If you're feeling like you need to be a little bit more productive and you maybe don't have a morning routine this is going to be for you! We're going to help you figure out what your morning routine can look like with kids and with your work schedule.

Step #1: we're going to start by starting our morning right

What does that mean? Well picking a time where you can wake up, where you have some alone time and you've got some time before the kids wake up. For me I wake up around 5am and that guarantees me about 2 hours of time before anybody else in the house is awake and I love it! Try to give yourself at least an hour.

Now when that alarm goes off…this is very important…don't hit your snooze button!! Whatever time you set your alarm, wake up and get out of bed. Don't check your phone, don't jump on any gadget or anything else. Just get up and get ready to start your day.  

Step #2: when you hit your office, it’s quiet time

This is the time where I like to spend time meditating. Affirmations are one of the most recent things that I've added into my morning routine. Every single day I write down 12 affirmations and they're really 12 goals that I want to have accomplished and I'm going to be the example of one of those. So one of them says I only work 4 hours a day and never on the weekends.

Now that's actually not true right now but it's something that I want to get toward. By that being something I write down every single day it just is a great reminder of where I'm heading. Definitely try something like that! Then I will visualize. I'll look at one of those 12 goals and I will decide okay, I want to visualize this specific item so let's say one of them is I take quarterly vacations with my family. So maybe I will visualize us walking into a beautiful resort with Tanner holding my hand or Kent carrying Tegan. Little things like that where I can really feel like we're in that moment. Taking that time to just keep that quiet time before you go on with your busy day is going to help you have a productive day.

So for me, my quiet time doesn't have to be an hour of meditation and an hour of affirmations. I think a lot of us will hear about these amazing miracle mornings and these morning routines and we think we need all this time in our day. It can be as simple as two minutes of meditation, five minutes of affirmations and for me that's really what it does look like. It's about five minutes of meditation into about five minutes of those affirmations and I can continue to move on with my mornings.

Step #3: creative time

One thing that I used to do was I would jump right into my emails and I would dive in and I would start to allow other people to control my day and I realized that I was wasting so much creative time! Now if you try to write something in the morning and then you try to write it again later that night about 9:00 p.m. you will find yourself exhausted and producing just not the quality work you want.

So figure out when you're the most creative. For me it's bright and early in the morning. When I have to write content or write social media posts or create courses, I’m going to do that first thing in the morning after my quiet time. Creative time is something that I'll actually spend almost up to an hour on every single day. Now there may be days where I don't have that much to do it and I might be able to have a little bit less but for me it's always an opportunity to come up with great content whether it's for my paid courses or my free videos or anything like that. So make sure you're utilizing that time.

Step #4: prep your day

So you might think my morning routine starts in the morning but it actually starts the day before when I'm wrapping up my workday. What I like to do is just get my office and desk organized. It may have gotten some papers on it and just looking like a hot mess, so I fix that and clean it up! Not only that but I look at my computer and I close out of all the tabs that I don't need for tomorrow.

Now one of my secret tips is that I love using the Google Chrome extension which is called Boomerang. There's this little app on there that allows you to pause your email inbox so in case you don't have the willpower to not check your email, you can actually pause your email inbox and you allow it to open up when you want to actually check it.

Those are the four steps to my morning routine and one of the most important are those twelve goals and affirmations! I need to keep my vision clear and if you want help writing those I'm going to give you my sample twelve ways that I do this every single morning, so make sure to check it out!!