Most mornings, I make and drink two small mugfuls of black coffee.

After trying dozens of different coffee-prep approaches, I landed on hand-grinding beans and steeping them in an inverted Aeropress as my preferred method.

This routine of placing the beans in the grinder, turning the crank until they’re sufficiently pulverized, placing them in the Aeropress, heating up the water, steeping the coffee, and then filtering it into a mug is something I do twice a day, every day.

It’s one part of a larger bundle of routines that make up my mornings at the moment, and my enjoyment of it—of the coffee, but also the other routines connected to the making and consumption of said coffee—has increased since I started doing things this way.

Making coffee is a mundane, at times boring task. It fades into the background: you probably don’t tell someone about how you made coffee that morning if they ask about your day.

But doing something twice a day means you do it more than 700 times a year, and in that repetition is an opportunity to achieve higher-than-you-might-expect gains from small refinements.

Tiny yields on humble investments can provide outsized returns if those yields are realized frequently enough over time.

I try to remind myself of this when I catch myself performing a habit thoughtlessly rather than intentionally.

I ask myself why I do it this way rather than some other way, if I might glean more from each motion or from the larger sequence of steps if I were to change something.

Maybe I should do away with the habit entirely? Sometimes uprooting a habit is the best way to deal with it, as that frees up your time and energy (even if only tiny bits of both) to be spent on something more purposeful.

Experimentation is also an important component of this thought process.

I arrived at my current coffee-making routine by trying out a bunch of other options, and I still experiment on a semi-regular basis to see if an even better option (for who I am now and what I currently want out of my mornings) exists.

I try to think of habits and routines and rituals as being infinitely malleable, lest they harden into constraints that keep me from growing and discovering ever-better (or better for a future version of myself) options.

In between tweaks and iterations, though, I remind myself to enjoy the incredibly minor, barely noticeable, mundane to the point where it seems silly to even think about it, more-optimal-than-before routines that help shape my day.

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