Morning routine

 All of us have some sort of morning routine that we enjoy and when it doesn’t go the way we want it to go it seems to make the rest of the day a little harder. For those of us that work from home one thing we must remember is to not let work get into the morning routine until a specific time.

Something that I had noticed in my own morning routine was I was letting all these other things start to invade my quiet writing time. For quite a long time I would get to my computer before breakfast with a cup of tea and I would write for about an hour without thinking about all the other things that I needed to do. Having breakfast was when the signal for the rest of the things to start to be added into the schedule. This was great because I am someone that can sit and write each day and it could be blogs or just journal notes but at least I was writing.

Over the last few months, I have started to notice that my writing time or quiet time in the morning was getting a lot shorter and it wasn’t the time was less, it was I was allowing other things to enter this time and overtake my quiet writing time. Being able to realize what is happening is important because than is when you can make the necessary changes to get that time back and get your routine back. It doesn’t matter why I allowed all these things to break my morning routine, what is important is that I can start to get that quiet time back.

Here are some things that took over my quiet time:

• Social media – checking both Facebook and Instagram
• Emails – both personal and professional
• Work items – I just allowed them to happen earlier in the day instead of after breakfast.

Yes, it is nice to check social media to see what is happening, but it doesn’t have to be first thing in the morning. It can wait a little bit so that I can enjoy my personal time. Checking emails especially work ones that can wait until after breakfast. I do have specific email accounts to notify me when an email comes in so if my smartphone let’s me know I got that type of email I will quickly check but if it can wait it is going to wait. Now, the work items, this was something that I shouldn’t have allowed at all unless there as an emergency or the rest of the day was already full booked for work (conference, etc).

Having a morning routine no matter what it is like we all need to do what helps make the rest of the day work a little easier.  I know that if I was going into an office the work items wouldn’t get started until I arrived so why I am allowing them to intrude on my early morning quiet time. Being able to realize when things aren’t working is important and changing things back to what was working is also good. The simple process of not opening email accounts or social media accounts during the quiet time does help. It gives me the focus that I need to be able to get writing done before the rest of the world wants some of my time. I have started to take my quiet morning time back and I have already seen that the writing is starting to come back as well.