Quick summary: Writing three lines before checking your phone, covering what matters today, what will be hard, and what you will not control, gives you a say in the day before other people’s demands set its direction. The practice rests on implementation intentions, and a meta-analysis of 94 studies found that deciding in advance when and how to act makes people more likely to follow through. It is a five-minute habit with no streaks to break, so it suits anyone looking for a low-cost way to manage everyday stress and support their well-being, though it is a personal routine drawn from Stoic practice and not a clinical treatment.

The day often begins before you do. The phone lights up, and the demands arrive in whatever order they like: a message from overnight, the news, a calendar that is already filling. By the time you have had a thought of your own, the day has told you what kind of day it intends to be, and most mornings you spend the next few hours catching up.

Marcus Aurelius faced a version of this problem without the phone. In his Meditations he rehearsed the morning ahead, reminding himself that he would meet difficult people and that things would go wrong, so neither would surprise him. He was preparing to arrive at the day before the day arrived at him, which is a different thing from pessimism.

The 3 lines

I now use a shorter version of that rehearsal before I pick up my phone. It takes three lines on paper: what matters today, what will be hard, and what I will not control.

1. What matters today: This is a single item. The day will contain twenty things that feel important, and writing down the one that counts keeps it from being buried under the rest. If nothing else gets finished, that one thing did, and the day was not wasted.
2. What will be hard: Here you name the part you are already dreading, such as the difficult call or the conversation you have been putting off. Writing it down in the morning turns a vague worry into a specific event with a time attached, and a specific event is usually smaller than a vague worry. Psychologists call the next step an implementation intention, which means deciding in advance when and how you will act. A meta-analysis of 94 studies by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) found that a concrete if-then plan clearly improves the chances of following through, and later research has continued to support it. Writing “I will make the call at ten” gives you far more to work with than telling yourself you should make the call.
3. What I will not control: This line works as a release valve. The delayed train, someone else’s mood and whether a particular email gets answered all go here, and once they are written down they stop posing as your responsibilities. Epictetus opened his Enchiridion by saying that some things are up to us and some are not. That idea is as useful at seven in the morning as it is at midnight.

Why the pen matters

A good intention that stays in your head tends to disappear by the second email. A written one stays on the desk for the rest of the day, where you can see it. Motivation comes and goes with your mood, whereas a written record is still there when the mood has changed, and that is the reason I rely on the page.

Missing a day

The whole practice takes about five minutes, before the phone, and there are no more than three lines. I miss some mornings, and when I do the practice does not scold me. There is no streak to break, and tomorrow’s page is blank whether or not I used today’s. I built it that way on purpose, because a habit that punishes a missed day tends to be abandoned during the first bad week, and the bad weeks are when it helps most.

I am not a therapist. I am a writer who spent a year testing whether an old Stoic habit could hold up against a modern schedule, and it held up against mine. Three lines make a cheap experiment, and the day is going to start whether or not you have written anything down.

Theo Huxley writes as the author of “The Emperor’s Journal”, a guided journal that pairs a short Stoic reading with one writing prompt. He publishes the Stoic Sayings.