Elena Ivanushkina

Time management concept is dead. What’s next? The power of Morning routine:

Feeling overwhelmed, things are piling up in to do list? How to stay focus and be able to prioritize during the day when you feel that you can’t manage your task? There are always more to do than the space available in your Agenda? The concept of 4 quadrants of Steven Covey (important/urgent scale) doesn’t work anymore? How to overcome nowadays constant distractions and piling up tasks, messages, and emails? What left within our control in the modern digital world?

The answer is – our mornings. By waking up 1 hour before our usual time, we can have this precious quality resource.

This is the time we can control and invest in self-development.  To plan, learn, reflect and to work on our most important goal.  Create a sequence of rituals or habits which contribute to your grow, before jumping to emails.  There are a lot of apps which help to stick to the routines and to track the new habits, like Good Habits, Way of life or Coach.me.

There are various approaches to the morning routines. I personally like the one from Hal Elrod, who propose the system called SAVERS.  This is the consequence of 6 actions, approximately 10 minutes each:

Silence, Affirmations, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing

You are free to customize it-  change the order, skip or replace some of the actions or do some of them in the evening. And of cause there are other tasks to be done, like  breakfast, shower, dress and prepare yourself for the day before leaving to work. The main idea is to have a ritual to follow the first thing after waking up. The statistic shows that the willpower is the strongest in the mornings.  So this is the ideal time to  follow the plan which makes the whole day productive and efficient.

So, what is the content of those rituals?

Silence

Affirmations

Visualization

Exercise

Reading

Scribing

Then, ask yourself: what would make my day great? what is my main focus  for today? Then spend some tie analyzing the previous day: what I can be proud of? What could I do better? What I’ve learned about myself? What new ideas I’ve got? Or  you can use Morning pages (The Artists’ Way, by Julia Cameron) or free writing technics. The idea is to  write three pages about anything, simply transcribing your thoughts.

Another option is to follow the evening routine.  Planning the next day, prepare the clothes to put in the morning, reflecting and journaling -pick what works for you and stick to it.

What would you add to this list? What are your ritual and habits to follow?  What works/doesn’t work for you?

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