Use This Technique to Save Time in the Morning

Most people, particularly if they have a family at home, have busy mornings.  Between waking up, getting ready for the day, preparing lunches for the family and getting out of the house, it can be a chaotic time.  Not to mention if there are other things they want to do like exercise, journal or read, time is definitely at a premium. However, there are a number of things that can be done to save time and sanity in the morning.  One of the most effective techniques is to do things the night before when you have more time to do them.

An easy way to implement this strategy is to load the coffee maker the night before.  Then in the morning, you only need to turn it on and within a few minutes you are drinking fresh, hot coffee.  There are even coffee makers that have a clock that can be set so that they will make the coffee at the time you choose so that when you wake up, the smell of fresh coffee greets you and it is ready for you to drink.  Just using this one move can be an incredible pick-me-up in the morning.

One of the best ways to implement the night-before method, is to prepare the next day’s lunches at the evening dinner table.  The preparation actually starts before the meal begins.  The meal is prepared but extra is made so that there is enough food remaining to eat for lunches the following day as well.  When dinner is finished, the lunch containers can be brought to the table, labelled with the names of who they belong to and filled with food for the next day. 

The beauty of this technique is many faceted: 

1. You are at a meal already with the food on the table so preparing the lunches is not much extra work at all.
2. There is a substantial savings as the food is already bought so does not need to be purchased the next day.
3. You know exactly what you are eating and can choose how nutritious you want it to be.
4. You do not have to choose where and what to eat, so no decision fatigue.
5. You save time in the morning when everyone takes their lunch container and goes, no confusion, no preparing no decisions.

Now at night most people are beginning to wind down and get tired so it is important to do your preparations as early as you can.  As mentioned, preparing lunches at the dinner table makes the job easier that having to bring everything out and begin the process from scratch.  However, once you have a nightly routine you will find that your mornings will be much smoother as you remove decisions and make things like coffee and lunch preparation automatic and frictionless.