The Sun Is Lazy (The Morning Routine)

I went from posting about once a month to working on five-to-six a week so far in 2012. There is one single change in my life that made this possible.

The Morning Routine.

Previously, we let the girls serve as our alarm clocks. They’d wake up before we’d want to get up, we could throw some clothes on them, stuff some food in us, get out the door to work in plenty of time. What more does someone need to do in the morning? As we evaluated how to improve our home life—get more personal time while not staying up as late—we realized something: our mornings must be more efficient.

Our morning routine:

5:00 a.m. – Alarms go off, coffee machine automatically turns on.

5:15 a.m. – Start being productive. For me, that includes writing, working on my tech services consulting, being a geek, etc. For V, that includes running.

6:30 a.m. – The girls generally wake up within 10 minutes of 6:30 a.m. – Time to get them ready.

7:30 a.m. – Start prepping breakfast.

8:00 a.m. – Breakfast.

9:00 a.m. – Lina starts “1st nap”, V finishes getting ready for work if needed.

9:30 a.m. – V leaves for work (10 am to 6:30 p.m. work schedule)

Those 90 minutes have been clutch. I never really understood those folks who beat everyone to the office or talked about how much they got done before breakfast, but for us, I don’t see any other way to increase productivity without lengthening days to 36 hours.

The nice thing, too, about this setup is what happened this week. Yesterday, no post went online. I have a few things in the hopper, but nothing is ready for prime time. Tuesday night, I went out and thus didn’t get to my primary nightly duty (dishes). Wednesday morning, at 5 a.m., instead of writing, dishes were done. This schedule allows for evening social possibilities without completely disabling the house the next day due to incomplete dishes, unprepped meals, etc.

That being said, I’m working toward having a few days of posts built up in the queue. I didn’t like seeing this yesterday:

After having one of my strongest days in the last month with Tuesday’s Tim Tebow article, I had one of the worst recorded days ever for viewership the next day. Even Sunday was stronger and the virtually all of days when I only wrote once a month were better even though the freshest content was quite stale.

What tips and tricks have you discovered to get a little more time out of your day?