Everyone has a morning routine, and if you don’t create one for yourself, then life will habitually force one upon you! It’s that simple.
Make a morning routine, or accept whatever comes your way!
What’s a routine? Simply something you regularly do, and if it becomes a normal process then it’s essentially a routine. Though there can be comfort in a routine, it must be evaluated and refreshed every so often.
For years, my morning routine was simple: get up early, shower, grab a coffee and hit the road to work, arrive ready to start (normally by 7 am). Whatever job I was doing had a routine of its own and so you followed it’s routine into the day.
Even earlier in life, when newspapers were an important event I started getting up a few minutes early to scan the headlines but saved their reading until the evening, often reading both morning papers where the news was now up to 24 hours old! Today, leave a paper lying in the drive and it’s a message to thieves you are not home!
Life Changes
So. Life hiccuped and no longer was I satisfied with my quick exit, so I made my morning to start even earlier. There were kids to care about, my bride’s equally busy routine, and school buses to wait for! Often without an alarm clock, I simply tell myself what time to awake and my internal clock handles it. Most of the time! I spend my morning with a routine that changes day by day to fill in the time I made available to myself.
Then, life changed, again. Relocation. A new church, new responsibilities, and a readjustment to what I thought I needed to do every morning. New travel times, new community, and a new way of looking at my 24-hour routine. The newspaper is no longer part of my morning – it can’t get here early enough. So. I started a new routine.
Here’s the kicker. Life changes force our morning routine to adjust to the needs of the present. You must allow for adjustments. Currently, my morning routine takes about 30 minutes, and since I work out of my home office there’s seldom a need to adjust life unless I decide to linger over one aspect or another.
Coffee (often a Bulletproof Coffee mixture), scan my social and email outlets, read or create a devotional, follow some scripture that seems appropriate, pray for the day and all it entails, and then scan the headlines.
If I’m going to have breakfast it squeezes into one of my morning tasks and is often a hard-boiled egg with salt and pepper.
I enjoy this routine and for the most part, it works whether I’m at home or on the road. I adjust it to my day and the needs of the morning, but I follow this routine 90% of the time.
Make Your Routine Count
I believe the most important thing you can do is find a routine that works for you. This allows your day to start more successfully. Fatigue, being rushed, missing the morning start (alarm clock), all are reasons we struggle with finding and following a standard routine. Why? Often, we get to bed late, we mull over the problems that make us cranky and difficult to be around, and we stress over everything from money, relationships, or a busy calendar. For some, the biggest issue is FOMO (Fear of Missing out)!
I have found that the morning routine works best when it starts the night before – get a good nights sleep! There is something about my subconscious mind that works through the issues faced yesterday and prepares me for greater success today.
"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." ~John Steinbeck Click To Tweet“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” ~John Steinbeck