Money Saving Mom®

Welcome to the 7-Day Say Goodbye to Survival Mode Challenge. Each day this week, I’ll be blogging through the 7-Day Challenge. If you’ve not signed up yet, enter your name and email in the orange sign-up box at the top of the page here and you’ll get the daily emails and challenge in your inbox.

Create a Morning Routine

Do your days feel chaotic and disorganized? Do you feel like you’re always behind and always running around in circles?

You need a routine. It will calm your chaos and bring rhythm, order, and peace to your days.

A routine is a plan for the flow of your day. It can be very basic and bare bones or it can be more specific. However, it is not a regimented schedule with detailed time blocks for how you’re supposed to spend every minute of every day.

While a rigid schedule works well for some, we’ve found that a routine is much more doable for our family–especially since our children are younger and my husband and I both have our own businesses. No day is exactly the same, so the flexibility a routine provides is perfectly suited to allow for the interruptions that inevitably arise.

5 Steps to a Successful Morning Routine

The best way to start yourself out on the path to success with a routine is to create a morning routine. Here are 5 steps to creating a great morning routine:

1) Make a List

If you’re anything like me, you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas of things you’d love to do each morning. You’re just brainstorming right now, so your list can be as long as you’d like. In fact, I’d recommend that you take a half a day to mull over what you want to put on your list and to keep adding things as they come to mind.

2) Pare It Down

Once you have a nice long list made, sit down and really evaluate the items on there in light of what is going to make the biggest difference in your day and what are the most important things you need or want to accomplish each morning. You can organize the list in order of priority if that helps you to categorize things more clearly.

3) Pick the Top 3-5 Things

After you’ve cut your list down to the top 8-10 things you really hope to do each morning, cull it down even farther to the 3-5 most important things. {If you couldn’t come up with a long list, well, you’re going to make it a lot easier on yourself! And I wish I could be more like you and not have such high hopes and unrealistic ambitions! :)}

4) Put Your List in a Conspicuous Location

Write your list of 3-5 Morning Must-Do’s down (or make a fancy document on the computer if you’re all tech-y like that!) and then put this list in a very conspicuous location. You could even put it multiple locations — on your refrigerator, in your laundry room, on your bathroom mirror.

Do whatever it takes to be constantly reminded each morning to stay on task. It takes awhile for something to become a habit, so the more reminders, the better!

5) Stick With It For 3 Weeks

Commit to following through with your Morning Must-Do’s every single morning for the next three weeks. You might not always hit them all each morning and, unless you live in a cave and don’t have any electronics nor interact with other human beings, I’m positive you’re going to have some interruptions.

Don’t let these things throw you off track. Do the best you can do, stick with it, and keep plodding along.

At the end of three weeks, stop and re-evaluate what’s working and what’s not. Tweak your list or your morning plan, if need be (maybe wait to have your coffee until your morning list is done?!), and then keep the Morning Must-Do’s practice up.

For more ideas and suggestions, read my series on How to Develop a Routine That Works and my post on 3 Things to Do To Have a Better Morning.

Today’s Challenge

Create your ideal morning routine. If you don’t have any structure in your life right now, this one action will make a big difference in how you approach each day.

Take some time right now to write down the five things you need and want to do each morning. Things like exercise, read and pray, clean up the kitchen, wake and feed the kids breakfast, and prepare lunches or even dinner.

Think about how much time you will realistically need. Whatever those five things are, commit to getting up and doing them first thing tomorrow and then consistently for three weeks.

Today’s Project

1. Read Day 2 of the 7-Day Say Goodbye to Survival Mode Challenge (type in your name and email address in the orange box at the top of the page here if you haven’t signed up yet).

2. Share your morning routine in the comments. Ideally, this will be a list of 5 things (or less). Commit to sticking with this morning routine as best as is possible every morning for the next three weeks.

My Morning Routine

• Get up, read Bible/devotional, journal, pray
• Exercise, shower/dress (depending upon what time I get up/my schedule for the day, this sometimes gets bumped to after blogging work)
• Check e-mail, clean out e-mail inbox
• Writing/blogging work
• Breakfast

Your turn: What’s your morning routine? Share it in the comments!