The Operator's Guide to Morning Pages

It’s the first full week of January. The holidays are over. You’re probably trying to shift into execution mode—looking at quarterly priorities, scanning your calendar, feeling the pressure to produce.

But there might be a resistance. Not laziness exactly—more like fog. A difficulty getting traction that manifests as “I’ll just clear my inbox first” or “Let me review this one more time before I start.”

I’ve been recommending something to the leaders I coach that sounds almost too simple to be useful: twenty minutes of longhand writing, first thing in the morning.

Three pages. Stream of consciousness. No topic, no structure, no purpose beyond getting whatever’s in your head onto paper.

This practice comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, where she frames it as a tool for creative recovery. I’ve adapted it for a different context. I think of it as operational hygiene—a way to clear the cognitive channel before the actual work begins.

The River Metaphor

Here’s the mental model that makes this click for me: your capacity for strategic thinking, problem-solving, complex decision-making—think of it as a river. It doesn’t run dry. It gets blocked.

Over time, fear, perfectionism, low-grade anxiety, and the accumulated weight of everything you’re carrying build up like sediment on the riverbed. The channel narrows. Flow restricts. You sit down to do important work and find yourself fighting through resistance that has nothing to do with the work itself.

Morning pages is dredging. You’re putting the petty, anxious, boring, repetitive thoughts onto paper so they stop circulating in your working memory. You’re not solving anything. You’re clearing space so solving becomes possible.

The Smoke Alarm Problem

We all have an inner voice that evaluates our work, flags risks, identifies problems. In a business context, it’s easy to mistake this voice for good judgment. Often it isn’t.

Cameron describes the inner critic as a faulty smoke alarm—one that responds to burnt toast with the same urgency as a house fire. It doesn’t distinguish between a typo in an email and a genuine strategic threat. It just fires.

When you write morning pages, you externalize that voice. You put it on paper: “I’m worried this project will fail.” “I think they’re going to figure out I don’t know what I’m doing.” “What if Q1 is a disaster?”

Seen in ink on a page, these thoughts become observable rather than ambient. You can examine them as data instead of experiencing them as background noise. They lose some of their power.

Why Handwriting Matters

I’m insistent about this with clients, even when they push back: morning pages must be handwritten. No typing. The objection is always the same: “I type faster.” That’s precisely the problem.

Typing is optimized for output velocity. It allows you to stay ahead of your thoughts, which means you can gloss over them. You’re transcribing, not processing.

Handwriting is slower. The friction is the point. It forces you to sit with the thought long enough to actually metabolize it. There’s research on this—handwriting engages the reticular activating system differently than typing—but honestly, the felt experience is evidence enough. Try both and notice the difference.

The Practice

If you want to try this:

Wake up twenty minutes earlier than usual. Get a cheap notebook—nothing precious, nothing you’ll feel protective about. Write three pages of whatever comes. If nothing comes, write “I don’t know what to write” until something else surfaces.

This isn’t journaling. It’s not necessarily meant to produce insight. It’s meant to clear the channel. Don’t write it for an audience. Be vulnerable, be true to your thoughts and feelings, and most importantly, don’t worry about doing it the right way. The way you do it is the right way for you.

I’ve been doing this for a while now. The surprising thing isn’t the writing itself—it’s how different the first hour of real work feels afterward. There’s less friction. Less fog. The river flows a little easier.

Might be worth twenty minutes to find out if it works for you.