Greetings and Salutations Blog Readers!

For the entirety of the time I have been blogging, I have been trying to master my mornings…so how about we…BLOG about it.

So, I have been trying to build better morning habits, habits that lead to more successful and productive days and a better life on the whole.

I have brainstormed the kind of mornings I want to have, and for the most part that hasn’t changed.

I would like to get up early. A note about the word “early”- I mean “earlier than needed” so I have time to enjoy my morning and do the things I want to do to have a productive day and healthy life.

I have made progress on my mornings, since I started trying to improve my habits, I now am able to get up closer to six, if not even earlier, if I am in bed (eyes closed not reading or smoking but actually in bed) by midnight.

What do I do with that time? Well, I tend to do little self care things, like my hair, makeup, skin care routine. I make delicious french press coffee. I get ahead on my social media game for the day. I read a few or more articles on Medium, catch up on fellow bloggers blogs, get hydrated, pack lunch and snacks, make a game plan for the day, bla bla bla.

But I haven’t managed to work in having a work out, or even some light yoga in the morning, but I am getting closer, in fact, today I even did some VERY light stretching, in an effort to force myself to slowly just do the damn thing.

Because I want to develop long term systems for the morning to guarantee a more productive day.

Waking up at five? Not sustainable. I can do it, sure, but it leads to me being DEAD tired earlier in the week, and come the weekend, any productivity drops dead from the sky, taking even longer to get back up to normal.

Six, however, works pretty easily, assuming I got to bed by midnight. If I manage to wake up at six, I can even sometimes make it to work early, which lets me log extra hours or leave early, both of which are amazing.

Waking up at six lets me be more prepared for the day, reading in the morning, hair and makeup done, but I haven’t gotten to the working out, yet, so I need to work on that. As I have mentioned, I do think working out in general will get easier when I have the bedroom more operational again, but some of those steps, like making more room, have been done, and I have a nice work space for it, and the other steps, like an A.C. for this room, will be achieved in the coming weeks, and by the time this blog is posted, it will likely be done.

In the morning, I like to have lunch, breakfast and snacks, along with my travel mug of coffee, prepped and ready to go. In the summer months, this normally means my cold brew is prepped, and I have extra cold water ready to get me through the hot morning walk.

I am hoping to move towards a smoothie in the morning situation, so I will be adding prepping the smoothies, along with the lunch and snacks.

But I am also hoping to get a bit better with meal prep so lunch is healthier than the processed turkey and or cheese I have been eating to keep costs down, and to have my snacks prepared ahead of time as well. My thinking is if I can become the kind of person who can meal prep, drink smoothies for breakfast, and do morning yoga, after waking up early and reading? ‘

Pretty sure that is all how one becomes truly healthy and maybe, it will be enough to help me hack my time management and productivity, in this hectic year of not only running and growing this blog, but writing, editing, and publishing.

So, this is where I am with my mornings, and this is where I am hoping to go next. Every step of the way, the only time I have had actual success is when I changed the system with which I was doing something, gotten to bed early enough to wake up early, drank water to avoid feeling sluggish in an hour, balancing out the coffee, setting alarms until I formed the habit, to make sure I had parts of my morning routine done at parts in the morning.

Makeup, clothes, and makeup by 8:00 A.M.

Breakfast, Lunch, snacks packed by 8:30 A.M.

My coffee is always ready because I make it so early, so I pour the travel mug and close it up to keep it hot, and not let it cool off to the point of being ice cold.

I changed the systems I used, and I had suststainable changes, allowing me to wake up early and be useful.

I will be continuing to try and change my lifetyle to be healthier and to include more working out, and that will likely include my morning systems, and my new systems in general. I will also be blogging about my writing systems, in hopes that it helps some of you put out the amount of blogs I put out, as a couple of you have asked me how I do that.

Until then, keep being awesome.

Thanks for reading!

❤

Abbi