6 Steps to Finally Keep Up With Your Morning Routine

Two glasses of orange water with a cut up orange and a mandarin on a kitchen counter in morning sunlight

Having a morning routine can make a surprisingly big difference in your day. It helps you be more productive and make more progress on your goals, and it can make you happier too. But how can you keep up with your morning routine?

We are all excited when we first come up with something. The first day of following your new morning routine will be easy. The second day too. The third day might be doable or you might forget you even have a routine.

Sometimes you’ve managed to stick to a routine for weeks, but then it starts getting harder and harder.

What’s the matter? How to prevent this from happening? How to make sure you will stick to your routine? Keep reading to find out!

Why you can’t keep up with your morning routine

You might have started many different morning routines over the years, only to give up on every single one of them. Why does that keep happening? Why is it so hard to stick to your routine?

There might very well be more than one reason why you find it so hard to follow your morning routine. For instance, you might have added things that don’t really matter to your routine, which demotivates you.

Or maybe you’ve only got good and useful things on your list, but you’ve simply added way too many of them. If you have 15 different things to do every single morning, you might get overwhelmed or bored.

Sometimes the reason is that you haven’t been clear enough. If you’ve planned to exercise every morning, but haven’t given a thought to what kind of exercise that would be or how often or for how long you should do it, it’s no wonder you’ve skipped that part.

Last but not least, you’re maybe not strict enough with yourself. Morning routines aren’t necessarily all fun and they might get a bit boring. After all, they are supposed to help you start your day right and get you closer to your goals.

How to keep up with your morning routine

Sticking to your routine isn’t necessarily as hard as it feels right now. If you find it difficult to follow your routine every morning, it’s because there’s some problem you need to fix, something that you need to do differently.

Follow these six steps to make sure that you will keep up with your routine, no matter what.

1. Start slowly

You don’t need to be perfect from the beginning. Start things slowly with an easy routine that you know you can complete even when you are tired. Your routine can literally only include brushing your teeth, eating breakfast, reading the news, and getting ready for work at this point.

After a few days, you can start adding one or two things to your routine. But keep in mind that your routine shouldn’t include too many things and it shouldn’t take too long to complete. It should just help you start your day right.

If you want, you can reward yourself in the beginning for completing harder tasks, like exercising or writing. This will encourage you to continue.

2. Be very clear

You have to know exactly what you are supposed to do in order to actually accomplish your tasks. That’s why you have to be very clear when you create your morning routine.

If you for example plan to read something every morning, you have to decide what it is that you will read and for long you will do it. This will help you to take action because you’ll know exactly what you’re supposed to do and you won’t need to spend time trying to decide what to do.

3. Have a good habit tracker

Having a habit tracker can help you a lot! It will help you to remember to do everything you’re supposed to do and you’re less likely to skip any days or individual tasks because you want to have that perfect streak. But keep in mind that perfection isn’t necessary, following the routine on most days is enough.

You can either make your own habit tracker on paper or download an app. One of my favorite habit-tracking apps is Habitbull, which is available for both Android and iOS.

4. Give yourself enough time

Being productive and having a morning routine doesn’t mean trying to get a hundred things done before breakfast or spending your morning running from task to task in order to look busy.

You need to give yourself enough time to get all the important things done. This means that you shouldn’t even try to do too many many things. Simply pick the ones that actually matter and stick to them.

Just because journaling or meditation can be very beneficial to you, doesn’t mean that you have to do them every morning. You know what benefits you the most.

What’s even more important is that you go to sleep early enough. I know it can be easier said than done, but getting enough sleep and being able to wake up earlier without an alarm makes a huge difference in your day. You can easily have an extra half an hour in the morning and have more energy than before.

5. Make it as easy for you as possible

Being productive doesn’t mean that you should have a long and difficult routine. On the contrary, you should try to make your mornings as easy as possible. That way keeping up with your morning routine will come naturally.

One important thing to do is to always make sure that you have everything ready beforehand. Trying to get ready in a hurry and feeling like you have nothing to wear is not a good thing. Instead, prepare everything you can the night before and make sure you have enough clean clothes and that everything you need to take with you is where it’s supposed to be.

You also want to make things as smooth as possible. Avoid situations where you don’t know what to do by always doing everything in the same order. That way you will start following your morning routine automatically. This is especially important if it takes time for you to completely wake up or if you’re not a morning person.

6. Change the routine when necessary

Creating a morning routine doesn’t mean that you have to do the same things every morning for the rest of your life. You need to keep things interesting. Try adding new things to your routine sometimes and omit things that you don’t need to be doing all the time. Maybe go for morning walks this month and hit the gym next month?

If you have decided to work on your book every morning for an hour, that will surely help you a lot. But you could do it for two months and then switch to studying French for a few weeks. This way you will make progress, but you won’t get bored (or neglect studying French).

You also need to ensure that your routine actually benefits you. If something doesn’t work or doesn’t seem to add anything to your life, change it. Do something else.

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No matter what kind of a morning routine you have, make sure to take care of yourself. If you for example often skip breakfast, it’s no wonder you don’t have much energy and you find it hard to focus on anything. Sleeping enough and eating well should be your number one priorities.

I hope this post helped you figure out what you need to change in order to get more out of your mornings. I’d also love to hear your thoughts. Do you maybe have a morning routine already? What is the biggest challenge you have with your mornings? Let me know!

Also, I’d appreciate it if you shared this post on social media!

Read these articles next to get the most out of your mornings:

How to Become a Morning Person and Love It

12 Tips for Morning Motivation

17 Productive Things to Do in the Morning

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