Finding a morning routine that doesn’t start with hitting the snooze button or a massive sugar-filled latte can prove to be a difficult task in the world of event planning. After a long night of work, the next morning can sometimes feel like a bad hangover. Although it’s easy to fall victim to the vicious cycle of waking up a little late, skipping breakfast, and rushing out the door, it’s often necessary to take a break and reevaluate the habits that are helping and hurting your health, work, and overall happiness. Below are five ideas to getting back on track and enhance your event planning skills.
1. Make A GamePlan: Decrease Decision Fatigue
The strength of your attention span and willpower decreases as you deliberate decisions throughout the day. As an event organizer, you want to save decision-making for decisions that actually make a difference and have consequences that could make or break your event. By eliminating decisions that you don’t really care about or want to spend time contemplating, it’s helpful to plan ahead and automate tasks such as these. Here are some simple steps you can take to automate time-consuming, yet necessary morning tasks:
- Plan outfits the night before.
- Pack your gym bag/work bag the night before.
- Sleep in running clothes (so you are less likely to skip your morning jog).
- Get a pill organizer for your vitamins/supplements.
- Make your meals the night before in a slow-cooker.
Automating tasks such as the ones listed above will leave you more time to plan the things you want to achieve throughout the day, while helping you save mental energy on things you don’t necessarily want to bother with in the early hours of the A.M.
2. Energize: You Don’t Need To Run A Marathon
Squeezing in a morning workout will help you get in the zone, improve your mood, and start your day off energized. Not only does exercise release endorphins and other feel-good hormones, but who doesn’t feel a sense of accomplishment after finishing a workout? Starting your workday with a good workout under your belt will also save you time by avoiding evening rush hour, a crowded gym, and precious time you could be spending relaxing or with your family. This doesn’t mean you need to exhaust yourself with a long and intense cardio session. There are proven benefits to light exercise such as gardening, biking, playing a musical instrument, and walking,
3. Practice Mindfulness: It’s Easier Than You Think
Practicing the art of mindfulness can often be confused with trying desperately not to think about anything or fervently attempting to sit still. However, mindfulness is actually defined as “the state of being conscious or aware of something”. So, your goal is not to sit atop a mountain and think about nothing for hours on end. The goal is to bring yourself into the present moment. The good news is, there are lots of ways to practice mindfulness without entering an ashram or giving away all of your worldly possessions. Here are some ways you can bring your mind into the present:
- Express Gratitude: Immediately upon waking up, write down five things you are grateful for and five things you want to accomplish that day. Using a tool like The Five Minute Journal is great way to hold yourself accountable and keep things organized.
- Use a meditation app. like Omvana, Headspace, or Calm. These all provide different features to make meditating a little less intimidating and more feasible for people with busy schedules.
- Integrate mindfulness into everyday tasks like washing the dishes or brushing your teeth. A book like How To Train A Wild Elephant, can be a helpful resource because it provides exercises you can easily incorporate into your daily life. Although these exercises are often as simple as taking three deep breaths before answering the phone, they have profound and lasting effects on one’s quality of life.
4. Wake Up Your Brain: And Prevent Disease
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body” – Joseph Addison
The quote above is a good way to visualize the effects of reading. Just as exercise causes you to break a physical sweat, reading initiates a mental sweat. Reading sparks your creativity, stimulates your mind, reduces stress, and expands your vocabulary.
A recent study shows that just by actively engaging one’s mind, he or she can slow the progress (or even prevent) diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Dementia. The benefits continue to unfold when you consider the level of stress you might experience before becoming completely immersed in an enthralling story. Chances are high that you will feel significantly less stressed after reading a well-written novel that carries you into an entirely new world of possibilities.
Apart from decreasing your risk of brain disease and helping your overall state of being, reading equips you with new bits of information and inevitably adding words to your vocabulary. Acquiring these new skills will result in elevated self-esteem and self-confidence, as you will become a more articulate and well-spoken individual. This can translate into improved performance at work and better communication with loved ones.
5. Refuel: What You Might Not Know About Brekky
The right breakfast foods can help you concentrate, give you strength, and even help you maintain a healthy weight. You’ve heard it one million times, and you’ll hear it again – breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You’ve probably heard that you’ll lose weight and maintain a more nutritious diet. Maybe this concerns you, maybe it doesn’t.
What you might be more concerned with is your performance at work. Well, eating breakfast affects this too. By downing a protein shake, or munching on a veggie omelet, you are improving your concentration, problem-solving skills, memory retention, and overall cognitive ability. So, if you want to stay sharp as an event planner, do as your mother told you and eat your brekky! If you don’t have time to make a meal in the morning, hard boil a bunch of eggs on Sunday night that you can snack on throughout the week, or try one of these simple recipes.
What’s Your Morning Routine?
Everyone is different and each person’s mind and body respond to different things. While some people love the rush of adrenaline produced in a high-intensity workout at 6 a.m., others might enjoy taking twenty minutes to read a good book with their morning cup o’ joe. Experiment with different ways of preparing yourself for the day and find the routine that best fits your needs. If you have a routine that helps you to start your day feeling like a badass, please leave a comment below!
