The last morning coffee hack you’ll ever need
Answer these two critical questions, and your perfect routine will build itself.
I thought I had it hacked.
For years, I had my morning coffee routine optimized around an automatic drip machine. A marvel of modern convenience, I supplied it with whole beans and set the timer before bed. The next morning, I woke to the smell and instant gratification of hot coffee.
Until the morning the machine broke.
Of course, I had the impulse to replace the coffee maker—stat—but I had started to suspect something was wrong with a culture that throws so much away. I decided to rethink my coffee routine.
I asked myself these two questions:
Why do I do this?
If I want to keep doing it, how long should it take?
That’s the hack. Those two simple questions.
Because here’s the truth—I had already been hacked. I had already chopped up my time to build a routine around the demands of bigger, better, faster, and more. My routines fed a machine that would never be full while leaving me empty and time-starved. The more I optimized myself in this direction, the more I relied on conveniences that stripped joy, ritual, and self-sufficiency from my day while adding more and more trash to the convenience-seeking world.
Answering the first question: Why do I do this?
Apply this question to any routine or habit, and you may be really surprised by the answer. For myself, I learned that an uncomfortable number of habits were built around meeting a need or want in as little time as possible so I could get back to work.
As Jia Tolentino writes about the Sweetgreen salad chain: “...the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize. I think about this every time I do something that feels particularly efficient and self-interested, like … eating lunch at a fast-casual chopped-salad chain, like Sweetgreen, which feels less like a place to eat and more like a refueling station.”
With coffee, I had to uncover whether my habit served any other purpose than optimizing my brain for speed and work. And. if not, was it worth continuing?
My answer was nuanced. Coffee does provide my brain a jolt. And, yes, drinking coffee is a way to optimize myself for work. But it’s a jolt I truly enjoy regardless of the amount and type of work on my plate for a day.
At its best, the morning cup offers a time to sit and touch base with myself, add ritual to my day, and add creative fuel that serves the work I choose to do as much as the work I have to do.
After thinking through the first question, I determined morning coffee was here to stay.
Answering the second question: How long should it take?
When we slow things down to the time they would take in their least harmful form, then we are forced to value the acts differently.
Have you hand-washed all of your clothes? With modern, energy-efficient washers, I don’t know if it’s more or less sustainable, but the act of trying it makes you reconsider the number and type of clothes you own.
When it comes to coffee, a morning coffee routine at its least harmful might look like a sustainably sourced coffee bean, ground at a shared resource, such as a coffee shop or local store with a grinder, and then made at home with reusable supplies to produce only the amount you will drink.
The surprising result of this experiment is just how little time it really takes, and the ritual it brings to my morning. Five minutes to boil water in a kettle. I usually take this time to brush my teeth, wash my face, and stretch. Another three to five minutes to pour the steaming water slowly over the grounds—a truly gratifying smell and process. In less than ten minutes, I’m sitting with my coffee.
Ten minutes. That’s all I was saving. That’s all the disposable machinery granted me. But what did it take away? In spending those ten minutes, I have reclaimed much more—placing far more value on my own time spent in ritual and on the environmental impact of rejecting false conveniences.
It turns out that I was not in search of a morning coffee hack. What I really wanted was to be unhacked, unhurried, and de-convenienced. Not “inconvenienced” which tries to convince me that I should not need to be bothered by rinsing out a coffee filter when I could simply toss it in the trash, but de-convenienced, a notion that reminds me to take more time on the routines that sustain me, because those ten minutes I added to my morning have given me back far more than convenience culture ever offered.