Changing morning habits and how – prepare your day
“A goal without any plan is only a whish” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Dear blog readers,
We all know that mornings are probably the best time of the day to help increase productivity. I would like to share with you some ideas that I do every morning (or at least I try to) and that you might find useful to start your day in a good way.
It’s so important to take advantage of morning period. How often we tend to lose time in things that we don’t need at the moment? Or we get late unnecessarily? I believe if we go through morning in a relaxed but efficient way we can get a lot of results, it will influence the rest of our day for sure.
So the importance of morning we all realize. Now, the importance of changing habits.
Most of us have a type of routine that are not aware of. We have small habits that take our time and attention. Hopefully this posts will help you to identity your issues during the morning and how you can change them.
So, in my opinion every action we want to take on our lives always need a plan. If you see that you’re not being productive enough during your morning time you should consider to have an action plan to change habits.
During last summer I thought about how I could change my morning routine so I could start September in an efficient mode. Really wanted to become more a morning person and to change some habits that were not helping me at all.
So my action plan consisted to do a change in my morning habits step by step. Instead of trying to change everything at once I did it gradually. So the things I wanted to achieve were: practicing yoga every day after I wake up and also to wake up earlier.
How I managed to add these new things to my morning routine?
Waking up earlier was basically step by step. I decided to change it slowly. Each week I decided to wake up a bit before. So started to change the habit first to 8.30 o'clock, then 7.45, 7.30, 7.15. It's important to not do a rough change because probably it won't work, you’ll tend to feel the need to sleep more even if your alarm rings.
I know that sometimes getting up early is hard and we always delay the alarm clock 15 min so we can sleep more. But think that if you get up earlier and you have time to do things on your rhythm and don’t need to be stressed to do everything in a hurry, you'll only gain.
Then to manage to wake up earlier I had to also get to bed earlier. It would be a dream to manage to sleep only 5 hours a day but I know can't, I'm a very sleepy person. So, waking up earlier only works for me if I also go to bed earlier. So this has been also a challenge for me.
Morning exercise between 15 and 30 min. I practice yoga every time I go out of bed. If I have a hard time to wake up I do a "lazy practice", I do only simple exercises. Remember less is more. If you don't have time to go out of home and run just consider to do some stretching at your home. That would be enough for you to start the day in a good predisposition.
The yoga practice habit I also introduced slowly. I knew I wanted to do every day but again to change habits is harder if are done dramatically. Before writing this posts I looked at my planner. I noticed that the month of September it happened the way I'm telling you. First week of September I managed to practice only once, then second week, 3 times, then the other week only 2 times, and in end of October already 4 times per week and now beginning of November I managed to practice almost every single day.
Today I will present you a technique that I do in a daily basis -To plan my day mentally.
Probably you're used to write down which things you need to do during your day on your planner, calendar or in your computer. Yes, this is definitely in my opinion a very good step but I realized that I started to be more efficient when I was doing a very simple step before going to bed and after my exercise morning practice. And it's just as simple as sitting down like if you were meditating and you visualize the things you need to do. Visualize the tasks, the meetings, the events, the people you need to talk to, everything with details. Create your scenario, how you're expecting things to be like, visualize the sequence of the tasks. It might be a bit hard in the beginning because you need concentration but I think if you add these step into your morning you’ll gain a LOT!
After all the shower and breakfast, you're ready to go. I chose this song to inspire you during your morning. Hope you enjoy this post, let me know what you think and which habits you have that help you during your morning! :)
