And by “outside” I mean outside your home. It may be in a park, in nature, or it may be indoor, in a coffee shop – the idea is to separate your first meal of the day from the place you live, and also from the place you work.

Oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Welcome to “Monday Moving Forward”, a series of posts about how to get unstuck, how to start your circaseptan rhythm (your week, in simpler words) smoother, and, generally speaking, how to not to feel like you’re carrying the world on you shoulders every Monday morning, a sensation which I used to be quite familiar with. Hence, my quest to find ways to get rid of it.

I work from coffee shops since before it was cool, so having breakfast outside my home was a given. But having breakfast in a coffee shop also meant that I was having the first meal of the day in the place where I work – not ideal. So, every once in a while I went for breakfast outside, in nature. More often than not it was in a park, just a sandwich (or a tostada) and a double espresso, just enough to kickstart my day.

Having this little pause in the routine cleared my mind. It also gave me a little bit of perspective, because, while I was enjoying being outside, I was keeping the planning engine running in the background, so to speak, re-arranging events, re-planning tasks, re-scheduling meetings, in such a way that the day felt bearable again.

There’s also something about spending time in nature in the first part of the day, it kinda puts you in sync with other, not so obvious natural rhythms that we, as city dwellers, seem to have forgot.