add a small mass over your wood stove to be warmer in the morning

100% agree.

We put a few extra fire bricks on and near our woodstove and it's more than doubled how well it heats the house.  A big kettle full of water helps.  We refill it each day and it has quite a bit of mass from the cast iron as well as water.

The other big help was to add those powerless fans to the top of the woodstove.  The woodstove came with an electric fan, but it never seemed to do much good.  We got some of those fans that work from heat and don't need power or batteries. The power went out for a very cold week and we found these heat activated fans alone were better at keeping the house warm than the electric one that came with the stove.