Morning Time-Savers for Teachers (and anyone, really!)

Getting out the door in the morning within the forty minutes I allot to get ready is a challenge. Of course, I could get up earlier, but setting my alarm any earlier than 5:40 makes my skin crawl, so I make it work. Over the years I've tweaked my routine to maximize my time, so I figured I would share in case it's useful for someone else.

What I do in the morning:
Upstairs
Drink water
Get dressed
Hygiene stuff: contacts, brush teeth, deodorant, etc.
Fix hair and makeup

Downstairs
Take supplements
Feed Jack
Make breakfast
Pack lunch
Pour coffee
Eat breakfast
Take Jack outside
Head to the car!

All of this takes just about forty minutes: 20 upstairs, and 20 downstairs.

In my "upstairs" routine, I've done a few things to speed up the process:
1. Have water ready next to my bed for when I wake up
2. My lamp is on a timer and turns on at 5:55 to make sure I get up
3. This is the biggest timesaver; I put five 3M hooks on the wall in my closet, and pick out five outfits for the week on Sunday. I've started taking pictures of outfits I like, and put them in a photo album in Google Photos, so hopefully my Sunday time of picking them out will go even faster with some pre-made choices I know I already like. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not fantastically fashionable, so it's taken me a long time to figure out what I like and looks good!

 (I seem to have been on a red color palate that week)

In my "downstairs" routine, I've prepped a few things ahead of time for this all to go faster.

1. I set the coffee pot on a timer the night before so it's already ready, and I just have to pour it and go. 

2. I usually make breakfast in the morning, but to cut down this time even further, I just started making breakfast casseroles on Sundays, and then I can just heat it up and eat it all week.

3. My lunches are my dinner leftovers. When I put away leftovers, I always put some aside in a glass container for lunch. This way, I don't have to make separate lunches, and it's made the night before. 

It seems like I do a lot on Sundays, but one thing I usually do on Mondays is grocery-shop after work, and then make a large meal to pack for lunches for at least three days. I don't like thinking that my weekends are just to get ready for the week, so the only things I pressure myself to have done by Sunday night are outfits, and a lunch for Monday. It's not a fool-proof system, but it helps a lot! 

So there you have it. What are some of your time-savers?

<3 Ms. P