Speed Up Your Family’s Morning Routine

Do you dread the busy mornings, when everyone trips over each other in the kitchen + bathroom, it’s an ongoing struggle to get coffee made, kids dressed + fed + grown-ups showered + packed up in time for work?

Are backpacks often misplaced, busses missed + people generally annoyed + disheveled?

Instead of stressing about the mad morning rush, focus on how you can get things to run more smoothly by becoming more organized in the first place.

Tackle the Week’s Lunch Plans

Most every kid enjoys pizza Fridays in the school cafeteria. Unless you’re dealing with food allergies, you can plan for your children to buy lunch at the end of each week.

Then, Monday can be another bought-lunch day, with kids eating school lunches while you’re out at the grocery store, stocking up for brown-bagged lunches on Tuesday, Wednesday + Thursday.

Check the Weather

Nothing like dressing your kids in long pants in time to realize that rain is about to start pummeling everything just as they’re heading out the door… or seeing them emerge from their rooms dressed in shorts on an unexpectedly chilly September morning.

Take a minute to look at the weekly forecast. Then, check again the night before. Weather tends to be unpredictable at times.

Keep Up with Laundry

Laundry procrastination leaves everyone feeling disorganized + chaotic in the morning. Laundry is one of those background tasks.

If you’re going to be home, you can easily throw in a load no matter what else you may be doing. Enlist older kids for laundry duty as well.

It helps to categorize clothing, not only by color but by wearer. This way, the folder of the laundry can fill up baskets quickly without trying to figure out whose socks belong to whom.

I’ll be honest. I don’t sort laundry. Unless it’s delicate or hand wash, one big scoop of laundry goes into the washer, then into the dryer + then gets folded, hung + put away. Not sorting can also save a lot of time.

Make Productive Shortcuts

Since we’re discussing laundry… suppose you just cleaned + dried a load of laundry. Now you don’t have time to fold it.

A time-saving shortcut would be to carry the basket of clean clothing up to the person’s room whose laundry it is. This way, in the morning if they’re missing a favorite pair of jeans, you can direct them to the basket of clothes.

Lay Out Clothing the Night Before

Set out or have your kids set out complete outfits the night before. This alleviates everyone trying to figure out what they’re going to wear when they can be getting dressed instead. All they have to do is get up + get dressed.

Make + Pack Lunches at Night

Sometimes the last thing you want to do is start filling lunch boxes at 8 p.m. But if you make lunch prep part of dinner clean-up, you can organize everything so that you’re not awake at midnight worrying if you have enough cold cuts for everyone in the house to have lunch tomorrow.

Take Shifts for the Bathroom

If you’re short on bathrooms, the best way around this is to stagger wake-up times.

For a smaller sized family, adults can wake up + use the bathroom first. Kids follow suit while Mom or Dad is downstairs making breakfast. So set the alarms accordingly.

Bigger families should allow for the kids with the earliest schedules to use the bathroom first. Also, things like hair drying + make-up application for teen girls doesn’t need to happen in the bathroom, especially when others are waiting their turn.