Creating a Morning Routine in Your Planner
Mornings set the tone for the entire day, but without structure, they can slip away in a blur of distraction and chaos. At least in my house they can! Your planer is the perfect tool to design (and stick to) a morning routine that supports focus, calm, and productivity.
Step 1: Define Your Ideal Morning
Start by asking yourself questions like, “What time do I want to wake up?” and “What are a few things I’d like to do before starting work or my daily responsibilities?” Some common morning routine things might include hydration, morning pages or journaling, planning your day, getting some deliberate movement in before you start your day, setting intentions or reading something inspiring.
Step 2: Time Block It
Use your daily or weekly pages to time-block your morning routine. Even a simple structure like this works:
6:00–6:15am | Water + Stretching |
6:15–6:45am | Tea + Morning Pages |
6:45–7:00am | Quick Planner Review |
7:00-7:30am | Healthy Breakfast |
Writing it down and seeing it on the page helps you stay accountable (and helps you notice what’s realistic and what isn’t!). I like to put my morning routine on a Compass Card from Franklin Planner in my Pouch Page Marker because the daily pages I use don’t start early enough, plus this way it’s always on my current day’s page and I don’t have to re-write it every day.
Step 3: Use Your Planner Daily
Every morning, open your planner and:
- Review your morning routine periodically to make sure it is still working for you
- Jot down any thoughts or intentions
- Highlight your top priorities for the day
This creates a sense of control before the day even begins, and with just 15–20 minutes and your trusty planner, mornings can become a calm, productive foundation for everything that follows for the day.
As always on Fridays, feel free to discuss whatever you’d like related to ring planners.
Routine: a usual or fixed way of doing things
ReplyDeleteI've never felt the need to plan how I get up in the morning; I've been doing it 62 years now, and I think I've got it sorted...
For me, a planner is for the non-routine.
But it's always interesting to hear how other people use their planners.
I reckon I agree with Kevin here. A planner has so much capacity so is the regular stuff you do without needing to plan or think about really efficient use of that capacity or space?
ReplyDeleteMy morning routine on site days is the same and well developed to make the first train out of the village in the right direction at 6am. I do not need to think and indeed I do not think for most of the getting out routine due to not being awake. It is automatic and the same every single morning I go out to site to work. It is the same down to the same minute for the same action. Once I found myself ready for the shower nearly 5 minutes early. That put me off a bit as I spent too much mental energy to work out which of my stages I had missed. Turns out I must have been more awake than normal so the same activities took less time. I later worked out that I had put the soup into the microwave out of routine and while the kettle was boiling for my coffee, travel coffee and to warm the food flask. That put me on a couple of minutes as did something else i did not do.
That is the level of routine I have in the morning, my actions are the same every site day to the minute that when I do that faster or slower I have to find the reason for it and whether it needs correcting or adopting as a faster way. So IMHO the routine, such as morning get outs, is not a planning need.
I’m the opposite of you Paul. I used to do the 6am train everyday but moved to part time work after not being well. I have very few early starts nowadays and my mornings usually have very little structure. But I still agree that I wouldn’t use a planner to plan my morning as when I get up, and how much I do that day, depends on how fatigued I am from whether I had a decent nights sleep and what I did the preceding day. No amount of writing down, ‘I’ll be up at x’ is going to make any difference whatsoever. I have to have a diary and adjacent notes to make sure I turn up to everything I’m supposed to, having read or produced everything I’ve promised to do. I use one A5 for each part time job for notes, ideas, contacts, info and one for personal journaling. Then I use various ones for personal stats, food diary, to do list around the house, finance tracking, etc but using so many is really my way to try to justify how many I’ve bought over the years, I think each is lovely and enjoy using them very much. I don’t mean any criticism of the post, we all have to live our own lives, just that my chaos can’t be solved by planning a routine!
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