THE MADNESS OF MORNINGS

Mornings are a madcap time in many households. Like mine. On mornings when I am responsible for getting my three children fed, dressed, and in the car by 8:45 a.m., I can be up before 7:00 and, if I’m not careful, feel like much of that time is spent dashing around. My eye is on the clock. I line up boots and coats to stave off last-minute disasters. Even so, it’s always possible that one child will make a stand against some tyranny—like being forced to wear socks—and we inevitably cut things close at the end. After I drop them off at two different schools, I usually get back to my desk around 9:15, when, instead of commencing my workday, I’m often tempted to just pour a cup of coffee and goof around online.

Having spent the past few years examining how people use their time, I know such orchestration—spending two or more hours each day getting ready to face what lies ahead—is nothing unusual. Magazines teem with stories on how to tame morning chaos. According to the National Sleep Foundation’s 2011 Sleep in America poll, the average 30–45-year-old claims to get out of bed at 5:59 a.m. on a typical weekday morning, with 46–64-year-olds rousting themselves at 5:57. Yet many people don’t start work until 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. And by “start work” I mean “show up at the workplace.” When people are frazzled from wrangling small children, battling traffic, or even standing in line for twenty minutes at Starbucks, it’s easy to seize that first quiet stint at the office as unconsciously chosen me time. We read through personal emails and peruse Facebook and headlines totally unrelated to our jobs until a meeting or phone call forces us to stop.

In the end you can spend three to four hours a day on mindless tasks or barking at a petulant child to get in the car now or we are driving off without you instead of on your core competencies. These are your highest-value activities: nurturing your career, nurturing your family beyond basic personal care, and nurturing yourself. By that last category, I mean activities such as exercise, a hobby, meditation, prayer, and the like. The madness of mornings is a key reason most of us believe we have no time. We have time, but it’s consumed by sound and fury that culminates in few accomplishments beyond getting out the door.

But mornings don’t have to be like this. Studying my own, even on those madcap days, I see how they could be better. They can be productive times. Joyous times. Times for habits that help one grow into a better person. Indeed, learning to use mornings well is, in our distracted world, what separates achievement from madness. Before the rest of the world is eating breakfast, the most successful people have already scored daily victories that are advancing them toward the lives they want.

At least that’s my conclusion from studying time logs and profiles in which high-achieving people talk about their schedules. Perusing the Wall Street Journal over coffee the other morning, I learned that while I was still sleeping, the Rev. Al Sharpton had already done a workout. “He has a gym in his Upper West Side apartment building, where he’s usually the only one working out when he arrives around 6:00 a.m.,” the paper noted. He warms up for ten minutes on a stationary bike and jogs thirty minutes on a treadmill. Then it’s on to the stability ball and crunches. “On days he can’t get in his morning workout, he uses the gym at NBC Studios. He travels to two to three cities per week and says he makes his staff call ahead to ensure the hotel has a gym.” Exercising in the wee hours, he never worries about what he looks like. “I usually wear an old track suit and Nikes,” he told the WSJ. “It’s so early no one sees me.” Coupled with dietary changes, however, this early-morning ritual in grubby clothes has made the reverend look quite spiffy. He’s lost over one hundred pounds in the past few years.

James Citrin, who coleads the North American Board and CEO Practice at the headhunting firm Spencer Stuart, is also often exercising by 6:00 a.m. He uses that early-morning quiet to reflect on his most important priorities of the day. One day a few years ago, he decided to ask various executives he admired about their morning routines for a Yahoo! Finance piece. Of the eighteen (of twenty) who responded, the latest any of them was up regularly was 6:00 a.m. For instance, according to the interview notes Citrin later shared with me, Steve Reinemund, the former chairman and CEO of Pepsi, was up at 5:00 a.m. and running four miles on the treadmill. Then he had some quiet time, praying and reading and catching up on the news, before eating breakfast with his then-teenage twins. When I asked Reinemund, currently the dean at Wake Forest University’s Schools of Business, about his schedule, he said that he’d been running those four miles pretty much daily for decades. “I don’t stay in a hotel that doesn’t have a treadmill,” he said. The exception to the routine? Sundays he starts a little later, and Thursdays he hosts “Dawn with the Dean,” when the Wake Forest students can meet him at 6:30 a.m. to run three miles.

Others of Citrin’s survey respondents started even earlier. One executive told Citrin, “There is a diner in town (‘Louie’s’), where I go most every day for papers and coffee. . . . Opens at 4:30 a.m., have papers by 5:00 or so. . . . They know me there so when they see me through the front window it is time for Conway’s large coffee, and four papers. . . . Billy is usually behind the counter, and it is amazing how many regulars he can keep straight.”

Whatever the ritual, though, there is a reason for these early-morning routines. Successful people have priorities they want to tackle, or things they like to do with their lives, and early mornings are the time when they have the most control of their schedules. In a world of constant connectivity, of managing global organizations, the day can quickly get away from you as other people’s priorities invade—sometimes even those of the people you love dearly and share a home with. As I’ve been talking with people about their mornings, the phrase I hear repeated is that “this is the time I have for myself.” As Reinemund told me, “I look forward to my mornings. I cherish my mornings, my personal time.” An executive might never be able to relax in Louie’s diner for an hour at 2:00 p.m., but at 5:00 in the morning, he can. I can’t write in my journal quietly at 8:15 on those preschool mornings, or lift weights, but I can at 6:15. Parents can also use some of that breakfast time more consciously for nurturing our children, rather than keeping our eyes on the clock. Seizing your mornings is the equivalent of that sound financial advice to pay yourself before you pay your bills. If you wait until the end of the month to save what you have left, there will be nothing left over. Likewise, if you wait until the end of the day to do meaningful but not urgent things like exercise, pray, read, ponder how to advance your career or grow your organization, or truly give your family your best, it probably won’t happen.

If it has to happen, then it has to happen first.