enough breathing space to start to think about all the *other* tasks I could do, which are important for whatever reason (makes a class better designed, work toward a promotion, be more complete about actually responding to people who emailed me hoping for a response, etc. etc.) but which I usually end up dropping on the floor out of necessity.
Hobbies work much the same way -- basically, I have an infinite backlog of projects I would really "like to do" if I have time, and the moment I have spare time, every single thing I have ever wanted to do, which was patiently lying on the floor, eagerly stands up again, clamoring for my attention. The only reason I *don't* think about them is that I am currently fully preoccupied with some other project, usually one that is somewhat time-sensitive/has the trait that finishing it sooner rather than later actually makes a difference.
I basically had this realization that, aside from very well-defined tasks where there is a hard deadline and a finite amount of work I need to do in order to hit that deadline (where it CAN help for me to do more work today to save me a headache tomorrow), there isn't really any such thing as "stealing work from myself" to make me less busy. It's more like... I can either choose to not be busy or I can choose to get more done. I know it's kind of obvious, but I just had this ":O" reaction to realizing that ultimately, productivity is just about priorities and whether I think something is important to do or not (and why / what larger goal or life priority is it serving) and whether I would rather be less busy or get more done... Another way of saying this is that, if I choose to make myself more busy now, I don't actually make myself *less* busy later -- I just... make myself more busy now, with the advantage of getting more things done. Basically, after spending several Morning Pages trying to answer these questions of "when am I going to be free enough to do ____ (dropped projects, stale to-do list items, etc.)?" "why am I so busy?" etc., my realization was something like:
Or maybe:
Which I guess isn't a bad realization to have. It just made me realize I was waiting for something that will never come -- the mythic "calm period" where I don't have anything to do. This calm period will never happen unless I create it for myself by valuing doing nothing productive over doing something from my infinite to-do list.
There are several other things that came out of this realization:
First, since the only reward for more productivity is getting more things done, it is actually important for me to celebrate getting things done, because uh... there aren't that many rewards for it otherwise. So since having that realization, I will typically begin my Morning Pages by recognizing all the things I was able to get done the previous day and just give myself a pat on the back for actually bringing long projects to completion and that kind of thing.
Second, since the only reward for more productivity is getting more things done, I have found a partially effective strategy for managing my exchange problem (somewhat), which is that, to avoid overcommitting to exchanges, sometimes it can help to establish in advance a condition for signing up to an exchange, related to the places where the exchange would make me busier. For example, if it's an exchange I would likely draw art for, then I will say, "You have to finish up [these current art pieces] before the exchange sign-up period ends; otherwise, you're not allowed to sign up." This bargain has a kind of logic to it to my brain because, if I want to be busy(er) in the future, I need to be productive enough to square away my current projects/commitments. The reward for getting things done is getting more things done! However, I say "partially" and "somewhat" effective here because I have on occasion set these conditions for myself but then said, "But I really REALLY want to sign up for the thing 🥺" and then gave myself a pass even though I hadn't done the agreed-upon work! Which is probably bad and a sign that the system doesn't quite work at keeping my commitments at a reasonable level. But there does seem to be something promising here, by tying my ability to sign up for an exchange to making progress on a project I find to be thematically related.
Third, I need to work on purposely giving myself regular periods of rest, especially after periods of hard work. I haven't really quite figured this out yet, but I'll discuss what I've come up with so far below.
Need to time my pages
One important note about my experience doing Morning Pages that I feel like I should mention sooner rather than later is how long it takes me to do them. I try to do them in the morning, but sometimes they take so long that I end up needing to leave home before I've finished my morning pages, and then teach class, and attend meetings... and then basically by the time I finish them it's already 11 AM. Basically, I felt like I needed to time how long I spent on my Morning Pages to see if they were actually helping me be productive or they were cutting into my productivity, and to see when I was dragging with my Morning Pages and needed to speed it up.
At the beginning, timing my sessions wasn't so important because it was clear that Morning Pages (regardless of how long they took) were helping me a lot because they were clearing my mind at a time when I felt really frazzled and overwhelmed by all the things competing for my time and trying to juggle multiple big projects with staggered deadlines. However, later on, when my mind was a bit more organized, it was less clear if the Morning Pages were hurting or helping. Also, I switched to a style of doing Morning Pages where sometimes I was doing internet research as part of doing my Morning Pages (like, I needed to look something up for reference on dates, or I needed to find some old project notes I'd stashed somewhere in order to make progress on it and that kind of thing), and this made it so that sometimes my Morning Pages never ended and my work day never begun, which is not a good situation to be in.
Anyway, because my Morning Pages tend to get interrupted so often by travel, meetings, and teaching, in order to track how long it takes me to do them, I actually also need to keep pretty detailed track of start and end times, so I make a note of what time I start writing them, and then note the time whenever I have to temporarily "pause" and when I restart again. Then at the end, I report two things: the time in the day I finished the pages (to see how long it delays the start of other work) and the total time spent writing them, not counting interruptions.
So, having done this time-tracking, the typical Morning Page session takes me between 1.5 and 2 hours of writing time only (NOT counting interruptions -- that's entirely time spent focused on finishing my Morning Pages!). Depending on how many morning events I have, this means that I often finish my Morning Pages at 10:30, 11, noon, etc. I rarely finish them before 9:30 or so due to my schedule. My record for how long it took me to finish writing Morning Pages, when I wasn't sick and was writing them at whatever opportunity I had, was 3:15 PM!
So in short, these do take quite a while, so much that I think they can affect my productivity just because there are ~2 hours less in the day for me to do actual work. Also, because of my schedule and the type of work I do, sometimes it actually does make a difference whether I read/reply to/send off an email at 9 or 9:30 AM vs. in the afternoon, and so finishing up Morning Pages too late can have negative impacts on my work. In some cases, I needed to rearrange my schedule to start my day early enough so that I can get my Morning Pages in before around 9 or 9:30, and some days I do a "Mini Pages" instead where I just write enough down to come up with a clear to-do list for the day and then stop, rather than go for the full three pages.
I think Morning Pages are overall worth it, at least when I need some time to make plans / set priorities on a longer timescale or just a bigger scale in general (e.g. is what I'm doing day-to-day actually a good use of my time and worth the effort I'm putting into it?) or if I otherwise need a bit of quiet time to organize my thoughts or feelings. Despite taking up time, they do tend to help me get more work done, because if I do them right, I tend to be excited and energized and focused on specific work, so they act as a kind of productivity multiplier throughout the rest of the day. However, because they themselves eat quite a large part of my work time, I might choose to cut them short or to use them to help me get started on a difficult piece of work that has been stalled for a while. It's a bit hard to tell if these are overall helpful, though, since I can't exactly compare my level of productivity over this period with an alternative universe where I didn't do Morning Pages...
My Morning Pages template
After a period where my Morning Pages fluctuated a lot and were just kind of mini-essays (split over multiple days) on whatever I happened to be thinking about at the moment, they've kind of settled into a pattern. Something like this:
0. I might start with just noting my current mood or physical state, especially if I woke up in a weird mood or am ruminating on something. If I had a dream, I might write down a very short version of it (if I want to write a longer account, I'll write it up somewhere more permanent).
1. Otherwise, I usually write down a summary of what I did/accomplished yesterday and how I feel about it (going along with what I said above about how the only reward I get for doing things is having gotten them done -- this is my reward for productivity). As I do this, I usually try to explain what went wrong or right. Like, if I didn't get as much accomplished as I thought, I try to figure out why or give myself reassurance why this is okay and understandable (lot of unexpected work or distractions coming in, spent a lot of time fighting [urgent fire], task took longer than I estimated, etc.).
2. I then talk about what I have to get done or what I would like to get done today/this week(end)/in the near future and why. This is the prioritizing part of my Morning Pages. I usually make one list for work activities and one list for recreational/break activities (I usually work with a 20/10 Pomodoro, which is probably a bit too skewed toward break activities (Pomodoro is typically 25/5), but that's the split my brain currently finds sustainable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Break activities usually consist of fannish leisure stuff that's fairly straightforward to complete and check off -- for example, community maintenance, link or social media reading, comment replies, and so on. In addition to trying to figure out what is important to me, I might also think about what is stressing me out the most / what I would feel best about if I got it done.
3. Based on that prioritizing, I will write up a couple of to-do lists for work and break, starring which ones are important/what I aim to complete that day.
4. Afterwards, I also write what I want to do during the evening as relaxation if I finish all the essential things on my list. I didn't do this at first, but then I noticed that I would often go into "staring into space" mode in the evening, or I would bounce around multiple activities in a kind of aimless, unfocused manner and get nothing done, unless I listed a couple of activities I wanted to focus on. Because relaxation is a bit less important than making progress at work, I don't mind if I change my plans later, but I like having some suggestions for my evening self at least.
5. If I still have space afterward (usually there's maybe 0.5 to 1.5 pages left), I dedicate it to working out something I'm thinking about or working on at the moment. Something I have found from my Morning Pages is that they're very good for brainstorming or analyzing or just generally doing something that helps get me unstuck on some difficult or challenging task or trying to figure out why something is giving me trouble, so that is usually what I do, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that.
I have no idea if this is how other people would want to use their Morning Pages. I guess one thing that is nice about them is that they ARE pretty flexible, so you can change their format to suit how your brain tends to work and also how you are feeling or what kind of support you need on a particular day. I've definitely had days where I broke from this general template entirely and just wrote a rant about what is stressing me out, or drafted a response to Someone Wrong on the Internet or whatever. Also, sometimes I have to remind myself that I can do planning and brainstorming *outside* my Morning Pages if I want to. Right now, Morning Pages has *really* skewed my work hours toward planning activities, but sometimes there is something I need to think about or plan urgently or in a way that Morning Pages isn't really geared for, and so I have to remind myself it's OK to still do that elsewhere, on top of all the time I spent drafting my Morning Pages.
The following sections are just some random observations I've had about Morning Pages.
"Path-clearing" effect
As mentioned, I've noticed writing Morning Pages tends to be super effective at figuring out obstacles I'm running up against and also planning. So one thing I've noticed about my Morning Pages is that they have this "path-clearing" effect, where they make it clear what I have to do... but then I have a bunch of work to actually do. For example, they're super effective at debugging fic and making it clear what edits I need to implement in order to fix something wrong with a fic, but then I actually have to do the detailed line-by-line edits, which Morning Pages isn't really good for? Or another example, Morning Pages are good at coming up with a bulletpoint outline for everything I want to include in a post or project I am working on, but then I actually need to draft out the full thing, which I can partially use Morning Pages but only in bite-sized pieces. Or another example would be that it's good for breaking a Big Complicated Task into doable steps / a strategy. But usually that means I still have to actually *do* the dozens of hours of work it clears the path to/creates. So one thing that tends to happen with Morning Pages is that I end up with lots of open/dangling projects, where I've done quite a bit of prep work and have a clear list of next steps, but I don't have enough time to actually execute the planned work and close up that active task.
(As an example, I planned out an outline for this post like over a month before I actually started drafting it, and it took that long just for me to clear my plate enough for me to actually work on it. Similarly, my fic editing plans have tended to dangle for months before I can actually get around to them.)
As a result, I try where possible to use Morning Pages to do actual work, when I have a lot of "open" projects on my plate. They're not always very good at doing actual work, but it's something I keep in mind so that I don't have so many unfinished projects open at the same time.
Project management techniques
Because I've been doing a lot more analysis of my processes through Morning Pages, I've been kind of getting a sense of general project management techniques to help me keep me on track for my deadlines, or to try to give myself motivating deadlines so that I spend a reasonable amount of time on the work I have to do and don't start overrunning my schedule and getting behind.
One thing that is important for analysis is time logging -- taking notes on how much time I spend on doing what. It's very hard to plan without having some kind of estimate of how many hours of work I still have ahead of me and how much time per day I can dedicate to a project. And in order to come up with even a ballpark estimate, usually some kind of time-tracking is required. But yeah, there is a bit of overhead involved with time tracking, so I usually only do this enough to collect a basic time estimate, or sometimes I will keep tracking if I think I am spending too much time on a task that really needs to be cut down/half-assed -- timing myself helps me keep in mind I shouldn't let my work just expand to fill whatever time I can give it, but that I need to keep moving briskly along and cut corners when needed.
Another thing that is helpful for not letting a task drag on too long is giving myself deadlines -- fake/self-imposed ones in this case. Even something random like "I want to finish this task by this Friday" has the effect of structuring/prioritizing my time during the week, which gives me concrete goals to work toward each day and makes it easier to fill my time when I'm juggling multiple projects. That said, priority is a double-edged sword where it does hone the mind, yes, but it also means that other tasks starve while your attention is extremely focused elsewhere, so I've also had the issue multiple times where having a deadline helped me get ONE thing done in a timely manner but at the cost of nothing else getting done until I hit the main task's deadline.
Another thing I've learned from doing these Morning Pages and experimenting with different lists is that giving myself small, bite-sized tasks (either main work tasks or break activities) that have a very clear, concrete endpoint after which they can be crossed off is very clutch. I find it very motivating to feel like I am closing up open tasks, and so having some very small tasks on my list that I can write down that can be finished in maybe 20 minutes or less helps give me a mood boost that bleeds out into the harder work tasks and makes it more likely those bigger work goals also get done. I really benefit from having these easily-close-uppable tasks; also, when it comes to break activities, if I have an activity that is exciting me at the moment, that is also very motivating, so it's a bit odd but my ability to get difficult work done is often a function of having arranged a good set of *break tasks* I can use during the day that would motivate me to work so that I can do the break, which I can accomplish, which gives me the energy boost I need to do more work. A lot of times I have stumbled with my main work because the break tasks were also onerous and challenging and just NOT at all a break! It's better to swap out an unfun slog of a break task with a simple stretch break (stretch breaks are a reasonably refreshing and easy break activity) to prevent that from happening.
Relaxation techniques
As mentioned above, one thing I realized is that there is no mythical "calm time" where I will feel on top of things and have a light workload and be able to relax more because my schedule is emptier, because I have infinite amounts of work that will always surface in order to fill whatever free time I have. Therefore, there is no break or relaxation periods other than what I give to myself on purpose.
And I am admittedly not great at giving myself relaxation time or having relaxing activities. During several of my early Morning Pages, I listed all the ways I like to relax, and looked at when they became less relaxing and how relaxing I felt about them in general. As you might guess, the things that are maximally relaxing are things that don't require much brainpower or concentration. Sleeping, watching TV, reading books, and talking to my partner are probably the most relaxing activities at one end, while art is in the middle (requires some concentration and can tire me out, but can be a bit rote/mindless), and writing is the leisure activity I do that tends to require the most effort.
For all of these things, though, I tend to make them more stressful by deadline-ifying them, either through external deadlines or by self-imposed deadlines/priorities. For example, for the past year, I've had a book club that means I have to push quite hard in order to finish reading my book on time, so something that would usually be quite relaxing (reading) becomes a bit stressful and something I need to make sure I'm on time to finish. Same thing with exchange deadlines and how they affect my art/fic work process. But at the same time, deadlines are helpful for me for setting priorities and structuring my time and making sure I am finishing up projects and so on.
So yeah, there aren't a lot of projects I have that don't have a deadline of some kind. Also, even some things that don't have deadlines have a mild social element (like replying to comments or getting caught up on fic or social media posts of friends and that kind of thing) that means that timely action is more desirable even if not strictly necessary. So yeah, there aren't a lot of activities I can do as relaxation that don't involve a deadline of some kind, so having stuff I want to do that is pretty mindless and doesn't have a deadline is pretty important for relaxing after periods of stress.
Aside from that, I don't really have good strategies for relaxing, other than having protected time dedicated to doing activities that don't have deadlines but are intrinsically fun (I try to fill my evenings with these kinds of activities, for example, as a contrast with work hours), or sometimes things that do have deadlines but which I'm itching to work on anyway, deadline aside.
More focus during the day
I've found that doing Morning Pages does help me maintain focus during the day, as long as I give myself a good set of goals (concrete, actually finishable, etc.). And I've also found that when I don't do Morning Pages, I get pretty stressed and anxious until I do them, although that might just be a function of having been extremely busy over the months I've been doing them (October through April).
I generally get stressed out when I have too many open/unresolved/active projects (things started but not finished), and in some sense doing Morning Pages can help organize that problem by winnowing down my open projects to just the ones I have time to focus on today, but also they tend to create MORE open projects through that "path-clearing" effect discussed above. Also, sometimes it's helpful for the sake of maintaining reasonable stress levels to "forget" items on your to-do list and let them sink into the inactive/forgotten projects pile, and depending on how fastidious I am being about checking what I've written in previous Morning Pages, it can sometimes be difficult to forget those stalled items. So that's something to be careful about when using Morning Pages -- it can help untangle things, but also can leave you with an overwhelming number of open-and-unfinished projects staring you in the face, unless you do things to purposely counteract this effect.
Creativity
Even though my use of Morning Pages is very skewed toward prioritization and project management, the original use of Morning Pages was actually as a way to recover from writer's block/burnout i.e. when the creative spirit is exhausted or stuck. And I can see it -- I do think it tends to help with that. While there have been a couple of times when I tried to brainstorm ideas for my writing in Morning Pages and still ran into a wall, I think most of the time when I used my Morning Pages to debug an issue I was having with a fic, some helpful ideas came out even if my expectations of being able to think of something were pretty low going into my brainstorming session.
For example, I've used it to try to figure out what comes next in a story, or to try to brainstorm specific lines or dialogue that are needed for the story but which have to obey a lot of constraints. Just having some blank space to toss around some ideas which you may or may not use is usually pretty helpful for getting *some* ideas flowing, some of which turn out to be usable.
I think the temporary nature and "thinking aloud" way of writing down thoughts tends to be conducive toward writing and coming up with fresh ideas. I also find it helpful for just reconnecting with the main idea of the fic, like reminding myself why I even want to write it and whether it's actually important if I finish it or not; what is the draw of the fic for me. Which is probably generally a benefit of Morning Pages: checking in every so often to consider the question of why I do things.
Conclusion
So yeah, basically, I quite like doing Morning Pages, although they can be hard to fit in my schedule sometimes, and I'm honestly still not sure if they are overall worth it/helpful. They're not a cure-all -- for example, there are still hard/intimidating tasks I get avoidant about and even with Morning Pages and my awareness of my avoidant attitude toward those tasks, I am not sure I have been able to get any closer to tackling them.
Even though Morning Pages ARE time-consuming, I would ordinarily take some time in the morning anyway to make a to-do list for the day, and the way I do Morning Pages is basically to do that but in a more extra way, and sometimes they also come in handy to just vent out some feelings or frustrations or try to figure out where my stress is coming from. In that sense, I think they are kind of similar to a sort of mandatory two-hour meditation exercise at the beginning of the day. It's not always clear that that meditation time would be better spent doing something else, but it does help to focus me, and 90% of the time, my meditation time is spent on something productivity-focused (just a reflection of the kind of person I am -- I don't think Morning Pages has to be like this for someone else).
And already that mandatory reflection has helped me understand things about work/productivity, so I think those insights have been one good thing to come out of these Morning Pages at least (even if the insights might have been obvious to other people!).
I first heard about Morning Pages on the
getyourwordsout Discord server -- someone mentioned The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and wanted people's opinions on it as a writing advice book. A lot of people either didn't like it or said they gave up once it started getting a bit too religious/Christian/spiritual, but multiple people said they liked the Morning Pages technique and that was their main takeaway from the book. I was intrigued at this universal approval for Morning Pages, so I looked up more information online.I found two blog posts: the first one, VanillaPapers.net: What Are Morning Pages? (And 20 Easy Tips To Start) seemed a decent enough rundown on the technique and what you have to do at the minimum for it to be helpful that I felt I could start.
The second one was not helpful but I share it because it's funny. ChrisWinfield.com: Morning Pages - A Clearer Mind, Better Ideas & Less Anxiety -- this whole blog post is so opposite my aesthetic and is so vapid in a specifically bro-y business-major grindset optimizer sort of way that, if I hadn't gotten those extremely positive endorsements from the GYWO server, this alone would have been enough to make me think Morning Pages aren't worth it, lol. It's not a good blog post, but it is worth taking a look at just to boggle at how pure a type the author is.
But anyway, since I DID have those positive endorsements, I decided to get an 8.5x11 (well actually, A4 since we're in Europe)-sized notebook and try this out and see if it was helpful to me. I started this on October 17th, have currently written over 415 pages of these Morning Pages, and gone through 6 pens, having done this almost every day except when (1) I was feeling very sick with a cold, (2) I was not planning on working in any way (i.e. hanging out with family), or (3) I had decided that the cost of spending ~2 hours doing a Morning Pages session would not be worth it/cut too much into limited daytime work hours (so probably about 10-15 days skipped in the past six months). (Usually, I use my Morning Pages to plan out my day, but not only did I have difficulty when sick coming up with anything I wanted to do that day aside from "sleep," but just trying to find the concentration to write three pages of *anything* was too much. Not to mention, I slept through the morning so by the time I woke up, it was late in the afternoon and I didn't feel much like doing "morning" pages anymore.)
Wait, it's all priorities?
Anyway, at the beginning, I mostly used my Morning Pages in order to organize my brain. During that period, I was buried under a lot of work and also managing a lot of different deadlines simultaneously, both for my job but also for fandom things (I signed up for too many exchanges last year...), so when I started doing Morning Pages, the main thing I wanted to figure out by writing them is, like, why am I so busy right now? At what point in the future will I feel free enough to take on some responsibilities I dropped earlier this year? What do I absolutely *need* to accomplish in the next few months? What is important/high-priority and what is droppable? What can I do to change my processes so that I spend less time on drudgery and more time on things I actually enjoy?
At the beginning, I took a look at all the things I wanted to do in the next few weeks or next couple of months and thought that I would feel more at ease if I could arrange things so that I could "steal" work from future me. That way, future me would have less work to do and therefore be less stressed out. What quickly became apparent, though, is that this isn't how most of my work works. Except in certain limited situations, I don't have a finite amount of work I have to do after which I can just relax and not do anything. Rather, I have an infinite amount of work, and finishing things and getting them out of the way only results in things lower down on my list that I considered myself too busy to do moving up again into the spotlight.
This is true for both work and hobbies. For work, while it seems like it would be closest to "finite amount of work after which I don't have to do anything," in fact, how it tends to work is that while there *is* some finite work I absolutely have to do, it is way beyond my ability to tackle in 40 hours a week. At any point in time, I basically have a huge amount of tasks that would be "nice to do" staring me down, but which I often have to drop if I'm behind on the "absolutely essential" tasks. So being ahead on "absolutely essential" doesn't mean it's relaxation time -- it means I have enough breathing space to start to think about all the *other* tasks I could do, which are important for whatever reason (makes a class better designed, work toward a promotion, be more complete about actually responding to people who emailed me hoping for a response, etc. etc.) but which I usually end up dropping on the floor out of necessity.
Hobbies work much the same way -- basically, I have an infinite backlog of projects I would really "like to do" if I have time, and the moment I have spare time, every single thing I have ever wanted to do, which was patiently lying on the floor, eagerly stands up again, clamoring for my attention. The only reason I *don't* think about them is that I am currently fully preoccupied with some other project, usually one that is somewhat time-sensitive/has the trait that finishing it sooner rather than later actually makes a difference.
I basically had this realization that, aside from very well-defined tasks where there is a hard deadline and a finite amount of work I need to do in order to hit that deadline (where it CAN help for me to do more work today to save me a headache tomorrow), there isn't really any such thing as "stealing work from myself" to make me less busy. It's more like... I can either choose to not be busy or I can choose to get more done. I know it's kind of obvious, but I just had this ":O" reaction to realizing that ultimately, productivity is just about priorities and whether I think something is important to do or not (and why / what larger goal or life priority is it serving) and whether I would rather be less busy or get more done... Another way of saying this is that, if I choose to make myself more busy now, I don't actually make myself *less* busy later -- I just... make myself more busy now, with the advantage of getting more things done. Basically, after spending several Morning Pages trying to answer these questions of "when am I going to be free enough to do ____ (dropped projects, stale to-do list items, etc.)?" "why am I so busy?" etc., my realization was something like:
Or maybe:
Which I guess isn't a bad realization to have. It just made me realize I was waiting for something that will never come -- the mythic "calm period" where I don't have anything to do. This calm period will never happen unless I create it for myself by valuing doing nothing productive over doing something from my infinite to-do list.
There are several other things that came out of this realization:
First, since the only reward for more productivity is getting more things done, it is actually important for me to celebrate getting things done, because uh... there aren't that many rewards for it otherwise. So since having that realization, I will typically begin my Morning Pages by recognizing all the things I was able to get done the previous day and just give myself a pat on the back for actually bringing long projects to completion and that kind of thing.
Second, since the only reward for more productivity is getting more things done, I have found a partially effective strategy for managing my exchange problem (somewhat), which is that, to avoid overcommitting to exchanges, sometimes it can help to establish in advance a condition for signing up to an exchange, related to the places where the exchange would make me busier. For example, if it's an exchange I would likely draw art for, then I will say, "You have to finish up [these current art pieces] before the exchange sign-up period ends; otherwise, you're not allowed to sign up." This bargain has a kind of logic to it to my brain because, if I want to be busy(er) in the future, I need to be productive enough to square away my current projects/commitments. The reward for getting things done is getting more things done! However, I say "partially" and "somewhat" effective here because I have on occasion set these conditions for myself but then said, "But I really REALLY want to sign up for the thing 🥺" and then gave myself a pass even though I hadn't done the agreed-upon work! Which is probably bad and a sign that the system doesn't quite work at keeping my commitments at a reasonable level. But there does seem to be something promising here, by tying my ability to sign up for an exchange to making progress on a project I find to be thematically related.
Third, I need to work on purposely giving myself regular periods of rest, especially after periods of hard work. I haven't really quite figured this out yet, but I'll discuss what I've come up with so far below.
Need to time my pages
One important note about my experience doing Morning Pages that I feel like I should mention sooner rather than later is how long it takes me to do them. I try to do them in the morning, but sometimes they take so long that I end up needing to leave home before I've finished my morning pages, and then teach class, and attend meetings... and then basically by the time I finish them it's already 11 AM. Basically, I felt like I needed to time how long I spent on my Morning Pages to see if they were actually helping me be productive or they were cutting into my productivity, and to see when I was dragging with my Morning Pages and needed to speed it up.
At the beginning, timing my sessions wasn't so important because it was clear that Morning Pages (regardless of how long they took) were helping me a lot because they were clearing my mind at a time when I felt really frazzled and overwhelmed by all the things competing for my time and trying to juggle multiple big projects with staggered deadlines. However, later on, when my mind was a bit more organized, it was less clear if the Morning Pages were hurting or helping. Also, I switched to a style of doing Morning Pages where sometimes I was doing internet research as part of doing my Morning Pages (like, I needed to look something up for reference on dates, or I needed to find some old project notes I'd stashed somewhere in order to make progress on it and that kind of thing), and this made it so that sometimes my Morning Pages never ended and my work day never begun, which is not a good situation to be in.
Anyway, because my Morning Pages tend to get interrupted so often by travel, meetings, and teaching, in order to track how long it takes me to do them, I actually also need to keep pretty detailed track of start and end times, so I make a note of what time I start writing them, and then note the time whenever I have to temporarily "pause" and when I restart again. Then at the end, I report two things: the time in the day I finished the pages (to see how long it delays the start of other work) and the total time spent writing them, not counting interruptions.
So, having done this time-tracking, the typical Morning Page session takes me between 1.5 and 2 hours of writing time only (NOT counting interruptions -- that's entirely time spent focused on finishing my Morning Pages!). Depending on how many morning events I have, this means that I often finish my Morning Pages at 10:30, 11, noon, etc. I rarely finish them before 9:30 or so due to my schedule. My record for how long it took me to finish writing Morning Pages, when I wasn't sick and was writing them at whatever opportunity I had, was 3:15 PM!
So in short, these do take quite a while, so much that I think they can affect my productivity just because there are ~2 hours less in the day for me to do actual work. Also, because of my schedule and the type of work I do, sometimes it actually does make a difference whether I read/reply to/send off an email at 9 or 9:30 AM vs. in the afternoon, and so finishing up Morning Pages too late can have negative impacts on my work. In some cases, I needed to rearrange my schedule to start my day early enough so that I can get my Morning Pages in before around 9 or 9:30, and some days I do a "Mini Pages" instead where I just write enough down to come up with a clear to-do list for the day and then stop, rather than go for the full three pages.
I think Morning Pages are overall worth it, at least when I need some time to make plans / set priorities on a longer timescale or just a bigger scale in general (e.g. is what I'm doing day-to-day actually a good use of my time and worth the effort I'm putting into it?) or if I otherwise need a bit of quiet time to organize my thoughts or feelings. Despite taking up time, they do tend to help me get more work done, because if I do them right, I tend to be excited and energized and focused on specific work, so they act as a kind of productivity multiplier throughout the rest of the day. However, because they themselves eat quite a large part of my work time, I might choose to cut them short or to use them to help me get started on a difficult piece of work that has been stalled for a while. It's a bit hard to tell if these are overall helpful, though, since I can't exactly compare my level of productivity over this period with an alternative universe where I didn't do Morning Pages...
My Morning Pages template
After a period where my Morning Pages fluctuated a lot and were just kind of mini-essays (split over multiple days) on whatever I happened to be thinking about at the moment, they've kind of settled into a pattern. Something like this:
0. I might start with just noting my current mood or physical state, especially if I woke up in a weird mood or am ruminating on something. If I had a dream, I might write down a very short version of it (if I want to write a longer account, I'll write it up somewhere more permanent).
1. Otherwise, I usually write down a summary of what I did/accomplished yesterday and how I feel about it (going along with what I said above about how the only reward I get for doing things is having gotten them done -- this is my reward for productivity). As I do this, I usually try to explain what went wrong or right. Like, if I didn't get as much accomplished as I thought, I try to figure out why or give myself reassurance why this is okay and understandable (lot of unexpected work or distractions coming in, spent a lot of time fighting [urgent fire], task took longer than I estimated, etc.).
2. I then talk about what I have to get done or what I would like to get done today/this week(end)/in the near future and why. This is the prioritizing part of my Morning Pages. I usually make one list for work activities and one list for recreational/break activities (I usually work with a 20/10 Pomodoro, which is probably a bit too skewed toward break activities (Pomodoro is typically 25/5), but that's the split my brain currently finds sustainable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Break activities usually consist of fannish leisure stuff that's fairly straightforward to complete and check off -- for example, community maintenance, link or social media reading, comment replies, and so on. In addition to trying to figure out what is important to me, I might also think about what is stressing me out the most / what I would feel best about if I got it done.
3. Based on that prioritizing, I will write up a couple of to-do lists for work and break, starring which ones are important/what I aim to complete that day.
4. Afterwards, I also write what I want to do during the evening as relaxation if I finish all the essential things on my list. I didn't do this at first, but then I noticed that I would often go into "staring into space" mode in the evening, or I would bounce around multiple activities in a kind of aimless, unfocused manner and get nothing done, unless I listed a couple of activities I wanted to focus on. Because relaxation is a bit less important than making progress at work, I don't mind if I change my plans later, but I like having some suggestions for my evening self at least.
5. If I still have space afterward (usually there's maybe 0.5 to 1.5 pages left), I dedicate it to working out something I'm thinking about or working on at the moment. Something I have found from my Morning Pages is that they're very good for brainstorming or analyzing or just generally doing something that helps get me unstuck on some difficult or challenging task or trying to figure out why something is giving me trouble, so that is usually what I do, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that.
I have no idea if this is how other people would want to use their Morning Pages. I guess one thing that is nice about them is that they ARE pretty flexible, so you can change their format to suit how your brain tends to work and also how you are feeling or what kind of support you need on a particular day. I've definitely had days where I broke from this general template entirely and just wrote a rant about what is stressing me out, or drafted a response to Someone Wrong on the Internet or whatever. Also, sometimes I have to remind myself that I can do planning and brainstorming *outside* my Morning Pages if I want to. Right now, Morning Pages has *really* skewed my work hours toward planning activities, but sometimes there is something I need to think about or plan urgently or in a way that Morning Pages isn't really geared for, and so I have to remind myself it's OK to still do that elsewhere, on top of all the time I spent drafting my Morning Pages.
The following sections are just some random observations I've had about Morning Pages.
"Path-clearing" effect
As mentioned, I've noticed writing Morning Pages tends to be super effective at figuring out obstacles I'm running up against and also planning. So one thing I've noticed about my Morning Pages is that they have this "path-clearing" effect, where they make it clear what I have to do... but then I have a bunch of work to actually do. For example, they're super effective at debugging fic and making it clear what edits I need to implement in order to fix something wrong with a fic, but then I actually have to do the detailed line-by-line edits, which Morning Pages isn't really good for? Or another example, Morning Pages are good at coming up with a bulletpoint outline for everything I want to include in a post or project I am working on, but then I actually need to draft out the full thing, which I can partially use Morning Pages but only in bite-sized pieces. Or another example would be that it's good for breaking a Big Complicated Task into doable steps / a strategy. But usually that means I still have to actually *do* the dozens of hours of work it clears the path to/creates. So one thing that tends to happen with Morning Pages is that I end up with lots of open/dangling projects, where I've done quite a bit of prep work and have a clear list of next steps, but I don't have enough time to actually execute the planned work and close up that active task.
(As an example, I planned out an outline for this post like over a month before I actually started drafting it, and it took that long just for me to clear my plate enough for me to actually work on it. Similarly, my fic editing plans have tended to dangle for months before I can actually get around to them.)
As a result, I try where possible to use Morning Pages to do actual work, when I have a lot of "open" projects on my plate. They're not always very good at doing actual work, but it's something I keep in mind so that I don't have so many unfinished projects open at the same time.
Project management techniques
Because I've been doing a lot more analysis of my processes through Morning Pages, I've been kind of getting a sense of general project management techniques to help me keep me on track for my deadlines, or to try to give myself motivating deadlines so that I spend a reasonable amount of time on the work I have to do and don't start overrunning my schedule and getting behind.
One thing that is important for analysis is time logging -- taking notes on how much time I spend on doing what. It's very hard to plan without having some kind of estimate of how many hours of work I still have ahead of me and how much time per day I can dedicate to a project. And in order to come up with even a ballpark estimate, usually some kind of time-tracking is required. But yeah, there is a bit of overhead involved with time tracking, so I usually only do this enough to collect a basic time estimate, or sometimes I will keep tracking if I think I am spending too much time on a task that really needs to be cut down/half-assed -- timing myself helps me keep in mind I shouldn't let my work just expand to fill whatever time I can give it, but that I need to keep moving briskly along and cut corners when needed.
Another thing that is helpful for not letting a task drag on too long is giving myself deadlines -- fake/self-imposed ones in this case. Even something random like "I want to finish this task by this Friday" has the effect of structuring/prioritizing my time during the week, which gives me concrete goals to work toward each day and makes it easier to fill my time when I'm juggling multiple projects. That said, priority is a double-edged sword where it does hone the mind, yes, but it also means that other tasks starve while your attention is extremely focused elsewhere, so I've also had the issue multiple times where having a deadline helped me get ONE thing done in a timely manner but at the cost of nothing else getting done until I hit the main task's deadline.
Another thing I've learned from doing these Morning Pages and experimenting with different lists is that giving myself small, bite-sized tasks (either main work tasks or break activities) that have a very clear, concrete endpoint after which they can be crossed off is very clutch. I find it very motivating to feel like I am closing up open tasks, and so having some very small tasks on my list that I can write down that can be finished in maybe 20 minutes or less helps give me a mood boost that bleeds out into the harder work tasks and makes it more likely those bigger work goals also get done. I really benefit from having these easily-close-uppable tasks; also, when it comes to break activities, if I have an activity that is exciting me at the moment, that is also very motivating, so it's a bit odd but my ability to get difficult work done is often a function of having arranged a good set of *break tasks* I can use during the day that would motivate me to work so that I can do the break, which I can accomplish, which gives me the energy boost I need to do more work. A lot of times I have stumbled with my main work because the break tasks were also onerous and challenging and just NOT at all a break! It's better to swap out an unfun slog of a break task with a simple stretch break (stretch breaks are a reasonably refreshing and easy break activity) to prevent that from happening.
Relaxation techniques
As mentioned above, one thing I realized is that there is no mythical "calm time" where I will feel on top of things and have a light workload and be able to relax more because my schedule is emptier, because I have infinite amounts of work that will always surface in order to fill whatever free time I have. Therefore, there is no break or relaxation periods other than what I give to myself on purpose.
And I am admittedly not great at giving myself relaxation time or having relaxing activities. During several of my early Morning Pages, I listed all the ways I like to relax, and looked at when they became less relaxing and how relaxing I felt about them in general. As you might guess, the things that are maximally relaxing are things that don't require much brainpower or concentration. Sleeping, watching TV, reading books, and talking to my partner are probably the most relaxing activities at one end, while art is in the middle (requires some concentration and can tire me out, but can be a bit rote/mindless), and writing is the leisure activity I do that tends to require the most effort.
For all of these things, though, I tend to make them more stressful by deadline-ifying them, either through external deadlines or by self-imposed deadlines/priorities. For example, for the past year, I've had a book club that means I have to push quite hard in order to finish reading my book on time, so something that would usually be quite relaxing (reading) becomes a bit stressful and something I need to make sure I'm on time to finish. Same thing with exchange deadlines and how they affect my art/fic work process. But at the same time, deadlines are helpful for me for setting priorities and structuring my time and making sure I am finishing up projects and so on.
So yeah, there aren't a lot of projects I have that don't have a deadline of some kind. Also, even some things that don't have deadlines have a mild social element (like replying to comments or getting caught up on fic or social media posts of friends and that kind of thing) that means that timely action is more desirable even if not strictly necessary. So yeah, there aren't a lot of activities I can do as relaxation that don't involve a deadline of some kind, so having stuff I want to do that is pretty mindless and doesn't have a deadline is pretty important for relaxing after periods of stress.
Aside from that, I don't really have good strategies for relaxing, other than having protected time dedicated to doing activities that don't have deadlines but are intrinsically fun (I try to fill my evenings with these kinds of activities, for example, as a contrast with work hours), or sometimes things that do have deadlines but which I'm itching to work on anyway, deadline aside.
More focus during the day
I've found that doing Morning Pages does help me maintain focus during the day, as long as I give myself a good set of goals (concrete, actually finishable, etc.). And I've also found that when I don't do Morning Pages, I get pretty stressed and anxious until I do them, although that might just be a function of having been extremely busy over the months I've been doing them (October through April).
I generally get stressed out when I have too many open/unresolved/active projects (things started but not finished), and in some sense doing Morning Pages can help organize that problem by winnowing down my open projects to just the ones I have time to focus on today, but also they tend to create MORE open projects through that "path-clearing" effect discussed above. Also, sometimes it's helpful for the sake of maintaining reasonable stress levels to "forget" items on your to-do list and let them sink into the inactive/forgotten projects pile, and depending on how fastidious I am being about checking what I've written in previous Morning Pages, it can sometimes be difficult to forget those stalled items. So that's something to be careful about when using Morning Pages -- it can help untangle things, but also can leave you with an overwhelming number of open-and-unfinished projects staring you in the face, unless you do things to purposely counteract this effect.
Creativity
Even though my use of Morning Pages is very skewed toward prioritization and project management, the original use of Morning Pages was actually as a way to recover from writer's block/burnout i.e. when the creative spirit is exhausted or stuck. And I can see it -- I do think it tends to help with that. While there have been a couple of times when I tried to brainstorm ideas for my writing in Morning Pages and still ran into a wall, I think most of the time when I used my Morning Pages to debug an issue I was having with a fic, some helpful ideas came out even if my expectations of being able to think of something were pretty low going into my brainstorming session.
For example, I've used it to try to figure out what comes next in a story, or to try to brainstorm specific lines or dialogue that are needed for the story but which have to obey a lot of constraints. Just having some blank space to toss around some ideas which you may or may not use is usually pretty helpful for getting *some* ideas flowing, some of which turn out to be usable.
I think the temporary nature and "thinking aloud" way of writing down thoughts tends to be conducive toward writing and coming up with fresh ideas. I also find it helpful for just reconnecting with the main idea of the fic, like reminding myself why I even want to write it and whether it's actually important if I finish it or not; what is the draw of the fic for me. Which is probably generally a benefit of Morning Pages: checking in every so often to consider the question of why I do things.
Conclusion
So yeah, basically, I quite like doing Morning Pages, although they can be hard to fit in my schedule sometimes, and I'm honestly still not sure if they are overall worth it/helpful. They're not a cure-all -- for example, there are still hard/intimidating tasks I get avoidant about and even with Morning Pages and my awareness of my avoidant attitude toward those tasks, I am not sure I have been able to get any closer to tackling them.
Even though Morning Pages ARE time-consuming, I would ordinarily take some time in the morning anyway to make a to-do list for the day, and the way I do Morning Pages is basically to do that but in a more extra way, and sometimes they also come in handy to just vent out some feelings or frustrations or try to figure out where my stress is coming from. In that sense, I think they are kind of similar to a sort of mandatory two-hour meditation exercise at the beginning of the day. It's not always clear that that meditation time would be better spent doing something else, but it does help to focus me, and 90% of the time, my meditation time is spent on something productivity-focused (just a reflection of the kind of person I am -- I don't think Morning Pages has to be like this for someone else).
And already that mandatory reflection has helped me understand things about work/productivity, so I think those insights have been one good thing to come out of these Morning Pages at least (even if the insights might have been obvious to other people!).
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Interesting idea! Thank you for sharing your experience, too, it was interesting to compare to my own and see what insights you've achieved through doing this (hadn't thought about how my own to-do tasks might be an infinite pile that won't some day get calmer, hmm).
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I was introduced to The Artist's Way in film school, so I read some of it in the early 2010s, including the bit about Morning Pages, since it's very close to the beginning of the book. I never finished it since it's technically a 12 week program where you're not supposed to read the next chapter until the appropriate week, and I've never found a multi-week program I've been able to stick to lol. It definitely has a strong religious/spiritual slant. I'm spiritual enough I was able to mostly work with it, but I can totally understand it being a big turn-off for others. In the book, the two things Julia Cameron emphasizes about Morning Pages are that they should be done immediately after waking up and in a swift stream of consciousness with no pauses or breaks. I now think those are also negotiable, but as someone who was always very preoccupied with doing things "the right way," I took those two stipulations to heart and held myself to them every time I tried to do Morning Pages. (I had a few false starts over the years until I was successful in creating the habit in 2019.)
The main deterrent I ran into is, as you noted, they take forever. I originally started in an 8.5x11 notebook and, like you, it took me around 1.5 to 2 hours to complete. Unlike you, I do not have the drive and patience to spend up to 2 hours of my morning on Morning Pages (especially since I'm the kind of person to roll out of bed at the last minute then rush to get to work), so every attempt fizzled out pretty quickly. (I was also a little annoyed that Julia Cameron seemed to not understand how long this might take other people. If I remember correctly, somewhere in there she says something to the effect of "This is a simple habit that will only require you to wake up 30 minutes earlier than you normally do!" And I was like... lolol wut???? Who's filling a full notebook page by hand in 10 minutes??? Like, I guess some people can, but I'm certainly not one of them!)
In 2019 I got a bee in my bonnet about trying Morning Pages again, but this time I made a few changes that helped me keep the habit. First, I switched to a 5.7x8 notebook. Smaller notebook = smaller pages = decreased writing time. Second, I didn't try to go for the full 3 pages right off the bat. At first I'd just make myself write for 10 minutes with no regard for how much of a page it covered. Then I moved up to writing 1 page, then 2, then 3. At my best and most efficient point, I was writing 3 full pages every day, no matter what, in around 45-50 minutes when I first woke up.
However, while I did some productivity planning, prioritizing, and creative brainstorming, I'd say about 85-90% of it was me going on and on about my feelings lol. I wasn't in therapy at the time, and Morning Pages mostly turned into a little therapy session with myself every morning. After a while, the habit became an important and integral part of my routine that I swore by. For a long time they were a great way for me to do some deep daily introspection and regulate my emotions, and I found them extraordinarily helpful. (This is a weird observation that I want to preface by saying that I'm really not a big astrology person, but my partner and her close circle of friends are big into astrology, so I learn a lot second hand, and one thing I kept thinking while reading your post is how I do Morning Pages like a Pisces and you do Morning Pages like a Virgo. I use them to extensively process my feelings and you use them to plan, plan, plan. XD)
Unfortunately, I ended up needing to quit doing them in the fall of 2020. 2020 was a rough year for me, and instead of being able to process my emotions through Morning Pages, they turned into me just stewing in my depression and anxiety day after day. It came to a point where I decided they were detrimental to my health, and I kind of gave them up in a fit of rage. 🫤 There have been many times where I considered going back to them, but to be honest my mental health has been touch and go for the last 5 years, so I'm just really scared to try again.
Anyway, this is a super long way of saying, if Morning Pages as you're currently doing them don't feel sustainable, definitely feel free to try to make adjustments like notebook size or time/pages you spend on them everyday. I think the optimal length of Morning Pages varies largely from individual to individual, so you might find bending the "immutable" rules actually benefit you.
Anywho, this was super interesting to read! I hope Morning Pages continue to be a beneficial addition to your life!
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I guess I didn't talk about it in much detail, but yeah, one part of why I can spend 2 hours a day on Morning Pages is that I have a very flexible work schedule where (aside from meetings/other events) it's rare that I HAVE to start working by a certain time or absolutely have to get certain work tasks done on a particular day. Otherwise, I definitely don't think it would be practical at all for me to do 2 hours of writing/planning in the mornings. And yeah, the "30 minutes stream of consciousness immediately after waking up while still in a half-awake state without breaks" aspect prescribed really never worked for me! I do try to just go with my gut and write about whatever I feel like I need to write about the most, but I just cannot write immediately after waking up, even when I keep a notebook and pen by my bed. I just don't wake up that quickly (like, waking up for me is always a 1-hour struggle of snoozing my alarm repeatedly) and I need to be pretty much fully UP before I can think of putting a pen to paper.
I'm not big about astology either but I do admit I fit the Virgo type to a ridiculous degree sometimes (and now also have to use this icon -- I love the icon you used too). XD I definitely agree with you about the Virgo vs. Pisces versions of Morning Pages and find it very amusing! It's also so interesting to me that Morning Pages were both good for your mental health and bad for your mental health at different times. I'm familiar with that experience of just suddenly ragequitting something that's just clearly not been working out for me for a while, and I understand you being a bit wary of going back to it again!
Anyway, thank you for sharing your experiences and advice -- really helpful!