Waking up Early and Cultivating My Morning Routine

This article is part of my ‘write everyday for 31 days series’ and is article number 2. To read yesterday’s article click here.

If you work for yourself, you’ve likely experienced the following situation:

You have great dreams of working for yourself, giving yourself the freedom you’ve always dreamed of.

You picture yourself waking up at 5am, working smart not hard, to ensure you’ve finished your days work by 10am, giving you the rest of the day to do exactly what you want to do.

On paper it all sounds idyllic. But then…

You go to bed at midnight after binge watching a TV show and struggle to wake up at 5am.

You finally leave your bed at 10am and tell yourself it’s okay because you can just do 5 hours of from starting from 10, meaning you’ll still finish at 3pm. Ideal.

Only, you don’t quite make it out of bed. And when you do, you simply must finish all the chores first. Then you need to think about making yourself a healthy breakfast (lunch) because you can’t work on an empty stomach. But you don’t have the ingredients in for the food you want to make.

You read recently about the health benefits of some weird herbal remedies and decide today is the day you need to go and source those out.

So now it’s 4pm, you’ve just about managed to get dressed and leave the house, but you’re yet to start work.

So when you do finally get round to sitting (or standing) at your desk, you’ve received a further 1000 emails that you must reply to.

And the dreams of waking up at 5am, stress-free, working when the rest of the world is asleep? Dead.

I’ve been there, you’ve been there, we’ve all been there.

2018 is the year of ‘the morning’ and the morning routine

Note how I didn’t say ‘early morning’ and instead just “the morning”. The problem many find with super early mornings is that if you’re not used to it, or you’re not a morning person, forcing yourself to do something you don’t actually want to do is often counter intuitive.

I know it certainly is for me.

In an ideal world, i’d wake up at 5am everyday. But sometimes, life gets in the way and that just simply isn’t possible.

And so i’m going to stop punishing myself.

I’m going to commit to waking up.

That’s it.

All I have to do in the morning is wake up and follow my routine.

It doesn’t matter what time I wake up, I just have to stick to the routine.

My ideal morning routine

Now that i’m less focused on waking up at a set time, I can spend the time making sure my mornings are conducive to good work. Because at the end of the day, that’s all we ever want to do.

If you’re doing good work, does it really matter if you wake up at 5am or 11am?

When I think about my morning routine, I think about all the things I’d need to do or achieve to ensure my day starts off right.

For me, it involves waking up slowly, listening to music, taking my dog for a walk, having some sort of breakfast and looking over what I achieved yesterday and what I hope to achieve for today.

The majority of that involves starting my morning routine the night before.

I know, on a personal level, I prefer stress-free mornings, the fewer decisions I have to make, the easier my day becomes.

So, I promise myself to stick to the following routine:

1. Wake up and immediately make my bed. Making my bed in the morning means despite how badly my day could end up, I’ve achieved something (and there’s nothing quite like getting into a freshly made bed at the end of the day).
2. Wake my dog up, give him some fresh water and take him for a walk.
3. The dog walk is a good time to check through my social media because during that time i’m not doing anything else, nor is there anything else I should be doing.
4. Once the dog walk is over, it’s back home, a shower, put on the outfit I chose the night before and sit down at the desk.
5. From there, I’ll read over my notes from the night before and start working on the most important task first.

Mornings are what you make them. But don’t feel like you need to punish yourself for not having the ‘perfect morning’.

As long as your morning is conducive to good, quality work you’re proud of, you’re doing well.

What’s your morning routine? Do you have one? Leave a comment below.