The idea is to establish a complete and aggressive schedule that lets you accomplish essential start-of-day tasks and puts you in a winning position for the rest of the day.
Part of this is taking care of basic needs. Nutrition, elimination, and basic hygiene are some elements that are necessary to a good start to your morning.
Another goal is to include some type of meditative and physical exercise to get yourself warmed up and energized.
Steps
1. List the essential tasks in your morning. Things you must do to feel healthy and good for the rest of the day.
2. What is your deadline? If you work away from home, at what time must you leave in order to be comfortably on time? Determine a comfortable estimated time of arrival at your workplace, train station, or other final destination for work that is controllable. Then, use experiment or your most trustworthy phone application to find the time that you must leave in order to meet that ETA. Take five minutes from this leaving time. This is your “walk out the door” deadline. If you work at home, choose a start time and subtract a minute or two to get your deadline.
3. Make a list of times. At the top, write the deadline. Place your essential tasks below this. Order your tasks to follow a natural sequence for your body and mind. Remember, you will end at the bottom with the first moment if consciousness, the moment you wake. The next thing you do after waking could be physical and rigorous exercise, or it could be gentle and slow journaling. Think about this deeply and create the order of all your essential tasks.
4. Next, determine the number of minutes you want to give each task. Write them next to each task. Do not try to easily assume that ten tasks will fill an entire hour of your morning routine. Think hard about how long things take. For example, do you really need 45 minutes in the shower? Try imagining a 5 minute shower. If you actually went from 45 to 5 minutes, you would have 40 extra minutes to do some awesome, fulfilling morning tasks. With that being said, showering may be the best part of your morning. It is up to you to decide what you want to get done and then how much time you will give those things.
5. Calculate the times and find what time you will need to wake up in order to complete all tasks. Surprised? Decide whether you will go to bed and wake up early to make this happen. If it’s too early, adjust the durations of your tasks and consider eliminating some tasks. This compromising may cause you to reconsider waking up early.
6. Open up your alarms setting on your phone or computer. If you don’t have multiple alarms, you can either write your schedule clear and large on paper, or purchase however many analog alarm clocks it takes. Set your deadline alarm with an appropriate, no nonsense label like, “Walk out the door”. Have it actually sound an alarm, something alarming.
7. Set the start time of your penultimate task, label it if possible, and make it silent if you have family or roommates. Go down your list of tasks, setting alarms for the start times of each task, labeling them, and silencing them if you want.
8. Set your wake up alarm. If you have a second alarm clock, preferably a battery- or windup- powered mechanical clock, set the wake up time on that too.
9. Place the secondary alarm clock outside your bedroom door. Have it on the ground if you can bend over reasonably well, or somewhere a bit lower than comfortable. This will make you move and will wake you up!
10. Place your primary alarm, the one with all the alarms on it, even further away from your bedroom. The next room over or the living room, depending on your home layout. You will now have to hustle to turn this second alarm off. Furthermore, this means you will need to leave your phone, if that’s where the alarms are set, outside of your bedroom. You won’t be needing it once you’ve gone to bed. Put that thing on airplane, plug in the charger that you’ve cleverly removed from your bedside nightstand, and get serious about sleep.
11. Go to bed, wake up when your alarm goes off, and get your morning started.
Live powerfully.
The Brilliant Beast Blog 