Morning rituals and early rising are all very good but…..

….they’re not enough on their own

It’s easy to rise early when you get to my age. The drive to visit the loo first thing is just one of the things that makes starting the day at 5am less of a chore than it was in my younger years.

I have learned, too, thanks to a combination of age and sobriety, that I need to keep busy once I’m awake. Busy in the sense of either knowing what tasks I have down to accomplish next or at least having books to hand that I am enjoying reading and want to return to. As my kids were growing up, whenever they said they were bored, I told them to read a book. “It’s impossible to be bored surrounded by books,” I would tell them. You may be surprised to know that my children — now adults — spend very little time reading books. Go figure.

But that’s enough about them; back to me. I have been an early riser for many years now. And I have used a bullet journal for the last few years to make sure I know what I am supposed to do next. In theory. Unfortunately, I have yet to master putting tasks in sequence in my bullet journal beyond the few tasks I repeat each morning and which form what can be called my morning ritual. By the time breakfast arrives, I have a list of tasks and I get to pick and choose what to do when. Which means, of course, that by the end of the day, many tasks are rescheduled for the following day (ad nauseum) as I scrabble to make at least a dent in the list of tasks outstanding. Ho hum.