Coffee, no phone, five minutes on the step before anyone else is up. It's become the one part of the morning I actually protect, even on days when everything after it goes sideways.
It started almost by accident — the coffee machine takes about four minutes, and I got into the habit of stepping outside while it finished rather than standing over it scrolling something on my phone. Somewhere in the last year that gap turned from a byproduct of waiting into the actual point of the morning.
It's not a routine so much as a refusal to let the day start before I've had a minute to myself, uninterrupted by a notification or a request from anyone.
I don't do anything with the five minutes. That's most of why it works — there's no journal, no meditation app, no productivity angle to it at all. Just sitting somewhere quiet with a hot drink before the house wakes up and the day's actual demands start arriving.
Small thing. Worth writing down anyway, mostly as a reminder to myself for the mornings when it's tempting to skip it because there's "too much to do" — those are usually exactly the mornings it matters most.