A Stoic daily routine, from morning to night

The routine at a glance

All three versions keep the same three moments and change only how long you spend on them. Start with the shortest one you will actually do every day. You can lengthen it later, and on a bad week you can shorten it again.

During the day, the routine is the same in every version: when something goes wrong, let your first reaction wait. If the thing is still with you a few minutes later, sort it or work through a short exercise. That takes two to five minutes when you need it and isn’t counted in the table.

This page is the schedule. Why these three moments work together, and how they repeat, is the subject of how to practice Stoicism every day.

Morning: read, then look ahead

Every version starts the same way: read one passage, slowly. Today’s teaching gives you one for each date, with its source, a plain-English explanation and one practice. In the three-minute version that is the whole morning. Read it twice and choose the sentence you want to remember at eleven o’clock, when the day is at its busiest.

The ten-minute version adds the move Marcus Aurelius made at the start of one notebook entry. He looked at the day’s people before he met them:

This isn’t gloom. Marcus names the kinds of people he will meet before the day has started, and gives himself a reason not to take their behavior personally: they act this way “by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil” (Meditations 2.1). Your list can have names. The colleague who talks over you in the Monday meeting, the customer who calls twice before lunch, your teenager at breakfast. Next to the one most likely to get to you, write how you mean to treat them.

Twenty minutes leaves time to write this down and add one more line: for the thing that weighs most today, which part is up to you and which isn’t. The Stoic morning routine sets out the full morning method, with Marcus’s second morning entry and Epictetus on the first impressions of the day.

During the day: let it wait

Most of a Stoic day happens between the two quiet ends, when an email lands badly or a plan falls through at four o’clock. The routine gives this part no time slot, only a habit: a pause before you act on the first impression. Epictetus describes it for one kind of moment:

His subject is pleasure; today that might be the third drink, the purchase at midnight, one more episode. His advice is to “let the thing wait for you” (Enchiridion 34), and to use the delay to picture the hour afterward as well as the moment itself. He gives the same advice about being provoked in Enchiridion 20: if you can gain a little time before you react, you will master yourself more easily (in our words). The sharp reply you are itching to send falls under both.

The pause itself is short. Put the phone face down, finish the sentence you were writing, walk to the kettle. Then, if the thing is still with you:

• Sort it. Ask which parts are up to you (your reply, your effort, your judgment) and which aren’t (what they said, how it turns out). The dichotomy of control, the modern name for the division that opens the Enchiridion, has a two-minute exercise for exactly this.
• Or work through it. For anger, worry or something you can’t change, open an exercise from I Need Perspective. Each takes a few minutes and ends with one thing to do next.

On a three-minute day, the pause alone is the practice. On a longer day, sort at least the hardest moment, even if you only get to it on the train home.

Evening: five questions

The evening half comes from Seneca’s nightly review (On Anger 3.36). The Evening Examination puts it into five questions, the same ones the Stoic Practice app asks:

1. What did you do well today? Start with what went right. One thing is enough.
2. Where could you have responded better? One specific moment, not a verdict on yourself.
3. What did you allow to disturb you that was outside your control? The irritations and worries that weren’t yours to settle.
4. Which virtues did you practice? Wisdom, courage, justice or temperance. There is no score.
5. Tomorrow I will… One concrete thing, small enough to check tomorrow night.

In the three-minute version, answer only the fifth. In the ten-minute version, answer all five, a line each, in your head or on paper. In the twenty-minute version, write them down after rereading the morning page, so you can see where the day matched what you expected and where it didn’t. The Evening Examination page explains where the practice comes from, and you can do it there in your browser.

Once a week: a longer look

The sources describe a daily review, not a weekly one, so this step is our addition, and it is optional. Once a week, on a quiet morning or evening, spend fifteen minutes with the week’s answers to the fifth question.

• Read the resolutions together. Mark the ones you kept. Most weeks it will be fewer than you hoped, and that is useful to know.
• Find the moment that keeps coming back. The same meeting, the same person, the same hour of the evening. That is next week’s work.
• Choose one resolution for the whole week, and one passage to go with it.
• If most of the week slipped, pick a shorter version of the routine for next week, not a longer one.

If you keep a written journal, the weekly look takes care of itself, because the pages are already there. Stoic journaling has a morning page and an evening page that fit this routine.

Make it stick

A routine is easy to admire and easy to turn into one more thing to talk about. Marcus has a one-line correction for that:

The routine is a means. Its test is not whether you did the ten minutes but whether, when the client cancels at four, you act a little more like the person you meant to be that morning. Talk less about the routine, and “be such” (Meditations 10.16). If it starts to feel like a performance, with perfect records to keep up, cut it back to three minutes.

It also helps to attach each part to something you already do. Read the passage with the first coffee, keep the pause for the moment before you hit send, and answer the five questions when you plug in your phone at night. You will still miss days. Marcus wrote this note about being thrown off balance by circumstances, but it fits a broken habit just as well:

His answer is speed: “quickly return to thyself” (Meditations 6.11), and don’t stay out of tune longer than you have to. Applied to a routine, that means starting again at the next chance rather than making up for the gap with extra practice. If you missed the morning, do the evening. If you missed a week, answer tonight’s five questions and start again tomorrow. A missed day doesn’t cancel the ones before it. In Marcus’s account, mastery comes “by continually recurring to it,” not from never slipping.

Print the one-page Stoic day

Print this page or save it as a PDF from your browser’s print menu. There is no form and no email address to give, and the print layout leaves out the site’s menus and app panels. If you want only the sheet below, check which pages it falls on in the print preview and print just those, or copy it onto an index card and keep it in your notebook.

For the other exercises built from the Stoic texts, see all twelve practices. The routine on this page is also the daily loop of the Stoic Practice app.