072. Win Your Morning: 6 Simple Habits That Make the Whole Day Easier

Early alarms + school rush don’t have to mean foggy, frantic mornings. In this episode, I'm sharing the six small “levers” that reliably flip my mornings from groggy to calm and focused—no perfection required.

You’ll learn how to:

• 📵 Phone fast for 10–15 minutes to protect your attention and stop the doom-scroll before it starts
• 🧭 Use a simple Get-Going habit (coffee, unload the dishwasher, feed the dog) to beat sleep inertia and start your “target behavior”
• ☀️ Get natural light ASAP to reset your clock (even 5–10 minutes helps)
• 🏃‍♀️ Move a little (walk the dog, stretch, a few squats) to lift mood and energy
• 🧒 Set a positive tone with kid checklists so you’re not the household reminder system
• 😴 Prioritize sleep (and ditch the snooze button) so everything else gets easier

Here's what you can try this week:

Pick any two levers (e.g., phone fast + light) and run them for 7 days. Let tiny wins stack.

Mentioned in the episode:

👉 Get on the waitlist for my upcoming class, 3 Simple Steps to Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend --> https://fireflybridge.com/update

• Effects of using a snooze alarm on sleep inertia after morning awakening - Journal of Physiological Anthropology, 2022 Dec 31;41:43. doi:
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9804954/
• Phone fasting ideas popularized by TJ Power: https://www.uniladtech.com/science/space/nasa-astronaut-how-much-paid-blunt-statement-388644-20250814

Get on the wait list for my FREE class: 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter your Kitchen in just a Weekend! This is how you get no-cry mornings and calm evenings in your kitchen. And I'll show you how you can do it in just a weekend without overwhelm and without getting stuck. And, of course, you'll learn how to make sure the clutter doesn't come back with minimal effort. Go to https://fireflybridge.com/update and get on the wait list!

Connect with me:

You can find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
Here's my website: https://fireflybridge.com

Call or text me: 305-563-2292

Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

It’s natural that it may take some time to get back into the swing of things now that Back-To-School is here because now you’re dealing with earlier mornings than in summer. 
So in today’s episode, I’m going through the 6 things that help me win my mornings and make my whole day easier, even though I don’t really want to wake up early. 
Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!
I didn’t use to consider myself a morning person. I thought being a morning person meant that you jumped out of bed, ready to go in the morning, full of energy. But I tend to drag myself out of bed in the mornings, yawning as I go, and I feel like I’m groggy until I have my coffee.
But when you have to wake up early because you’ve got to get ready to get out of the house to beat the traffic, and maybe you have kids to get ready for school too, finding ways to make mornings work better is incredibly important.
So I experimented with my mornings over time, and I also, of course, did plenty of research to see what science could guide me towards trying out, all to find the Lazy Organizer way of make my mornings good.
And to me, good means I get the essential stuff done, the kids and I make it out of the house on time, no tears - we’re all in a good mood, or at least not angry or sad - motivated to have a productive morning!
I realized in the end, that I am a morning person. I get my best work done in the morning, not really after lunch or the evening. So I structure my days so that I do the hardest stuff I have to do for the day in the morning, the stuff that requires more brain or physical energy, and more of the interpersonal stuff that goes in the afternoons or evenings. So meetings? Afternoons. Doctor’s appointments? Afternoons or after school or at lunch time. 
So this episode isn’t about a perfect routine. It’s about a handful of small habits, or really levers, as I think them, that reliably flip mornings from being foggy to focused. You know, when your first hour works, the rest of the day gets lighter, OK? You make decisions faster, you’re less reactive, and you feel capable. 
Bringing us back to why we’re doing all this, why we talk so much about habits, routines, levers - it’s because we want to be Organized for Beautiful Living! And what we’re talking about today, setting up your winning morning, well that’s all about Pillars 4 & 5: Work to Live Well, and Thrive Daily.
And we aim to establish these 5 pillars of Organizing for Beautiful Living: Live light, love your home, connect often, work to live well and thrive daily, so that we can be Lazy Organizers. So that we’re not struggling with disorganization and clutter in our home and work, and we can be lazy about organizing, because organizing is not what’s important, right?. Beautiful Living in our homes is what’s important.
OK, so here are the 6 levers we’re going to go through. Again, these are the 6 things that have helped me to win my mornings. 
The first is Phone fasting.
This means not grabbing my phone and scrolling as soon as I wake up.
I use my phone as my alarm every day, and chances are that you do too, and it’s so tempting to grab that thing and check what’s up in the world, isn’t it?
But here’s what happens. Our neurobiological response to activities like receiving notifications or scrolling through social media or news sites is a release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that plays a big role in how we feel pleasure and motivation.
So we receive a DM or a text message, our phone dings with that notification, which triggers the release of dopamine which makes us feel a boost of pleasure. And researchers have found that this creates a cycle where our brains crave more of these quick rewards, which then leads to us using our phones more. Now when this gets bad, then we’re into doomscrolling, or worse, we have a phone addiction.
So the idea of phone fasting was presented by TJ Power, a neurologist. He explains that we should instead be trying to get our dopamine hits in ways other than our phones so we can live better. We shouldn’t be reliant on our phones, on quick and easy, contrived pleasures of social media because we know social media is largely not reality. And in comparison, our daily lives are generally sort of bland, right, when we compare them side by side with what we’re seeing on social media?
But just as shopping to feel better is not healthy, neither is looking at our phones all day to feel better.
So TJ Power argues that living our lives should be the thing that makes us feel good!
So instead of grabbing our phones as soon as the alarm goes off, we should fast from our phones for about 15 minutes.
What I do is the alarm goes off and I’m tapping all over the screen with my eyes closed to turn it off.
Then I go to the bathroom, I go to the kitchen and start making my coffee, I unload the dishwasher, and either I sit with my coffee for a bit and read a part of my book, or I envision how my day is going to go. All this takes about 10 minutes for me.
And then, I normally need to pack the lunches and things like that, so the scrolling through my emails and messages starts after that.
The idea is that you take action on something, you accomplish something, before you grab that phone because by accomplishing that one thing will naturally trigger dopamine and will make you feel pleased already. For me it’s smelling my coffee brewing and unloading the dishwasher, and getting the lunch packed. You could also make your bed, for example, or change into your workout clothes, or take the dog out.
It’s just a few minutes without the phone, but it’s made a really big difference for me. I mean, I’m not tracking my dopamine or anything like that, but I notice that I get less lost in my phone when the kids come out for breakfast, so we’re cracking jokes more, we’re planning for afterschool with my full attention. Things like that.

The second lever is a Get-Going habit. 
There’s been so much talk about spending early morning time productively, right? Like you hear about great business leaders who wake up at 4am, and they only need 5 hours of sleep, and they get more done before 8am than the rest of us get done all day. 
Well, that will never be me. My alarm went off at 5:15 this morning, and I felt like it was the middle of the night still. And we’ll talk about that on the last lever, but one of the things that has helped me to enjoy early mornings and get the essential things done is having a get-going habit.
Think of a Get-Going Habit as a simple task or a set of tasks that signals to your brain and your body that it’s wake-up time.
For me, it’s the smell of my coffee, and unloading the dishwasher. 
Other ideas that would also get your body going are feeding your dog, getting your workout gear on, doing 20 squats.
Your get-going habit is the habit that helps you transition from sleep inertia and quickly starting what you want to get done - or as researchers say, “starting the desired target behavior.”
Sleep inertia is that groggy feeling you have when you first wake up. It’s that period of time when you’re still cognitively impaired, not fully present yet. That can last anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes after you wake up, and during that time, you’re likely a bit disoriented and have slower reaction times.
That’s the time when I’m dragging myself out of bed, to the bathroom, then shuffling to the kitchen and all that. So until I’ve transitioned out of sleep inertia to fully awake, I’m not at 100%.
I can empty the dishwasher, I can make coffee and pack lunches, but I’m probably not ready for full-on work sessions or meetings.
You need to be aware that sleep inertia is impacted by how well you slept, right? So if I got a full night’s rest and I woke up naturally, I’ll probably transition out of sleep inertia much faster than I did this morning when I cut my sleep short because I woke up at 5:15. 
Still, having my get-going habit helped me to feel that, OK, the morning’s started. Let me get these things done so I can be ready for the rest of my day.
The third lever is exposure to natural light. 

Sunlight as soon as possible after you wake up is the best thing to set your chronological clock straight if you’re having sleep problems. 
So something as simple as stepping outside into the sun with your dog in the backyard for 5 to 10 minutes is great, or taking him for a walk, or just having your coffee or tea outside.
But when you’re leaving the house before the sun comes up, that’s not always possible. Still, maybe when you get to where you’re going, sit in your car with the sun in your face for a few minutes before going inside to the electric lights. It will really help.
The fourth lever is Get Moving. 
And I know you know this. Any sort of physical activity is beneficial to your body and your brain in the morning. Physically, you’re using your muscles, you’re getting oxygen moving, you’re regulating your hormone levels. And we talked about that dopamine release earlier? Well, getting movement of any kind is a win in my book. So whether I actually do a workout in the morning, or I just walk the dog, it’s 100% an accomplishment.
I know some people just do squats or jumping jacks or stretch as soon they get out of bed. Kudos to you! I’m so groggy when I first get out of bed that I don’t think I could stay upright if I did any of those things, so going out with my dog is my movement first thing, and later I’ll go out for a walk or I’ll do a workout.
But movement makes me feel better for the rest of the day! So my days aren’t all desk days, right? If I have a client, it’s physical work, and I take that into account. If I know I’ll be in my office most of the day, then it’s even more important to me to get some kind of movement in during the early morning.
The fifth lever is to Set a Positive Tone for Everyone.
Listen, I can be just as cranky as anyone in the early morning! We’re not saints! In fact, I warn my husband when I’m especially tired by telling him I’m having a Cruella Devil morning, and he knows to keep a bit of distance, at least until I’m out of that sleep intertia phase.
But it’s not just me who I want to be in a good mood in the mornings. I want the whole family to feel positive. I mean, if we're cracking jokes, or sharing exciting things we’re looking forward to for the day, then we can talk about the after school and evening schedules with more calm.
One way I found to keep good moods going all around when the kids were little was to get them involved in planning their morning.
What were they going to wear? Which of the 2 options do they want for breakfast? Can they put the waffles into the toaster?
And I created a list for my school-aged kids so they wouldn’t have to ask me what they had to do in the morning every morning, and I didn’t have to remember to tell them.
I wrote it on a post-it note and stuck in on their bathroom mirror so they would know what they had to do before coming to breakfast.
And it was: use the bathroom - listen, you need to write everything down for the kids, right? - wash your face, change into your uniform, put your pajamas away, and make your bed.
This way, I didn’t have to tell them to make their bed a thousand times and pretty much lose my patience, right?
And after breakfast, it was brush your teeth, grab your backpack and jacket, and we were out the door.
So experiment with easy ways to have a positive tone in the morning. What few, simple things can you do to not have the yelling, nagging, or frustration rise up?
Maybe you have everyone find their shoes and set out their clothes the night before.
You create a simple meal plan with the kids so you’re not struggling with, or fighting over, what’s for breakfast, or what to put in their lunchboxes every day.
Maybe it’s also having your shoes and workout clothes in your exercise space every day so you’re not searching all over for them just when the kids are waking up and need your attention.
And the 6th lever is Sleep.
It all starts with good sleep and enough sleep. Without that, your mornings are going to be a struggle.
This morning was a struggle for me because my body clock was off. I shortened my usual amount of sleep by waking up at 5:15, but not going to bed earlier enough last night, which means that I didn’t spend enough time in the various stages of sleep to allow me to feel refreshed. And I’m going to work on correcting that from now on, of course.
And one thing I’m going to warn you against is hitting the snooze button.
When you hit snooze, you prolong the sleep inertia state, that groggy state you go through when you wake up, right? If you wake up, hit snooze, fall back asleep for 10 minutes and wake up again, you’re not going back into a deep sleep state. You’re falling into non-rapid eye movement sleep which is primarily defined as a drowsy state.
So while you think you’re getting more rest by hitting snooze, you’re just making your body live through a longer drowsy period, which is really uncomfortable and not fun. It’s what you’re trying to avoid in the first place by hitting snooze, but you’re actually making it worse!
So TJ Power recommends that we stop sleeping with our phones next to our bed, both because we’re tempted to scroll through them as soon as we wake up, but it would also be good to move that phone alarm away from your bed if you automatically tend to hit the snooze button.
The extra 10, 20, 30 minutes on snooze, in a drowsy state, is not worth it. It would be better to just set your alarm for 30 minutes later, and get more natural sleep.
So sleep is huge, and if you’re going through perimenopause or menopause and sleep is difficult for you, talk to your doctor, talk to your friends, experiment to see what could make it better for you.
Of all 6 levers, I think sleep is the most critical lever. All of the 5 other levers obviously depend on how well you’ve slept - your entire morning really depends on it.
But, again, we’re not about absolutes here. I struggled for a long time with sleep. It’s not fun, but we all go through it.
The best we can do is be Lazy Organizers and find ways to compensate using the other 5 levers.
So again, these are the 6 levers I use to win my mornings, and make my whole days a lot easier:
One, Phone Fasting for at least 10 to 15 minutes.
Two, A Get-Going Habit, which is a simple task that signals to my body and brain that it’s time to be awake.
Three, Exposure to natural sunlight as soon as possible after waking up.
Four, Get Moving, of course, in any way or shape that works for you.
Five, Set a Positive Tone for Everyone, and for me, that included posting a list of what my kids should do before they come to breakfast so I didn’t have to remind them, and they felt more in control of their mornings.
And Six, Sleep - good sleep, and enough sleep, and not hitting the snooze button.
I think Sleep, of course, is the hardest of these 6 levers to get into place. The other 5 are relatively simple, but might take a bit of experimentation to figure out what’s good for you and your family.
Keep it simple as you start, and you may not use all 6 of these every single morning from now on. I mean, our lives are not identical from day to day, and illnesses, travel and other situations might alter what we’re able to do each day.
But I do hope that you can try at least one of these levers to win your mornings more often than not.
By the way, I’ll add links to some of the studies that support these levers to the show notes, in case you’d like to read them for yourself, ok?
Thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope you have a winning morning tomorrow already!
I’m Zee, and I’ll see you on the next episode of Organizing for Beautiful Living.