I Tried an ENFJ Writing Routine

A few weeks ago, I was inspired by Bree Buonomo and Hudson McCarthy to try a writing routine based on my Myers-Briggs personality type. I have a lot of experience with the Myers-Briggs personality types from when I wrote my blog post, “How to Use Myers-Briggs Types to Create Characters,” but I never thought about applying the personality types to my own writing routine until I saw Bree’s YouTube video.

The idea is to find out your personality type, look up authors with the same personality type, and try to piece together a routine based on what other writers of the same personality type do. My personality type is the ENFJ, otherwise known as the Protagonist.

The Protagonist is a charismatic leader who inspires their listeners. They are not afraid to stand up and speak about what they believe in. Protagonists have a genuine interest in other people’s problems, which can lead to them getting too involved.

Bree is also a Protagonist, so I decided to follow her routine and see if I reacted to it the same way she did. All of the research for the routine was done by her, so if you haven’t watched her video of her trying out the ENFJ writing routine, I highly recommend watching it, then coming back to finish this post.

Now onto the routine.

ENFJ Writing Routine

1. Wake Up
2. Exercise
3. Get Ready for the Day/Gratitude
4. Eat Breakfast
5. Get Writing

Wake Up

It wasn’t hard for me to wake up. I did this routine on a Saturday, so rolling out of bed around 9:00 AM was allowed. I try not to rush my sleep too much on the weekends if I can help it. Especially when I get little during the week.

Exercise

I have a love/hate relationship with morning exercise. On one hand, it really helps me jump start my day when I workout in the morning. I have never regretted a morning workout as long as it is low impact. However, I loathe working out in the morning because I feel like I don’t do my best work. On this day, I decided to do a sunrise yoga. This way I could stretch my body for 15 minutes and relax before starting my writing. I really did enjoy doing the sunrise yoga as my morning exercise. I believe doing a low impact workout or stretching in the morning does improve my mood and prepares me for my day. 10/10, I would recommend doing this.

Get Ready for the Day/Gratitude

This part was also straight forward. Before doing anything else for the day, ENFJs need to get entirely ready. This is a bit different for me since I normally like to eat breakfast before getting ready, but I did it anyway. It wasn’t bad, but I did find myself getting munchy before being ready. Also while getting ready, I was supposed to do a gratitude practice in the shower. This gratitude practice requires thinking of five things you are grateful for before getting out of the shower. This wasn’t taxing by any means or a struggle. However, my mind wanders like crazy in the shower, so it was hard for me to focus on doing gratitude.

I prefer to do morning pages before writing over a gratitude practice. Morning pages allow me to get all the things out of my head, so I can focus on my writing. I prefer to do gratitude in the evening, so I can reflect on my day. I believe in the future I will stick to doing my morning pages and keep gratitude for the evening.

Eat Breakfast

According to Bree, ENFJs need to eat a breakfast that includes eggs, colorful veggies, and fruit. This is a typical breakfast for me, so it wasn’t hard to whip up. I love eating a protein-packed breakfast to begin my day, so this will continue to be in my routine.

Get Writing

For ENFJs, we are encouraged to write in sprints and take breaks often. We are also encouraged to participate in a group writing setting. For me, I love writing in a group because I’m an extrovert. However, with the pandemic, I haven’t been meeting with an in-person writing group. To fill this void, I’ve been attending writing live streams on YouTube as often as I can. The only downside is that I struggle to find streams on the weekend which is when I like to do a lot of writing.

Writing in sprints and taking breaks every 20 minutes or so really keeps me focused on my writing. I do my best writing in chunks of time rather than sitting down for an extended period of time. My brain enjoys focusing on one particular part at a time and then uses downtime to creatively think of what is coming next. This makes me happy that breaks were encouraged during this routine. I’ve heard of so many that make you meet a certain word count before taking a break, so this was refreshing.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I can say this writing routine worked almost perfectly for me. Exercising, getting ready complete, and writing with breaks worked well for a weekend writing routine. I hope to be able to incorporate this into my weekday one day. Even if you aren’t an ENFJ, I highly encourage you to try out this routine and see if it works for you! This was such a fun experiment and I look forward to doing more experiments like this in the future.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my Instagram, where I will be posting the vlog style video that goes with this post. Happy writing!