The Ultimate Way to Sustain Morning Routines: I Built a Morning Routine Tracker with Claude Code

The treacherous territory of morning routines

"Morning routine"

A habit that every business professional idealizes, yet one that 99% of business professionals have likely had their dreams crushed by.

I am among that 99%, but I have been struggling to somehow join the miraculous 1%.

However, I have been crushed time and time again.

So, I decided to start a revolution. Up until now, I have tried to manage it solely through my own willpower. I decided to change that.

But I am not an engineer or anything of the sort. So, what to do?

The recently popular Claude code.

The magic sword, Claude code.

I am usually out of the loop when it comes to trends, but even I have noticed the arrival of the black ship known as Claude code.

If you are a business professional, some of you may have even had it introduced at your workplace recently.

Here, I will ask my rival, GPT-kun, what makes it different from the chat-based AIs we have had until now.

In short, Claude code actually does the work for you.
For example, it can take a presentation draft you started and bring it to completion, or implement an app you have been thinking about using.

So, I thought to myself:

Let's have Claude code build a morning routine tracker.

Morning routine motivation is the greatest enemy

There are many reasons why morning routines don't last, but for me personally, the heaviest one is motivation.

People often say it is important to build a system that doesn't rely on motivation, but
even after building that system, I still lack the motivation.

There are several ways to boost motivation, and
one of them is feeling the sense of continuity.

So, I used this as a foundation to proceed with the implementation of a morning activity tool using Claude code.
As a result, a quite excellent product was created.

Practical Application: Giving Commands to Claude code

When I threw a rough command at Claude code saying, "I want to build a tool to keep up with morning activities,"

it asked me about the necessary direction and information for implementation, so I answered them as asked.

Along the way, I also mixed in an instruction with maximum abstraction: "Make it look good as a professional designer." I wouldn't want a boss like this.

Even after the implementation was completed once, I irresponsibly threw in the following additional implementation requests one after another.

If it were a human engineer, they would be justified in starting to get angry by the second or third time.

・"Move today's morning activity button and calendar to the top. Also, make it so that I can keep adding what I want to do and tips for continuing. The buttons are also too big."
・"Make it possible to record what time I woke up."
・"Make it possible to select the time via a pull-down menu."
・"Make it so that when I hover the mouse over the calendar, I can see that day's wake-up time and notes."
・"Display the average wake-up time for days when morning activities were successful on weekdays, excluding weekends and holidays."
・"Make it possible to compare last month's performance with this month's performance at a glance."
・"Add achievement rate (%) and a graph of wake-up time trends."

Claude code is obedient. It proceeds without a single complaint.

In fact, even when I, the requester, added requests while feeling irritated, it followed them politely.

I'll introduce the completed morning activity tool to you sleepyheads.

With that said, here is the morning activity tracker that Claude code created for me.

Features of the Morning Activity Tracker

Here are the details of the specifically implemented features.

Today's Record

• One-tap achievement recording — Toggle that day's morning activity ON/OFF with the "Mark today's morning activity as achieved" button

• Wake-up time recording (optional) — Select via "Hour" + "Minute" pull-down menus (minutes in 5-minute increments)

• Today's note — Free entry for what you did, how you felt, etc.

Goals & Strategies (Motivation Management)

• What I want to do (Goals) — A list where you can add or delete any number of items using '+ Add'

• Strategies for consistency — Also a list that allows multiple entries

Achievement Summary (Inside Today's Card)

• 🔥 Current Streak — Current number of consecutive days achieved

• Longest streak / Total achievements / This month's achievements values

• Average weekday wake-up time — Average for days when morning routines were achieved, excluding weekends and holidays

📊 Performance Comparison (Last Month vs. This Month)

• Number of days morning routine achieved comparison

• Achievement rate (%) comparison (calculated based on elapsed days for this month)

• Average weekday wake-up time comparison

• Color-code good/bad results for each with difference badges (Improvement = Green / Decline = Red)

🌅 Wake-up Time Trend Graph

• Display wake-up times for the last 45 days in a line graph

• Higher means earlier wake-up (the line goes up when you improve)

• Hover over each point to display the date and time, e.g., '7/24 (Fri) 6:50 Wake-up'

• Distinguish achieved days with filled points and unachieved days with gray points

📅 Calendar

• Mark achievement dates on a monthly view (days with notes are marked with a dot)

• Color-code Sundays and holidays in red, and Saturdays in blue (automatically detects Japanese holidays)

• Click a date to edit achievements/wake-up times/notes for past days

• Hover over days with records to preview the content

The Benefits of Claude Code

Honestly, the world is overflowing with morning routine tools. But what is the benefit of building your own with Claude code?

- While there are highly polished tools created by others, they cannot address your own unique challenges.
- Even if you try to implement and build a solution yourself to address those challenges, you cannot do it without coding knowledge.

Claude code is a monstrous tool that solves these two problems.

“Even without coding knowledge, you can build it yourself and approach your own unique challenges.”

So, is the morning routine actually continuing?

This is the important part. No matter how much you build your own tools, it is meaningless if you don't use them effectively and actually do your morning routine.

I am not aiming for a hermit-like lifestyle of “waking up at 5 AM every day” in the first place.

Therefore, it is a bit questionable whether this fits the general definition of a morning routine, but
I have been able to maintain waking up 30 minutes earlier than I normally would at a pace of 2-3 times a week.

After all, by creating my own tool, I was able to incorporate elements that directly motivate me, and those have paid off.

That said, it is still only 2-3 times a week. I want to continue improving the tool by applying patches to my own weaknesses and feelings.