A productive morning routine is a set of activities and habits that you incorporate into your morning to help you feel more energized, focused, and ready for the day ahead. It involves intentionally taking control of your time in the morning and using it efficiently to set yourself up for success.
A productive morning routine can have numerous benefits for your personal and professional life. It allows you to start your day with a clear mind, making prioritizing tasks, making decisions, and tackling challenges easier. It also helps you stay organized and reduce stress levels throughout the day.
1. Join the 5 am Club
Join The 5 am Club – Through the enchanting story of an entrepreneur, an artist, and their eccentric billionaire mentor, The 5 am Club (2018) shows how embracing a revolutionary morning routine can deliver epic results. It explains how you can use the first hour of your day to drive personal growth and get the most out of life.
However, I am, by default, a night person, so I can get an incredible amount of work done in the evening. You need to do what works for you, but I can tell you one thing. If I go to bed at 10 pm, I am awake by 4 am and ready to work by 4:30 am. If I go to bed at 2 am, I am dead until at least 10 am. I need 2 hours less sleep if I go to bed early; this means 2 hours more in my day.
📖 Book Tip: The 5 am Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. @ Amazon
How do I know the details of my sleeping habits? I have a Garmin smartwatch that gives me valuable insights and measures my sleep quality, sleep zones, and duration.
So, despite being a night person, I rest a lot better and need less sleep when I go to bed early.
Experiment with your sleep patterns and see what works for you. Try a Fitbit smartwatch; it will help you learn about yourself.
Get the 5 am Club on Blinkist (12 minutes listen)
Barry D. Moore: Founder – GreatWorkLife.com
2. Have A Disciplined Morning & An Easy Evening
By being disciplined in your workday, you can spend more time in the evening procrastinating and enjoying the simple life. If you do not have the discipline to focus on critical business goals and tune out the distractions, you will spend more time at work. Sure, 25% of that time was spent on social media, but psychologically, you will return home late and drained from the day.
Imagine returning home at a reasonable time, spending a little more time with the family, and then playing around and engaging with friends with an actual phone, Skype, Facetime, or WhatsApp video call. It is much more rewarding than getting a “like” on Facebook.
3. Try Easy Morning Exercises
I know what you are thinking, “not another person telling me to have a workout before going to work.” But let me share what works well for me without breaking a sweat.
If you spend much of your day sitting in meetings or front of your desk, you may be troubled with back problems or a weak core. I do 20 minutes of stretching, situps, and core work every morning to combat this.
📖 Book Tip: The 8-Minute Morning @ Amazon
It is not a cardio workout, and I do not really sweat. It is just enough to wake up and invigorate the body. It is a great way to kick-start my day and strengthen my core.
4. Try Morning Pages
Morning journaling is my most effective productivity tool. I spend ten minutes each morning writing—in the style of Julia Cameron’s famous “morning pages”—stream of consciousness style.
📖 Book Tip: The Miracle Morning @ Amazon
The writing is not for posterity or for keeping; it is simply a tool to clear my mind of the chatter and clutter so I can focus on a more productive day.
Meredith Atwood – Former Attorney, Author of The Year of No Nonsense, Founder of SwimBikeMom
Get The Miracle Morning on Blinkist (an 18-minute listen)
5. Plan Your First Hour Monday
“I always suggest that people spend the first hour of each Monday looking at and planning the week ahead. Doing this all in one go saves you the time of trying to pick up where you left off each morning. Plus, you may even overlook some tasks or projects in the shuffle.
The best way to do this is to regularly use organizational software like Asana, Trello, or Teamwork to see all of your projects at a glance, along with due dates and any uploaded information. You can also see which tasks other team members are working on, which can be especially helpful if the current project is layered and will be passed from one person to the next.”
Angela Ash – Flow SEO – Expert content writer, editor & marketer
6. Eat a Frog in the Morning
I’ve been an entrepreneur for over ten years now. The single biggest factor in my success has been productivity and organization, so I feel like I have a lot to say about making Mondays more productive, which you could add to your article.
To have a productive Monday, start the day before on Sunday night. Do a quick weekly planning session for 5-10 minutes every Sunday evening. This means that you can hit the ground running on Monday morning. You won’t end up wasting time deciding what you should be working on—you just do it.
📖 Book Tip: The 8-Minute Morning @ Amazon
In my early years as an entrepreneur, I used to start on a Monday morning by looking at the emails that had come in overnight and working through them. This killed my productivity on a Monday, as I’d inevitably end up responding to low-value emails. By implementing a quick planning session on Sunday evening, I’d know exactly what I was supposed to be working on and could just wake up on Monday morning and start working on that.
Another point on top of this is around priorities.
“Pick the hardest task of that day and complete it first before doing anything else.”
Even if you do nothing else that day, you will still make good progress and be productive this way.
It also helps avoid procrastination. Many people do small or unimportant tasks to make it feel like they are making progress when they aren’t.
For years, I focused on the small, quick tasks first. This meant I kept putting off the more challenging tasks, which tend to impact the business the most. When I switched to doing the hardest task first, my productivity skyrocketed.
Scott Watson, Co-Founder of Wickfree Candles
Get Eat That Frog Summarized by Blinkist
7. Talk to the Chimp
Here is the toughest challenge.
Eliminating internal distractions is especially difficult because, according to Professor Steve Peters, a Chimp chattering away in your head gives you background stress and alerts you to any subconsciously perceived threats.
📖 Book Tip: The Chimp Paradox @ Amazon
I have read this book thrice; it is an amazing insight into how we work.
It is real, and you can deal with it by talking to the chimp.
The Chimp Paradox changed my life.
Get the Chimp Paradox on Blinkist (a 13-minute listen)
8. Start Your Morning the Night Before
What is your favorite productivity or effectiveness tip?
Mine is simple: Make a To-Do list at the end of each day so you can hit the ground running the following day. I’ve been doing this since I started my business over four years ago, and it has helped me immensely.
As a business owner, letting a million little distractions derail your day is easy. I’ve found that having a concise list of things I want to accomplish before my day begins helps me focus much better.
What benefit did you realize by using it?
I struggle to flip the “off switch” at the end of a workday. Making a to-do list for the next business day has become a mini-ritual of sorts that helps me bring closure to the current day.
If I have my list written down for the next day, it’s easier for me to unplug after work and spend quality time with my family—which is a top priority for me!
Jeff Proctor is the Co-Founder of DollarSprout.com, a personal finance website read by millions of people each year looking to improve their financial lives.
9. Plan Each Day
Lay Out Each Day, but Don’t Shy Away From Pivoting
Everybody will have their system, but the closest thing to a universal tip is laying out a schedule before you start each day. While you can still tap into your productivity without doing so, you are limiting yourself by not building even a rough schedule.
Unless you consciously monitor it, you won’t realize how much time is wasted between tasks deciding what to move on to.
Those moments add up over a week, month, year, etc. Some people view a daily schedule as a commitment with absolutely zero flexibility. Laying out a schedule is supposed to act as a guide, allowing you to pivot away if something more urgent comes up.
Some people thrive on building a daily schedule on the most granular level possible. While this is commendable, it is not for everybody, especially those with constantly changing routines.
Ultimately, it will boil down to a trial and error process of deciding what works best for you, but building a daily schedule is my suggested jumping-off point for those looking to be more productive with their time.
Barbara Hernandez-Taylor, Head of Product Marketing for Azuga
10. Put One Goal On The Whiteboard
As I work from home, staying productive is often one of my biggest challenges. So, I put a system in place to help myself stay on track with the goals I want to achieve for my business. I would write down the ONE goal for my business in big capital letters on my whiteboard. Personally, I work well with this visual and in-your-face reminder.
Then, I would break it down into 3 to 5 actionable steps that I have to take consistently daily. So, I know what I have to do every day to stay productive and be on track to achieve my goal for my business.
Gladice Gong is a personal finance blogger passionate about helping people start a business online.
11. Focus on What Matters Every Day
My simple tip is to read the book “Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day.”
Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, “The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!” or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I’ll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that’s exactly what we do. Why?
📖 Book Tip: Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day @ Amazon
In a world where information refreshes endlessly, and the workday feels like a race to react to other people’s priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position.
But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn’t mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That’s what this book is about.
Listen to Make Time on Blinkist
12. Reduce Stress Boost Productivity
Overworked and Overwhelmed (2014) examines work-related stress and outlines what one can do to fight it.
This book offers practical insights for the executive, manager, or professional who feels their RPM is maxed out in the red zone. This audiobook offers actionable hope for today’s overworked and overwhelmed professionals by making the concepts and practices of mindfulness simple, practical, and applicable.
📖 Book Tip: Overworked and Overwhelmed @ Amazon
New research shows that the smartphone-equipped professional is connected to work 72 hours a week. Forty-eight percent of Americans report that their stress level is up and that the number one source of stress is the job pressure of a 24/7 world.
This survival guide is packed full of simple yet effective stress-relieving strategies that you can start implementing today. It is tailor-made for today’s fast-paced corporate world.
Get Overworked & Overwhelmed on Blinkist (a 15-minute listen)
Oh dear, waking up at 5am sounds almost impossible to me! My little habit that helps me to organize the day and sort of establish a plan for the day is checking my kanban board (I use kanbantool.com for that). It shows me right away where I finished my work the previous day, what needs to be done, what are the deadlines, etc. I find it very useful.