Building an ideal ritual involves “morning routine” and you get the 5 a.m. club, cold plunges, journaling before sunrise and somebody explaining that how you spend your first hour determines your entire life.
Cup of Jo, the Brooklyn lifestyle site Joanna Goddard has run since 2007, does not really work that way. Which is why it is worth looking at what her mornings actually involve, because the answer is a useful corrective.
Joanna Goddard’s Kids Wake Her at 5:45 a.m. And She Hasn’t Used an Alarm Clock
In a 2017 interview she said she had not set an alarm in seven years. Her older son pads into the bedroom around 5:45 every morning, and that is the alarm.
This is not a productivity hack. It is what happens when you have small children, and the reason it belongs at the top of this article is that it describes most people’s mornings more honestly than any routine built around uninterrupted solitude at dawn.
Asked how she feels about mornings, she said she doesn’t love them or hate them. “They’re just there.”
She Turns on a TV Show For The Kids So She Can Close Her Eyes Again
That detail comes from the same interview and it is the most quietly radical thing in it.
The optimized version of that moment involves getting up, hydrating, and doing twenty minutes of something improving. The Cup of Jo version involves cartoons and going back to sleep for a bit.
She runs a site with roughly 5.5 million monthly page views and writes Substack’s top fashion and beauty newsletter alongside it. The morning is not where the achievement happens. The morning is how you get to the part where it happens.
Biking the Kids to School And Then Biking to Work Covers a Couple of Miles
Her commute was the exercise. Bike the boys to school, carry on to work, and the movement folds into something she had to do anyway rather than sitting on top of it as a separate discipline.
This is the part worth stealing outright. Routines that survive are the ones bolted to something already happening.
The Site’s Morning Content is Muffins, Kids and Small Domestic
Look at what Cup of Jo actually publishes rather than what a “morning ritual” article would predict. Warm muffins as a back-to-school weekday breakfast. Editors comparing skincare routines, where one of them admits it’s a miracle if she remembers to wash her face. Posts about what makes an ordinary Tuesday feel slightly festive.
Building Your Own Version Starts From Your Real constraints, Not An Ideal Schedule
Practically, if you want a morning that resembles this one rather than the optimization version:
- Start from what you’re actually working with. Kids, a commute, a partner on a different schedule, a shift that begins at seven. Design around those rather than treating them as obstacles to a better routine.
- Attach the new thing to an existing thing. Coffee already happens, so put the ten minutes of reading beside the coffee. The school run already happens, so let that carry the exercise.
- Pick two things, maximum. A morning with six components isn’t a ritual, it’s a schedule, and schedules collapse the first time somebody gets sick.
- Let some mornings be bad. The routines people keep are the ones that survive being skipped.
Fifteen Protected Minutes Does More for The Day Than a Five-Step Routine
If one idea transfers from all this, it’s that the start of the day is easier to defend than the middle of it.
Not for productivity. For mood. Whatever the day does to you later, it can’t reach back and ruin the fifteen minutes you had with coffee before anyone needed anything.
Some mornings that’s five minutes. Some mornings a kid arrives at 5:45 and it doesn’t happen at all, so you put on a show and close your eyes for a bit, which is also fine.
Skip The 5 a.m. Wake-Up
There’s a genre of morning content that treats your first hour as a test you can fail.
Cup of Jo has been publishing for nearly two decades without ever really doing that, and the mornings it describes are recognizably the mornings people have. Muffins, a bike ride, a kid in the doorway too early, and the day starting whether you’re ready or not.
