January Focus Review: My Morning Routine

I had planned to have the conclusion of my Mins Game published today, but I’m still behind… So that will have to wait… Doesn’t really bode well for my year of monthly challenges… But we won’t think about that today… Anyway… Let’s discuss something else…

When I published my post on my updated morning routine, I had no idea what sort of response it would get, and I was definitely not prepared for the popularity of that post. It was a Pinterest sensation! Remember when I mentioned that I was getting near 10,000 views for all of 2016?  Yeah, with that morning routine post, I have already almost reached that in just a month. I even had a couple days with over 1000 views each!  Craziness!  (I realize that this might not be a lot for other bloggers, but it is a huge jump up for me!)

Anyway, the point is that it was obviously something that many people were interested in, so I figured that I should do a follow up to discuss how my January focus went, and what I learned from it.

Straight up, it totally helped me! The thought process of working through the timelines that would work based on what ever tasks I needed to do in the morning, helped me put deadlines on my activities in the mornings. I’m not perfect, I still have mornings when things go awry and I end up leaving late, or not getting everything done that I wanted to get done, but the improvement has been drastic!

I still struggle with getting up at 5:30am. Mostly I think because I don’t go to bed early enough in the evenings. Someone suggested that I create an evening routine like this, but with my evenings, there are just too many variables to be able to do that easily I think… Maybe I can make that a focus for an upcoming month, but for February I’ve already chosen meal planning as my focus, but I’ll discuss that in an upcoming post.

I think an interesting thing to perhaps log in the future is what morning routine option I use the most. For January I’m pretty sure it’s the one where I wake up the latest and get the least amount done… But it got more diversified as the month went on.

One of the biggest successes of this focus was that I was made aware of how much time I spend doing nothing in the mornings… Which I suppose was also one of the challenges… Almost every morning I would catch myself doing something that wasn’t on the schedule… putting dishes away from the night before, cleaning up papers, finding items for my latest instalment of the Mins Game… (or actually sitting and doing nothing…)

One of my biggest challenges of this focus was my inability to have a quick shower in the mornings…  I mentioned this in the original morning post, but I didn’t really get much improvement throughout the month.  It’s just so nice and warm in the shower… and so cold when I get out…  Maybe this won’t be as big of an issue when we get our home renos finished up, and get a nice heated tile floor in the bathroom… But, the quick shower thing is something to work on in the future, for sure.

So, what am I going to do going forward?  Well, I’m not going to abandon my morning routine just because it is no longer the focus of the month… In fact, I hope that I can continue working on it, and hopefully I will be able to improve on it as it does become more of a “routine”.    But, I better publish this post now and get moving if I’m going to be successful on my routine this morning…

What are your biggest challenges for your morning routine?  How do you overcome them?

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