25 Mar Developing a Morning Routine to Win Over This Quarantine

(Please note that this is a draft from my book – How To Live Your Best Life)

The first lesson when it comes to living your best life had to do with the way you start your day. We often hear that breakfast is the most important meal of the day because it does shape the way you’ll be for the rest of the day. What you do in the morning act the same way. It is important for you to create a morning routine that will put you in the right mindset! Successful people are known to have a morning routine and to help you build yours, I will share different morning routines in this blog post.

What is a morning routine?

A morning routine helps you start your day the right way. In fact, the first hour of your day sets the tone for the rest of your day. Your morning routine will help you feel ready for the rest of the day and also, will put you in the right mindset to be productive, proactive and efficient for the rest of your day.

How to build yours?

A morning routine differs from individuals. Essentially, you want your morning routine to be easy to replicate every day and to put you in a great mental mood and have you feel your best when you are done. At the end of your morning routine, you must feel in the right mindset.

The morning routine shapes the way you will tackle your day. For a long period in my life, I wanted to enjoy every single second in my bed. In fact, when I had to get out of the house at 9:00 AM, I would wake up at 8:50 AM. In 10 minutes, I would get up, take a quick shower, brush my teeth and get ready and leave by 9:05AM. Not bad eh? Unfortunately, the comfort of my bed couldn’t prevent the fact that my morning routine was rushed, not perfect and that I would leave late.

Few Morning Habits That I Embrace

Wake up Early

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” – Ben Franklin

The first rule of creating a morning routine is that it has to be during the morning. (Duh!) However, many individuals underestimate the power of waking up early because of how hard it is to wake up sometimes. It is primordial to have a good night’s sleep and it is as much important as food and water. Without sleep, you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly. In order to wake up early, you have to optimize your sleep.

Do not underestimate your sleep.

This is the base of your morning routine because it allows you to have enough time to do the different things that you’d like in the morning. To be more efficient, wake up an hour before the time you usually wake up. This way, you will have enough time to do your routine day after day.

Waking up early helps you to get more done.  During the morning, there are fewer distractions so you can achieve more.

Waking up earlier is not an easy habit to start doing and here are different tips and tricks to help you with it.

1- Get Up. The hardest thing to do in the morning is getting up but from there everything gets easier. In fact, by getting up, there’s almost no chance that you will fall back on your bed. However, it takes a lot of self-control to get up instead of pressing on the snooze button.

2- Get Multiple Alarm. Most of us use our cellphone to wake us up and we have on the best or on the night table next to our bed. This makes it easy to snooze and sometimes, you might snooze unconsciously. Now, if you put your alarm away from the bed, you have no choice to get up and stop it.

3- Do it Gradually. If you are used to waking up at 8:00am and you want to now wake up at 6:00AM, it will be tough to suddenly change it. Do it gradually. Start with 7:45AM for 3-4 days, then 7:30AM and so on; your body will get used to wake up earlier and earlier.

In addition, a study done by Biologist Christoph Randler demonstrates that the number of hours that you sleep doesn’t impact the productivity that you may have the next day. Instead, the biggest factor is the time that you wake up.

Small Wins To Create Momentum

Every morning, I like to start my day with small wins. These wins are essentials because I feel productive as soon as I start my day and it creates momentum for my day. My small wins are: getting up, making my bed, take a shower and brush my teeth. After 15 minutes, I feel fresh and ready to tackle the day. I start every day the same way.

Here are other small wins that can be done in the morning:

Working Out – Either a 10 min joggings, Push-Ups, Read 10 pages of a book, write in your journal and more. These are different alternatives for you to start the day with small wins that will get your mindset ready for more wins during the day.

In Chapter 3, I will go over small wins to help you live your best life. As you will notice, the different principles of how to live your best day intertwine with each other.

Your day’s schedule

I personally like to start my day with taking a look at my day’s schedule. It is good way to process the day’s event and put me in the right mindset for my meetings, my tasks and my energy. I have a productivity planner that helps me put into perspective my main task of the day. It helps me separate my tasks in 3 ways: The only task that I can accomplish today that will make my day, the secondary tasks that I want to accomplish that day (that I should tackle only if I finished the main task) and finally the last tasks that could be done today once the main and the secondary tasks are done.

There are other ways to tackle your day’s schedule such as writing in an agenda or to prioritize the main task in your day.

Personally, I used to struggle with having my day’s plan before I start the day. However, since I started to note down the way my day was about to go and tracking the time it would take me to do certain meetings and to work on projects, I was able to look back at the data and optimize my day. There was a point where I used to have 4-5 meetings a day. At that moment, I was building my name and doing business development like no other. Also, I would go to 3-4 events a week! It sounded like the perfect formula for me but unfortunately, I was not productive on the back end. My office and paperwork would be neglected. Keeping that in mind, I worked on a schedule that would allow me to continuously network but giving me some time off that to work on admin and office work. Waking up in the morning knowing exactly what is the plan of the day without worrying about not completing some tasks is the best.

That being said, preparing yourself the day before is a great solution for you to make your morning decision-less. If your goal is to work out in the morning, sleep in your work out clothes so you are ready to go as soon as you wake up. Preparing your lunch the day before makes your morning run smoother.

(More in the book, how to live your best life!)