This morning I got up at 5am, went for a lovely 30-min run, had breakfast, sat on my patio for a slow meditation, and then did my usual “Pick 6” habit to chose my vibes for the day.
What I’m doing in that early window is something I’ve come to think of as designing the day energetically – deciding, while it’s still quiet, what kind of day I want to inhabit, before anything else gets to decide it for me.
If I don’t consciously claim the opening stretch of my day, something else in the world will claim it for me. The news might fill it. The inbox might have a say. Someone else’s urgency could influence it. Headlines, emails, other people’s agendas – they’re all standing at the edge of the morning, happy to set the emotional tone before I’ve done it myself. And then the rest of the day can easily inherit that tone. I could spend the next several hours taking action in directions I never actually chose.
So the practice is simple: make the choice consciously first.
Pick six words to shape your day
Here’s the concrete version I’ve been applying since last year.
I keep a deck of index cards, each one with a vibe word on it – such as Delight, Flow, Savor, Ignite, Immerse, Explore, and 100+ more. Some of the words are practical, some are playful, and some are sensual. The deck has a lot of range, because so does my life. I made the first batch by hand – just words that name the different energies I might want to engage with. Each card’s core vibe is in the middle of the card, and the four corners hold related words that I associate with the core vibe. All are verbs because I like to think of vibes as ways to move energy, not as frozen snapshots.
Each morning I pick six of these cards and post them up on a dedicated board in my office, as shown in the photo. The tacks have magnets on top of them, so it’s easy to swap in new cards without poking holes in them.
That’s the whole ritual. I skim the deck, notice which words give me an intuitive nudge, and choose the half-dozen I want to set the tone of the day. This morning it was Integrate, Clear, Listen, Design, Build, Stabilize – which tells me today wants to be about grounding and consolidating what’s been surging lately, not launching anything new. Another morning I might be drawn to pick cards like Ignite, Energize, and Frolic, which gives the day a completely different shape. The cards don’t dictate my tasks. They name the feeling space I want the day to have.
This morning I infused this practice into a personal life navigation app I’ve been developing, so now I can just tap the cards I want. I took pics of the cards in sets of 25 (125 cards total) and had AI extract the words and build the digital versions, including assigning emojis to each. It took all of 15 minutes to add this feature to my app, thanks to AI handling the coding.
But the analog version works just as well, and there’s something nice about handling physical cards on a table. If you want to try this yourself, you don’t need anything but index cards and a pen (I used colored markers).
It’s a choice about energy, not output
I experience life as the movement of energy – currents I can either let run on default or deliberately shape. Early in the day is one of the highest-leverage times to shape this energy because whatever tone gets set early tends to propagate forward. A morning that starts in reactivity tends to stay reactive. A morning that starts with wonder and delight tends to influence the day very positively.
When I let someone or something else set the tone, I’m basically outsourcing the emotional design of my whole day to whatever happens to hit me hardest. I’d rather design it myself – not to control the day’s details, but to flow with a vibescape I actually chose.
And here’s the part that surprised me: designing the day is mostly about subtraction, not addition. It’s not just the vibe cards I choose that matter – it’s the ones I notice and don’t choose. In practice I often pick about 10-12 cards in my first pass, and the most interesting decisions are those final few that I release. These decisions help me tighten the focus of each day by calling out what I’m deliberately choosing not to infuse. This simple practice of consciously choosing my core energies for the day is more helpful than you might assume, especially in terms of focus.
Try it tomorrow
If any of this resonates, here’s a light version to try.
Tonight, write a dozen or so vibe words on index cards – whatever energies you’d actually want to feel in a day. Tomorrow morning, before you touch your phone, pick a few. Sit with them for a couple of minutes. Then let the day unfold from there.
You might be surprised how much a day will reshape itself around a tone you chose on purpose. I’ve seen on many occasions how these vibes can weave themselves into my day in surprising ways, even when I’m only loosely aware of them. It’s when I go to replace them the next day that I often reflect back on how they shaped that previous day.
I’m re-establishing some positive rhythms this month – more running, more creative engagement, more deliberate design of how my days actually flow – and this small practice has quietly become one of my favorites in the past year. It costs almost nothing. It’s a potent defense against distracting influences. And it lets me flow through each day as something I’m composing rather than something that’s merely happening to me.
The day is going to take a shape either way. Might as well be the one you chose.
