Ah, this is so true! How your morning goes depends to a large extent on what your evening looks like.

Do you go to bed at a time which allows you to get enough sleep?

Have you prepared yourself for the next day (e.g., clothes, food, backpack, living space)?

Have you made a plan for the next day?

How my evening routine began falling apart

I’ve had some sort of evening routine for a long time. Recently, however, with childcare and working from home, I loosened up on my evening routine a bit because what was the point of it? I’d be home the next morning anyway, so I could just do what I needed to do then.

I didn’t want to be productive in the evening. After all, I’d been productive all day long, didn’t I deserve to relax now? Sure I did, but what ended up happening was that I’d “relax” by spending 30 minutes on social media. Then, it’d be time for bed, and I’d feel like I’d wasted my relaxing time. That only left me feeling frustrated.

Then I began to not get enough sleep (I was going to bed a bit later), so I was groggy during the day. I’d sleep in a little bit, but then I’d be rushed in the morning, trying to get William (our son) to daycare. The mornings would feel like a blur of rushing and hurrying, which is such an unpleasant way to start the day.

After dropping William off at daycare, I’d come back home, intending to start working, but I’d be greeted by an untidy living area (which is also the area where I work), dirty dishes in the kitchen when I’m trying to make tea, and mail to be opened because I didn’t get to it the previous night.

None of this is terrible and insurmountable. Usually, I got to work 30-60 minutes later than I had intended because I took time to tidy up and clean or simply because I had dropped off William at daycare a bit late. But over time it became rather annoying to always be running late in my own eyes. I decided it was time to make a change.

Deciding to implement a more solid evening & morning routine

A couple of weeks ago, I came across this podcast episode by Mel Robbins. It was the right message at the right time: your morning routine starts the night before. Basically, the importance of the evening routine for the success of the morning routine.

It was music to my ears. I know this, and I’d been implementing it for years until I just kind of… stopped. Now I felt full of energy and excitement to do it again!

Soon after that, I listened to a talk by Amy McCready from the Positive Parenting Solutions course I was following. In a module on creating a good morning routine for your kids, she said, “You need to wake up 30 minutes before your kids. This will allow you to get ready calmly, so you can be prepared and able to meet your kids’ needs once they wake up.”

A thousand objections came to mind when she said this. “But Amy, I need to get enough sleep! I’m waking up in the night, so I can’t possibly get up at 6:30! It’s easy for you to say this, you don’t know how tired I am!”

But another voice in my head said, “Imagine how nice it would be to wake up 30 minutes before William. To have that quiet time to myself, to wake up slowly, to take care of myself and get myself feeling good before I take care of him… And I could just go to bed 30 minutes earlier, it’s not that big of a deal, right?”

The truth is that I am naturally a morning person: I enjoy some quiet morning time, a (relatively) relaxed morning routine and the fresh walk to daycare, and then starting work at a reasonable time in order to make use of my most productive hours. This all sounded so attractive to me that I knew it was the right thing to do. I wrote out my evening routine and then my morning routine, and I set out to actually put them into practice…