Some mornings everything happens at once. The kettle’s not boiled and someone wants to wear their ‘sparkle shoes’ despite the broken straps and the nappy bag won’t zip and I’ve looked at the clock twice in the last ninety seconds, both times feeling behind, even though nothing has actually gone wrong yet.
I tried fixing this with an earlier alarm. Twice. Twenty minutes earlier the first time, forty the second. Neither one made the morning feel less rushed. It just meant the rushed part started earlier, and I was much more tired.
More time seemed like the obvious answer to a feeling caused by not having enough of it. But instead of a calmer morning, the extra twenty minutes gave me a slightly longer version of the same one, because nothing about the order of things had actually changed.
What I actually needed was a part of the morning that belonged to me before anything else got a claim on it.
With one of my kids up by five most days and my partner often already gone for an early shift, the morning is organised around someone else’s needs from the moment I open my eyes. An earlier alarm doesn’t change that. It just means more time awake before I get to the part of the morning that’s mine (which for me is a few minutes at the sink washing my face and applying a few products without rushing).
In the end, what worked was simply moving that part of the morning that was entirely my own, earlier in the sequence of events, before things got out of my control. It works by coming first; before the kettle, before anyone needs anything.
Tomorrow, whatever time your morning actually starts: before you check on anyone, before the first practical thing, do the one small thing that’s genuinely for you. Even if it’s ninety seconds. Move it to the front of the queue instead of squeezing it in wherever there’s room left over.
For me, the rushed feeling came from how much of the morning got spent on everyone else before I’d had a single piece that was mine.
