Are 'morning pages' useful?

I first heard about morning pages from a friend who'd got hold of a new book to unleash her creative side. That book turned out to be The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I know this because I came across that book myself in my local library a couple of years later and after checking with my friend found it to be the same

Julia advocates writing three pages of free flowing text every morning before you do anything else. This is to help tap into your creative energies whilst you're still presumably half asleep and not as inhibited by the constraints you put on yourself by your daily routines.

I tried this for one day - sorry Julia - and then never tried again. In my mind, I was equating the half an hour it was taking me to write the pages long hand, with the time I could have spent on my actual writing project. When you have two young children and a full time job, all time is precious and it's impossible for me to not look at time cost of any activity. Half an hour writing material I would have no further use for, just didn't make any sense.

But, I've recently come across 750words.com again. (I say again as I tried this site several years ago.) I had a go at writing 750 words in one session (750 words being about three pages worth) and was surprised at the results.

16 minutes is pretty fast isn't it! It's certainly not the massive drain on my time that I had assumed it to be. It's probably because I've developed into a much faster typer than I was a couple of years ago, and my typing is so much faster than my longhand writing.

Rather than consider this time lost, I used it as a warm-up exercise to working on my novel. Although, at first I didn't really notice much difference, after a few minutes, I was much more in the flow. Because I'd already started with some writing, it was much easier to pick up the work on my novel. I also felt much less pressure to hit my self-imposed word count of 1000 words a day on my novel as I'd already done a significant piece of writing on 750 Words. In the end, I wrote about 700 words on my novel as well, and that was mainly because I broke the cardinal rule of going back and editing what I'd just written, rather than ploughing through new material.

At the end of the evening, I was in a really positive mood.

So, I'm going to continue with 750 words for a few days and ignoring Julia's advice about doing it first thing in the morning, I'm going to use it as a warm-up exercise to working on my novel.

Have any of you tried this?