Time Tidbits: Efficient Mornings (Guest Post)

10 Tips for More Efficient Mornings
Ideally, mornings should be the time of day you can gradually ease into your day by meditating and planning out what you need to do. In real life, mornings are pretty chaotic times, especially for families. Shuffling kids out of bed and into their clothes while setting out breakfast, backpacks and your own work stuff or to-do lists often means that you’re starting the day in a frantic, even irritable mood. If you’d like to turn your mornings into your most peaceful and efficient time of day, check out these 10 tips.
- Set up a master family calendar. By your back door or in your kitchen, set up a marker board or master family calendar that you can write on. Record field trips, meetings, extracurricular activities, school parties, work events and anything else that you need to remember but will most likely forget in the morning.
- Make your to-do list the night before. Make your to-do list when your mind is fresher and you can actually recall all of the things you need to do.
- Pack bags the night before. Make sure your kids have all of their homework and you have everything you need the night before to cut down on rushing around in the morning.
- Wake up 10 minutes earlier. That extra 10 minutes will allow you time to meditate and visualize how you’d like your day to go.
- Lay out clothes the night before. Another morning routine that you can do at night is to iron and lay out clothes for you and your family.
- Don’t argue. It’s easy to be grumpy and sour in the morning, but a bad attitude can ruin your whole day, so try to be polite until you get out of the house.
- Make your coffee before you get in the shower. Right before you jump in the shower, start your coffee so you don’t have to wait around until it’s ready.
- Make it easy for your kids to get their own breakfast. Set out cereal and put other breakfast items in easy-to-reach places so that kids don’t have to wait on you to get started.
- Set up a wake-up schedule. Not everyone needs to get up at the exact same time, especially if you have to share bathrooms. Assign each person a wake-up time, and rotate every couple of days so everyone has a chance to sleep in one day.
- Check messages during your commute. Unless you’re the one driving, the morning commute is an ideal time for you to catch up on e-mails and voice messages.


This post was contributed by Rose Jensen, who writes about the online degree programs. She welcomes your feedback at Rose.Jensen28@ yahoo.com