Ever feel like 24 hours in a day isn’t enough? I’ll try to fit as much as I can in but there are times I feel this way too. There are days I wish I could clone myself just so I could feel productive. Is there a magic answer or an easy button we could just push? I wish! But I think I am starting to figure out that with a little better time management and a system in place, I feel like I am more productive in that 24 hour period and that makes me feel awesome. 

I always feel like the morning is the most productive part of my day, do you? I have never really been a morning person until I had children but now with a toddler and a baby I find that in the morning before they wake up I can accomplish a lot. Who knew! With that in mind I started to really focus on making the most of my limited time in the mornings. I try really hard to get out of bed when my husband leaves for work at 5:00 a.m. – it’s really early but it is worth what I get in return. Waking up this early has really given me a chance to get an hour to an hour and a half before the baby wakes up to actually get something done. Sometimes I have to soothe someone back to sleep or someone wakes up super early so I don’t always get my full hour but i’ll take what I can get.

I decided that I needed a morning routine to maximize my time. It should be structured so that the things I felt were the most important happened first and the things that could be dropped were last, so that if someone woke up early I wouldn’t be in a panic trying to get it done later in the day. I heard about the miracle morning system but after trying it out I found that didn’t really work for me. I’m not the type of person that can only do something for 5 minutes, so I kept the parts of that system that did work for me and decided my morning routine needed some more tweaking. I’ve found if I wake up and have a cup of coffee while I get some computer time in first that allows me to wake up but also feel like I get some me time which I crave since my me time is pretty much nonexistent. Once I finish my cup of coffee, I go start a load of laundry. It’s at this point I either take a quick shower in the guest bathroom (babies are asleep in my room so using my bathroom is out of the question) or I grab another cup of coffee and a bite to eat depending on how I feel. Once I am finished with either showering or eating, I’ll swap and do the other.

During my second cup of coffee i’ll see what’s going on for the day/rest of the week by checking my calendar. This is definitely helpful on Monday mornings to help me get organized with my week. I’ve been intrigued by the thought of using a planner/bullet journal as a stay at home mom to help me maximize my time and organize life more so I decided that at the beginning of the year I will start one and see how it goes. I used planners a lot professionally when I was working so I figured it may just help me at home since I was always so organized at work. I bought a cute Happy Planner in the classic size to get started and I can’t wait to see how it works for me. I bought some accessories, stickers and extensions for it because I figure if I am going to try it I might as well dive right in and get everything I want. Anyways, I digress so back to the topic at hand. After my second cup of coffee i’ll have a can of sparkling lemon water and usually at least one baby is up by then so it’s breakfast, diapers and the hustle begins.

It was pretty hard to sit down and think about what was essential for my morning routine and when it came down to it a load of laundry, a cup of coffee and a few minutes of me time were the top 3 that I don’t want to compromise on. Everyone might gasp, but I’ll bump a shower for a nice cup of coffee first thing in the morning because I can always shower later or at night when my Husband is home.

What are your essential things that if not done would throw your entire day off? If I let it, our laundry would get out of control in the blink of an eye and no one, especially me, wants to spend an entire day washing and folding laundry. Yuck!

~JennyCup