My Morning Routine when I’m NOT a Morning Person!

Full disclosure– I am absolutely NOT a morning person, LOL!  I have tried sooo many times to create this amazing morning routine where I'm super productive and get up at 5:00 am ready to greet the day… but I could just never make it happen.  If this is you, check out the video here or keep reading to find out what actually works for me!

I have watched so many videos and written down so many morning routine plans.  I thought if I wrote it down that I would actually do it.  Spoiler, that didn't happen.  No matter how hard I tried to accomplish big things in the mornings, I just couldn't do it, and I always felt defeated.

What I used to attempt for my morning routine:

• Asleep by 9 pm the night before.
• Up at 5 am doing the hardest stuff on my to-do list.
• Working out
• Getting ready including makeup and being fully dressed.
• Make my bed.

But here's the thing– it was absolute torture.  I move so slowly first thing in the morning.  If I shower first thing, my 15 minute shower turns into 30.  If I tried to work out, the entire experience was awful.  Normally if I work out later in the day, I might not like it at the beginning, but just a few minutes in I'm almost always enjoying it.  That literally never happened in the morning, LOL!  Morning workouts just aren't meant for me.

I also really don't do well with human interactions for about the first hour, LOL!  I'm still kind of a zombie, so while I might not be mean, no one is getting my best first thing in the morning!

I've just come to accept that I have limitations in the morning, and no amount of planning or goal setting will change my natural inclination to NOT be a morning person.  A detailed and energetic morning routine just does not make sense for me.

What I do instead:

• No alarm– I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night and stress about how much longer i have until my alarm goes off, so I don't set one,
• I'm in bed by 8-8:30 the night before to start settling down.  I'm usually asleep by 9-10 pm.  I wake up 6:00-7:30 or so, but I'm really flexible here.
• When I get up, I go straight downstairs to my office to work.  This might sound odd, but I do mostly repetitive tasks, and I have just enough brain power for this kind of work.

Here's what I do once I'm in my office:

• Do my morning routine checklist in Asana (my task management system for my business).  I put my morning routine here so that I can check off the tasks as I complete them.
• Gather stats from the day before and plug them into spreadsheets.
• Check the budget in YNAB.  I categorize all the expenses from the day before.  This only takes about a minute because I keep up with it every day.
• Check Asana for business tasks for the day.
• Check my Google calendar for appointments or meetings.
• Check Slack (our team messaging system) for anything I need to respond to from team members.  This is human interaction, LOL, but I can handle it by now since I've been up for 15-20 minutes!
• Pray about my workday– I used to think this had to be a super long devotional, but morning is just not the time for that in my case.  So I say a quick prayer over my workday or over anything that's particularly on my mind.  It helps my mindset and really puts me in a good place to start the rest of my day.

After all of this, I start to work on whatever project I'm most excited about.  Later in the day I'll have to do some of the harder things that are less exciting to me, but I let myself deal with those later once I have more energy and am more mentally alert.  It's easy for me to work on whatever excites me, so I'm much more efficient in the mornings instead of trying to drudge through something when I'm not fully with it yet.

I keep working until I'm ready for a break, which is usually about 30-60 minutes after I start.  On my first break I head back upstairs, shower, get dressed, do my makeup, etc., so I'm fully ready for my day.  I then eat breakfast and head back downstairs to my office to get back to work.

You might wondering how I do all this even though I have elementary-aged children.  The answer is that my husband takes care of the morning routine with the kids and then drives them to school.  I do the afternoon pickup routine.  He is MUCH better at mornings than I am.  He can cheerfully hop out of bed, grab a cup of coffee, and then he's good to go.  So I'm lucky that we complement each other so well here.

My best advice for creating a morning routine is to figure out what will actually WORK for you.  By all means, watch those morning routine videos and use them as inspiration for yourself.  But you have to make it your own.  What are you actually capable of in the morning?  Are you a morning person or definitely NOT, like me?  Is your routine realistic for your current situation?  What do you have to do in the morning, and what makes more sense to do later in the day?  There's no right or wrong answers here, and a routine works only if you'll actually do it, LOL!

Organization that actually sticks for busy, happy lives