Stop me if this sounds familiar.
The alarm goes off. You roll over and your first thought is, “It cannot possibly be morning already.” So you hit snooze, because you know yourself and you’ve set your wake-up time for a little earlier than necessary to build in a bit of extra sleep time.
It goes off again. And this time your thought is, “I know I should really get up right now but I’m so tired. If I just hit snooze again I’ll {get ready extra fast/skip the shower/wear my hair in a ponytail/forego baby’s morning nursing session/give the kids lunch money so I don’t have to pack it/insert your own personal excuse here} and I’ll still be able to get out the door on time.”
Then the alarm goes off a third time, and you finally get up. Next it’s rushing, rushing, rushing, and late, late, late. And you’re cursing yourself for not getting up 15 minutes earlier because now you’re leaving the house 15 minutes later than you need to.
But you don’t learn your lesson, and tomorrow the whole thing repeats itself.
This might not be everyone’s story, but I also know that I’m not the only one out there who struggles with this. I’ve become more of a morning person than I used to be, and I really do love the morning time, but the whole getting out of bed thing that has to happen first is not my fave.
At one point I was 20 minutes late to work. Like, every day. And it wasn’t a huge deal because I had some flexibility, but it didn’t feel good. Nobody wants to be late to work, or anywhere else for that matter.
{This is not the time to leave the house when you are supposed to be at work at 8:00.}
Though it was tempting to blame my kids, I couldn’t. I’m the mom, and they weren’t the ones hitting the snooze button.
It was me.
So I resolved to fix the problem. How, you ask?
I decided to start being realistic, not optimistic. I couldn’t listen to the lie I’d tell myself in the wee hours of the morning that getting us all out the door would only take 45 minutes, so sleeping an extra 15 wouldn’t be a problem. And in order to stop believing that lie, I had to confront my morning schedule head-on.
That meant making a detailed, ordered list of all the things I needed to do between the time I woke up and the time I arrived at work. Working backwards, I identified how much time each task would take and what time I needed to be doing it. And then I could figure out what time I actually needed my feet to hit the floor in the morning.
Here’s the schedule I came up with using this strategy.
Well, looky there. It’s no wonder I was 20 minutes late every morning. Because every morning I’d been lying to myself and convincing myself that if I rolled out of bed at 6:45, I’d still make it to work on time. But I really needed to get up 20 minutes earlier.
Which I know is kind of the no-brainer conclusion when you’re consistently 20 minutes late, but clearly identifying all the tasks made it much more apparent in my brain that a 6:25 wake-up is actually necessary. I took out the optimism and replaced it with realism.
So there you have it, friends. If you’re having trouble getting out the door on time – whether it’s to get to work, to church, or to an afternoon playdate, take some time and really look at how long it will take you. Figure out all the stuff you have to do, work backwards, and stop convincing yourself that it won’t take that long.
I know all us mamas have superpowers, but getting kids out the door at super speed is not one of them. Sorry.
A version of this post originally appeared on Family. Work. Life.
