GABY Morning Routine
Start every day with Gratitude, Exercise, Breakfast and You
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 85%
GABY is Kagan's deliberately simple morning routine — Gratitude, Exercise, Breakfast, You — designed to start the day strong so you do not feel behind. He argues most morning-routine books are 'more complicated than I want to consume', so GABY strips the practice to four sustainable moves. Gratitude is writing down one thing (often something funny or mundane like 'bathrooms'). Exercise is a fixed daily target such as 250 push-ups. Breakfast is a real, ideally healthy meal. 'You' is doing at least one thing purely for yourself. The mechanism: each element is small enough to be non-negotiable, and together they front-load the day with controllable wins that build momentum and self-worth before the world's demands arrive.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. Noah Kagan built GABY as a stripped-down alternative to complex morning-routine systems, running it every single morning and tracking it in the Strides app.
Core principles
- 01A strong start beats a perfect plan
- 02Control the controllable early in the day
- 03Simple beats complicated — you can actually sustain it
- 04Doing something for yourself first defeats the feeling of being behind
How to run it
- 1
Gratitude
Write down one thing you are grateful for. It can be small or funny — a stepdad, a piano, bathrooms.
Pro tip Use plain notes, not a complicated gratitude app.
- 2
Exercise
Do a fixed amount of movement each morning, such as a target number of push-ups.
Pro tip Pick a number you will hit every day, like 250 push-ups, using a free app to count.
- 3
Breakfast
Eat a real, ideally healthy breakfast to fuel the day.
- 4
You
Do one thing purely for yourself that makes the day feel fulfilled.
Pro tip Anchor it to the thing you know makes you glow, like making a video or a good conversation.
- 5
Track it daily
Log each element in a simple habit tracker so the routine sticks.
Pro tip Strides is a free app that works well for this.
Watch out Do not over-engineer the tracking or you will drop it.
In the wild
Each morning Kagan writes one gratitude in his notes (grateful for his stepdad one day, a piano the next), does 250 push-ups using a free push-up app, eats a healthy blueberry breakfast, and makes sure he does something for himself. He tracks the whole routine in the free Strides app so it stays consistent.
→ He reports starting his mornings and days great and not feeling behind.
Common mistakes
Making it too complicated
Elaborate routines and apps are hard to sustain; GABY works because each piece is trivially small.
Skipping the 'You' element
Dropping the personal-fulfilment step turns the routine into another chore and loses its motivational payoff.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone who wants a low-friction morning routine they can actually maintain.
Not ideal for
People who already have a dialled-in routine and need advanced optimisation.
From the transcript
“gaby to me is basically what i do every single morning ... it's basically gratitude exercise breakfast and you”
“gratitude every morning i write down one thing i'm grateful for”
From the episode
Bonus Episode: How To Build Career Momentum with Noah Kagan
Noah Kagan