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

On Five-Minute Friday last week, I introduced the life-transforming concept of daily habit tracking and, if you‘re keen to try it for yourself, I provided an example spreadsheet to get you up and running quickly on your own daily habit tracking journey. If you check out the YouTube version of last week’s episode, you’ll also see that I screenshared the final part of the episode in order to provide a hands-on demonstration of how to configure my habit-tracking template for whatever habits you’d like to track.

Starting with today’s episode, I’ll be recurringly using Five-Minute Fridays to cover the daily habits I track that are most influential in my life. Perhaps they’ll provide food for thought for you or maybe you’ll even try adopting some of them into your own life.

We’re kicking things with one of my morning habits — habits that help me anchor myself for the day and get started on the right foot. My very first morning habit each day is starting the day with a glass of water. I think I first heard of this habit from James Clear’s email newsletter many years ago. It’s a good example of a relatively low-effort habit that can make a big difference to my day.

The reason why is that while we’re sleeping, we dehydrate. We obviously don’t drink water and sleep at the same time, but our body nevertheless continues to carry out water-consuming metabolic functions. As examples, we lose water through our skin as sweat, it escapes as moisture when we exhale, and our kidneys continue to use water to produce urine.

The resulting dehydration can give us a headache, cause us to feel lightheaded, or make us feel sleepy. Thus, as a result of overnight dehydration, it’s easy to wake up feeling like we’re in dire need of some relief. Many folks might assume they need their caffeine kick, which could very well be true, but you also could probably benefit from a tall glass of water. I leave such a full glass of water by my bedside each night before I go to bed so it’s there for me to chug first thing when I wake up in the morning.

One of the cool things about this morning glass of water ritual is that you can use it to form the first link in a chain with other habits you’d like to have each morning, such as brushing your teeth, getting your workout gear on, or settling straight into the most important task of the day.

This particular habit is such an important anchor in my day that, according to my habit-tracking spreadsheet, I started the day with a glass of water on all 365 days in 2021. If you’re using my template and are interested in adopting this habit, I have it configured as a binary habit — either you do it or you don’t — so you can set the min column in my spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. Again check out last week’s episode — #538 — particularly the video version on YouTube if you’d like a walkthrough of how to add habits to my habit-tracking template.

Given the benefits of staying hydrated, you may also want to consider tracking how much water you drink over the course of each day. I personally don’t do this because I drink a ton of water every day. I go through a giant bottle on my desk almost every hour that I’m working so I don’t require nudging to do it any more than I already do. There’s no point in wasting time tracking habits that you already know you ace.

All right, that’s it for today. Next Friday, I’ll be back with another one of my morning habits.