Good Morning To You!

Experts share their secrets for streamlining and speeding up your a.m. routine for a calmer, more productive start to your day.

- Anne Marie O;Connor

Are your mornings like oprah's? Do you wake up naturally when the sun rises, without an alarm? Do you then spring out of bed, meditate, exercise and eat a healthy, balanced breakfast before heading off to a productive day at work? 

Or are your mornings more like a scene out of The Hangover (even if you just stayed up late bingeing on Netflix, not carousing all night around town)? After hitting the snooze button about 7,000 times, you stumble out of bed 35 minutes late, exhausted and discombobulated. (Hopefully you do know how the baby and the tiger got there.) 

If your typical a.m. is closer to the second scenario, rehabbing your routine can make your mornings, well, if not Oprah-perfect, then at least more manageable. It’s all a matter of planning and preparing, sometimes even months ahead, so everything you need—clothes, coffee, breakfast, coffee, keys, coffee—is ready to go. (You may even be able to sleep in 10 extra minutes!) Read on for ways that even the night-est owl can have lark-ish mornings.

Months in Advance

Want to make mornings this October effortless? Channel your inner Marie Kondo, the infamous organizational expert, every few months, when the seasons change—it will pay dividends every day in the future. Focus on these areas for the biggest payoffs:

Organize your closet. When the weather starts to change, “swap out your seasonal clothing, so you have just the clothes you’re likely to wear that season in your main closet,” advises Lisa Zaslow, founder of Gotham Organizers, a New York–based organizing consultant. “That way, you’re not picking through heavy wool sweaters in the middle of summer.”