Congratulations. Your morning routine is ready to go in your calendar, so you can start practicing it from tomorrow!
In this lesson, we will talk about different ways to make sure that you plan time to practice your morning routine every day.
The first thing to do is writing down everything that you _need _to do in the mornings, no matter how small. This could be things like preparing lunch to take to work with you, having a shower, brushing your teeth. Even if it only takes a few minutes, we want to ensure that you have considered everything so that you have time for it all.
Secondly, you will consider how much time you have in the mornings. You can reflect on whether you want to wake up earlier to add some new habits to your routine or just add things within the time you already have.
Don't underestimate the impact that half an hour of focus in the morning, or even less, can have in your day. Whatever time you have available is okay.
My morning routine, including both things I need to do and the habits I created to make me more productive, takes 1h20. But there's no right answer for this, everyone is different so consider what is reasonable for you.
Then you will take the list of little habits from the previous lesson and include those alongside the things you already do. So after you brush your teeth, maybe you will introduce a gratitude practice, or after breakfast, you will spend 15min learning a new skill.
You can also think about frequency. Habits are stronger if you do them everyday, but it's okay to change the frequency of some habits if it doesn't make sense to do them every day. For example, if you want to take yoga classes as part of your morning routine, maybe these are only available at your local gym 3 times per week, and that is perfectly fine.
So you could end up with different routines for weekends and weekdays, habits that you practice every other day, and things that you do everyday. The frequency of each habit should be what makes sense to you.
Take a few minutes to think about how your new habits can fit alongside the things you already do.
Maybe not all ideas you came up with will end up in your morning routine. That's okay, you can keep these for future reference for when you want to change things around.
When you are happy with what you've got, it's time to add your new morning routine to your calendar. We want to make sure that you're scheduling it in just like you schedule anything else in your life - so that it becomes part of what you do everyday.
There are many different ways to add this to your calendar, and I'll share just a few:
- Some people like to set phone reminders that go off at certain times, so you get a little nudge whenever it's time to do one of the activities in your morning routine.
- There are also lots of different calendar apps where you can add new appointments and see your morning routine alongside the other tasks in your day, and you can personalise it with different colours and styles.
- You can write it down in your diary, if you prefer to keep a physical record of what you do everyday.
These are all useful ways to ensure you have time for your morning routine.
My tip is to use whatever method you already use for your appointments. That is already part of your routine, so it's one less change to make. But of course, feel free to try different methods if any of the ideas I shared sound interesting.
Once you have chosen your preferred method, you can add your morning routine to your calendar, which means that you can start practicing it from tomorrow!
Here's your task: take some time to schedule your morning routine following whatever method you've chosen. Change things around a bit until you are inspired by what you've got.
We have just one final step to complete your morning routine. After all this work, I want to make sure that you keep motivated and that you can see your progress.
In the next lesson, we are going to talk about how you can keep track.
