As an entrepreneur, you know that your day can throw almost anything at you. Creating and sticking to a morning routine can help ground you and prepare you for a successful and productive day. If you create a successful routine, you’ll foster a successful business. Ultimately, you’ll want to create a routine that is tailored to your personality and workflow. Here are some tips to remember as you create your perfect morning routine.
1. Wake Up at the Same Time Every Weekday
While this may seem like a given, waking up at the same time every day during the week helps you stay consistent with your schedule overall. Just as you would wake up and get ready for a traditional nine to five, wake up with enough time for you to get dressed and prepared for the day.
Don’t hit that snooze button: when your alarm goes off it’s time to get up and get moving. If you are a habitual snoozer, this daily habit might take a few days or weeks to break. Do your best to remain consistent, but work your way down to getting up immediately and getting on with your day.
A consistent waking time will allow you to better schedule meetings with potential and current clients and help you set expectations for your work day as a whole. As a successful entrepreneur, it’s tempting to take multiple days off during the week to relax with friends, run errands, and work around the house. If you sleep in, you are more likely to take one of these “work free” days instead of getting to work.
2. Identify What Makes You Productive
Think about what kind of activities help you get in the mood to be productive at any time, not just in the mornings. Once you’ve identified these activities, begin to incorporate them into your morning routine. Activities to get your mind ready for the day could include:
- Making a mug of coffee or tea
- Going for a run or completing a 15 to 30 minute exercise routine
- Cooking and eating a healthy breakfast
- Journaling
- Meditating for 20 minutes
If choosing just one of these activities seems restrictive, schedule your favorites for each day in the same time slot. The importance of the activity doesn’t lie in the activity itself, but that you are scheduling a time to center yourself and prepare for the day.
You might notice a glaring omission from this list: social media. While you might argue that social media can be a helpful tool to get ready and check out what’s going on in the world, it’s not necessarily a focusing activity. You want to choose activities that align with your business and personal goals for best results.
3. Identify Your Goals
Get the most out of your morning routine by identifying your overall goals in your business and personal life. If you’re having trouble identifying your goals, try thinking about the following:
- What do you want to accomplish every day?
- What about every week?
- Where do you want your business to be by next year?
If you Identify your short- and long-term goals for what you want to accomplish in your business, you can tailor the activities of your routine to set you up to specifically achieve those goals.
4. Choose Activities That You Enjoy
The beauty of a personal morning routine is that it can be tailored to your individual taste. Your first instinct might be to find morning routines of your favorite successful people and follow them. This can be great if you absolutely do not know where to start; however, you’re more likely to stick to a daily routine if it is something that you actually enjoy doing.
Your routine should prepare you for the rest of the day and set you up for success. It should also be something that is important to you that you enjoy. If the idea of a 30 minute workout or morning exercise sounds like the opposite of what would prepare you for the day, then don’t include that item in your routine.
Everyone is different. The more you enjoy your routine, the more likely you are to stick to it and look forward to it each day.
5. Include Your Routine in Your Schedule to Start Until It Becomes Second Nature
As an entrepreneur, your life is more than likely calendar-dependent. In order to make room for a routine in your daily schedule, block out a certain amount of time each day on your calendar, and don’t take any meetings, calls, or video conferences during this time if you can help it.
The length of your morning routine depends on your personal preference. If all you need to start your day is to get up, get dressed, and make a cup of coffee, then your blocked-off time is going to be much shorter than someone who would prefer to go for a run, take a shower, meditate, and then make breakfast before sitting down to work.
While your routine could be pretty much the same thing every day, it doesn’t always have to occur in the same order unless the order of things is something that is very important to you. You know yourself best and you know what works for you.
6. Allow Your Daily Routine to Evolve Over Time
When you first map out your morning routine, you may decide after a few weeks that you are being a little too stingy with the time you’ve given yourself, or you may think midway through all of your activities that you’d rather be getting to work straight away. Listen to gut. Just because you set your routine to be a certain amount of time or a certain number of activities doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it forever.
If you’re doing it right, your routine should evolve and change over time as you do. The routine of an entrepreneur who is just starting out is going to appear vastly different than that of the entrepreneur who has been in business for a decade.
Overall, if you identify what you enjoy, determine what makes you productive, and listen to your gut, you’re sure to create a morning routine that works for you and sets you up for success each day. Remember that a consistent morning routine can help you maintain consistency throughout the rest of your business and ultimately lead towards overall success.