Are you a night-owl or a morning riser? Let’s be honest, everyone of us is one or the other. We either stay up late at night and are hard to rise in the morning, or we are early to be and early to rise.

For most of my life, aside from my time in the military, I was a night-owl and hated mornings. I kept the snooze button handy and would have 5-6 alarms set so that I could snooze to the very last minute. What i continually faced was unplanned days and unfinished task/goal lists. At the beginning of 2020, I decided that I was going to make a change to be more intentional with my life. I studied some of who I consider the most successful people and I found that all of them had a few things in common, but the most common was that each of them had a regular morning routine.

What is a morning routine? A morning routine is essentially a set of actions you perform in the morning, usually before starting your day’s main activity like going to work or to school. The actions can be anything from drinking a glass of water or brushing your teeth to doing a two-hour workout or running around the block and more. I sat down and wrote out what I wanted to accomplish in my morning before I started work or before it was time to get everyone else in the house up for the day. What tasks, what goals were most important?.

Early on when I first started my morning routine, I was struggling to get up and get it going. What i discovered was that I was setting my self up for failure due to what I was doing each night before. I would stay up late each night. I was going to bed with my phone or ipad and browsing Facebook, Instagram or the internet. I was doing this until I was exhausted and falling asleep with my phone in my hand. Then when the alarm would go off at 5am, I would just continue to hit snooze. I knew that something had to change.

I quickly figured out that in order to have a successful morning routine, I need a nightly routine as well. Once I put a nightly routine in place, I was able to have a successful morning routine.

I will share in more details what my nightly and morning routines look like in a later post. But first, Do you have a morning routine? What does it look like? What have you found to be most helpful in staying on task with you morning routine?

Because People Matter,

Kris