A morning routine is nothing new, but since January our schedules have changed and with it my morning routine. It's been a while since I've shared what my mornings look like so I thought why not now!

What you'll learn:

→ why a morning routine helps productivity.
→ my daily journaling exercises.
→ how to come up with your routine.

Transcript

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] How you start your morning can have a big impact on the rest of your day. And so I kind of wanted to share with you how I start my morning and most specifically some of the journaling exercises that I try to do every morning. Now, there's a lot of people that talk about morning routines, and it's all well and good. But give yourself some grace. Not every morning goes like I want it to, but I try to do it most mornings and more often than not. So hopefully this inspires you to create a great morning routine for yourself. But remember that you need to do what works for you. And what works for me might not be the best for you. However, it's really important, I think that you have a morning routine, whether it is before you get to the office, or if you work from home. There you know, you might have a morning office routine and a morning home routine, but really write it down, make it your own, and try to stick to it and make it a habit. My name is Sami Bedell-Mulhern. I'm the host of the digital marketing therapy podcast. I thank you so much for joining me as we work through some of these tactics to help make us more effective and efficient in our jobs, so that we can reach our goals and maximize on our digital work. Before we get into this episode, it is brought to you by our patrons, thank you so much for patrons for helping support the podcast and you can learn more at thefirstclick.net/Patreon. Get an action on these episodes so that you can see the impact happened in real time. I know you can do it. And I am so thankful for all the hard work that you're doing. Let's get into the episode. 

[INTRO] You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. And each week, I bring you tips from myself and other experts, as well as hot seats with small business owners and entrepreneurs to demystify digital marketing and get you on your way to generating more leads and growing your business. 

[Sami Bedell-Mulhern] So the concept of a morning routine is not new. This is something that so many people talk about, and has kind of been a hot topic conversation over the last few years, especially the first couple of years before COVID. And I feel like all of our habits kind of just got crazy. As we were trying to navigate working from home, working remote, getting back into the office, not being in the office, people being home, people not being home. And so in January, I recently revamped my morning routine, because we've moved to a new place. So we moved to Minneapolis just over a year ago. And my husband is now working out of the house a couple of days a week, and the kids are in school full time. And so January just felt like a good time for me to really revamp my morning routine and kind of get back into a flow. And I really like it because it just helps me get into a different mindspace. And it helps me be more effective and efficient during my day. So my mornings start between 530 and six, really six is the time that I get up. And if I'm being real, if I get up at 530, that's just some bonus time for me to do whatever I want during the morning and kind of have a little bit of a buffer compared to if I wake up at six. So what I like to do when I first wake up, get up and I make some tea, or coffee, usually it’s tea, but I come downstairs, my home, I work from my house, so my office is at home, I really, really, really try hard for the first 15 to 30 minutes to just to just be and just sit and kind of not look at my phone, not look at social media, definitely not look at email, when at all possible because I like to start my day focusing inward and focusing on me as opposed to focusing on what everybody else needs from me, whether it be my team members, my clients, you know, our members inside of our communities, I like to just be able to kind of get my head around what's going on. So what that looks like is I really just do about 15 minutes of writing, it doesn't take me long. If you'd like to write more than you can absolutely do that. But I like to grab my tea and I have a couple of different notebooks. So one is a gratitude journal. So in there, I just write five things that I'm grateful for from the day before. And I just do that really quick. It just kind of gets my head right. And then the second thing that I do is what success looks like for me. And that's something that I learned from Rachel Hollis and I don't know if she learned it from somewhere else. But anyway, I write down the 10 things that I feel like I'll know I'm successful, if these things happen. And these are lofty goals, and I write them as if they've already happened. So for me, it's things like my family has four vacations planned this year. Travel is something I really love to do, something I want to take my family on trips to go see the world. So that's one of mine, my family has four trips planned this year. If I really wanted to get specific, I could list, you know, like, we have a trip planned to Europe this summer, like I could be specific about them. I say things like, we live in our dream home. We are in a rental right now because we just moved. And so that's a really big thing for me is to be able to get us into our forever house. I have, like, a lofty revenue goal for gross revenue. So whatever those things are, that are a combination of personal and professional, because I know that my professional, the work that I'm doing in my business is what's going to get us to those personal goals as well. So I write them, I just write them down. And that doesn't take me very long at all. But I try to do that every day because it just gets my brain into that, this is why I'm doing the work that I'm doing, these things here for my family and for my business is why I'm doing the things that I'm doing every day. And then the last thing that I do with whatever extra time I have is just kind of free, right? I just have a journal. And I will just write whatever comes to mind, whether it be professional or personal. And I try to go back and read them about every month or so. Because a lot of times there's ideas that come out during that free writing that I don't even think about or they're just kind of a passing thing. And then when I go back a few months later and just kind of flip through those pages to see what I wrote, it all kind of aligns and makes sense, and helps me kind of make decisions as I go into the next phase of my business. So that's, I spend about 15 to 20 minutes doing that, depending on the day. And then I spend about 30 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, just depending, in my email. And what I'm doing there is going, just going through everything, and putting things in my project management tool that I need to, like, take care of assigning any tasks to anybody on my team that might need them. So if we have edits on a website, or if we have, you know, like I got the transcript for the podcast, like, I can put all that into clickup, which is our project management tool and pull them out of my inbox, I respond to everybody and get all of that done, gets me pretty darn close to about zero. I'm pretty anal about my email. But it just works for me that I know I've got all those tasks done. After that I have a little bit of me time. So that usually looks like either a quick workout or by that time, my husband and the kids are downstairs, getting ready for school, my husband handles breakfast, and getting my son off to school because he's first and then I get my daughter off to school. So it's usually saying hi to them checking in. If there's nothing that's needed for me with them, then I'm typically jumping right into a couple quick tasks. So you know, I'm a huge fan of the full focus planner, that is part of my wind down from the night before. So when I end my day, I try to look at the day ahead and put my big three for the next day and any related tasks that need to be done. So I don't have to do that in the morning. So I know if I have a little extra time in the morning, I'm gonna look at that checklist and try to get a few of just those quick things in as I can. And then by then it's usually about 715. And that's when I get in the shower and get ready. That way, by eight o'clock, I have about 30 to 40 minutes before I have to take my daughter to school. And again, I use that to get quick tasks done because there's not enough time to get a big project done. And I actually really kind of like that, because I can get all the quick things done. If I had an extremely busy email day, I'm going to finish up my email, I might hop into social media and comment and engage with some followers, I might check out YouTube and see if there's anything that I need to be doing on that site, whatever little quick things that I can do that are going to continue to drive the business forward, maybe I'm gonna brain dump some content ideas or prep for the meetings that I have that day. But whatever quick tasks I can get done. Because then I know when I come back from dropping my daughter off from school, I can jump into a big chunk of time and have those big projects done. So that's what my mornings look like. It's a combination of just getting prepped for the day, and personally and professionally, so that I know what tasks need to be done. I have my head on straight. And I haven't just spent all that mindless time scrolling social media in the morning or stressing myself out by looking at email right away. So I'd love to hear what your morning routines look like. I'm always updating and adding and changing to mine to make it so you know like, Right. You know, when you add things into your morning routine and they just don't sit right, they just don't feel authentic to you. Just because somebody else is doing them doesn't mean you need to do them. So I'm always looking for inspiration and ideas to see what works. So, if this was helpful I hope you'll subscribe wherever you listen, otherwise check us out on YouTube at thefirstclick.net/YouTube and I will see you in the next one