Waking Up on Purpose: My Journey to a 5 a.m. Routine

So I will say that when the whole thing first started, I arrived to Doha after three months in Europe where we had complete autonomy and flexibility around our schedule.

Other than a couple of flights that we had, most of our transportation was scheduled when we felt like we wanted to move to the next destination.

Like, for example, if we were buying a bus ticket, we did not buy an early morning bus ticket if we didn't need to.

Most of the time we had options.

So we'd buy a noon bus ticket instead of a 6 a.m. bus ticket.

so all summer when we were traveling we could stay up pretty late and our kids were on a schedule where they were definitely getting enough sleep but it was a different kind of schedule for kids we were staying up very late sometimes 11 pm or even midnight and then we were waking up at like 9 or 10 a.m it worked for us we were able to do some things in the evening In these locations we were traveling to, it was pretty fun.

We stayed up late.

We slept in.

We started the day kind of slowly.

And then the bulk of our activities were in the afternoon slash evening.

Then we went home, had dinner.

Every night looked a little bit different, to be honest.

The whole thing was very, very flexible and not very routine, which is the complete opposite of my life right now.

And I just want to share that.

how starkly different my routine is now compared to what we were doing all summer.

So just imagine all summer we had that luxury, I will call it, to make our own schedule, do what we wanted.

And then we show up in Doha and I had like one day to get ready for my job and And they said, are you ready to come into work? And I said, yes, but I'm probably going to need a later start time for the first couple of days as I'm adjusting to the new routine.

And they were fine with that because they weren't even sure if I was going to be able to come into the school.

I had just arrived to the country.

I said, yes, I can arrive, but probably 9.30 the first day.

And then I'll come in earlier and earlier.

So that was really nice because the first day I arrived at 9.30, the next day it was like 8.30. And eventually I got on track by like week two to be arriving by 7 a.m. And ever since I've been fine and I've never been late one time, I've been able to make it to the school by 7 a.m. or actually by 6.45 a.m. we leave our hotel apartment by 6 15 every day so by 6 15 we all all meaning me and the three kids need to be ready to leave that is the earliest routine i've ever had in my entire life and you may be listening to this and be like oh we've been doing that for years like that might be your family's routine but this has not been my family's routine My kids' school normally start close, it started close to 9 a.m. in the U.S.

So they started around 9 and I normally started my workday, if I was working anywhere in person, around 9 because I would say I need to drive my kids to school and this is the time that I can start and that's always been approved and I have never really needed to start any earlier than that.

Starting the day by waking up at 5, getting out of the house by 6.15 with three kids is very new to me.

It's new to me.