This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Since then, Five-Minute Fridays have largely revolved around daily habits and that theme continues today. Indeed, having covered most of my morning habits already, namely:

• Starting the day with a glass of water

• Making my bed

• Carrying out alternate-nostril breathing

• Meditating

We’ve now reached my final morning habit, which is to compose something called morning pages.

I learned about the concept of morning pages from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. It may seem hard to believe now that I’m releasing two podcast episodes and a YouTube tutorial every single week, but five years ago I had staggeringly little creative capacity. I excelled at evaluating other peoples’ ideas and I could execute on ideas very well once they were passed to me, but I self-diagnosed that if I was going to flourish as a data scientist and entrepreneur, I’d need to hone my creativity.