If you're a regular Halle Work listener, you're probably a sucker for a morning routine, just like me, and for good reason. When left to our own devices were surprisingly bad at something as seemingly simple as getting fed and heading out the door on time. So maybe by now
you've got yours perfected. You're meditating, exercising, journaling, drinking water with a pitch of Himalayan rock salt and a squeeze of lemon, all before your first Probadoria session at the office, Or if you're like the rest of us, it's a work in progress. And to add one very complex variable to the mix, maybe you have kids. Most kids hopefully aren't as interested in being little productivity machines as we are, but the right start to their day is still just
as important as yours. Is best selling author and parenting expert and host of the top ranking podcast Happy Families, Doctor Justin Coulson says that the solution is actually to do less, and according to research, it can be as simple as a four part formula to turn our mornings with kids from messy to magic. My name is doctor
Amantha Imbert. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. So what are some of Justin's time saving hacks as a working parent, especially when thinking about the mornings.
So there's probably a couple of different ways to answer this, Samantha, and I know that I don't want to get too deep and philosophical, but we do definitely have a couple of those things that I'll share with you in just a tick. Before I do that, though, I think it's probably worth highlighting my relationship with time and how it's changed over the years, and having children has been a
really major element to that. I used to feel like time was a resource, and I felt like it was my job to maximize and utilize time for the very best of my ability, and to squander time was just
the wrong thing to do. Watching my children when they get to live their life outside of the structures that we place upon them for their good, of course, Amantha, like school, for example, what I've discovered is that they actually don't think about time, not just not in the way that we think about time, but they actually don't think about time at all. It isn't important to them,
it's not a thing. They're so present and so delighted to be in whatever moment they're in with I'm not suggesting that the future is an important that we shouldn't be making plans, but just their ability to be there and to enjoy that. And it's something that I've really learned as I've considered my life. I mean, I'm getting dangerously close to now and I'm maturing, and so Amantha,
I think that I'm what I've actually decided. And this might sound a little bit woohoo and airy fairy, but I've decided that I am time like I am just made up of the moments that I have, and with that it's helped me to be a lot more easy with what happens. I'm still I'm still an efficiency junkie. I still need to get things done. When I step into the office, stuff has to be done, We've got
deadlines and all that kind of thing. But when I step out of the office, my focus is actually less about time and efficiency with my children and just being with them. And that might mean that if they're having a bad morning, as much as we have a process for getting through the morning and making sure that well five children or four children. Now that the oldest ones don't need is so much, are out the door on
time and doing what they need to do. We've kind of allowed ourselves to just be with them where they are. We have one daughter as well who has ADHD, and so that has also forced us to look at time and efficiency in a completely different way. So that's a kind of philosophical treatis before my answer. The short answer though, is we've got a couple of things that we do. One of the things is what we call our making Morning's Magic system, and that's comprised of four elements. Element
number one. The morning begins the night before. So that means that we get the kids lunch boxes organized, or at least have them out and ready for the next day. They've got their uniforms, is it library days? At sports day? Do we know where their shoes are? Has a rogue sock been left under the seat in the car as their swimming gear ready for the next day? All that sort of stuff. Morning begins the night before. We have found that that is one of the most incredibly useful
things to make sure that we have smooth mornings. We even sort of pull out the stuff for breakfast and stick it on the kitchen bench so it's ready. That's the first thing. The second part of the four part process is that we wake the kids up about ten or fifteen minutes before they need to be awake. And
what that does is a creates two things. First of all, connection because when we wake them up, we walk into the room gently and softly and sit with them and give them a hug and talk to them about the dream that we've wokened them from or what they're looking forward to in the day. We just have two or three minutes with each of them. It doesn't take long, but they wake up feeling connection before we move it to the next room and then a Mantha the critical thing.
It also creates margin because no one's rushing because we've got an extra tenn or fifteen minutes because everyone's getting up a little bit early. The third thing that we do is we actually have kind of like a breakfast and lunch system. The kids put in their breakfast order and their lunch order by you know, when you go to a motel, usually a cheap motel on the side of a highway, you can do a quick tick and
flick for room service. Breakfast the next day and you order those two pieces of thin white bread with a couple of fried eggs that usually arrive cold and a little bit too hard, not running en off. But you've got that tick and flick process. So we actually us we don't do it anymore because the kids have got
the system nailed. But to start it off, we would get the kids to fill in their menu for breakfast and lunch the night before, which means that when they walk out into the kitchen, the list of what they need to do is already there. What they're going to eat, what they're going to prepare, how it's going to work. And I can't tell you how amazing that is to remove the decision making process from a tired, sleepy child's mind. They just have to look at the piece of paper
and make that. And we've spent the time to teach them to make it, which means that step number four is that we don't tell them what to do. What we do instead, as we say, hey, how are you going with the five things that need to be done this morning? What's next? How can I help?
That is so good. I'm taking copious notes as you're talking. Justin I'm loving this.
We found that it's made an enormous difference, and in fact, it was so popular that The New York Times picked up an article that I wrote and they published it. If people want more, you could probably just link to the Making Morning's Magic New York Times piece that I wrote, and it outlines precisely what those steps are and also how it taps in with basic psychological needs that kids have. And this is why it works because it fulfills the
need for connection. They're getting lots of that when we wake them up nice and early and spend time with them, but also as we say, hey, how are you going? What help do you need? Which is connection rather than where are your shoes? Why haven't you done this? Hurry up, we're going to be late, which is correction and direction. So it meets that need for connection. It satisfies the need for autonomy because they're making lots of choices about what they're going to eat or what they're going to
do to make the morning work. And it also satisfies a basic psychological need for what research is called competence
because they do it themselves. We spend the time teaching them how to make their breakfasts, how to scramble their eggs, how to pour milk onto their week bics, and how to get their lunch organized, which means that by the time they're about sort of eight on nine years old, they're doing it all on their own, which which is just bliss for a parent who is busy and tired and probably stayed up too late the night before watching Netflix instead of remembering that their morning began the night
before as well.
That's very cool. I was curious around what you were saying, just around being really present and almost losing that sense of time and almost the artificial structure that a lot of us can impose onto our kids. And it was funny. It reminded me of a moment this morning with my daughter before homeschool started, and we were playing with Lego and I'm on a never ending mission to sort all the Lego blocks into their appropriate colored boxes. I mean,
like that's like achieving in box zero. It might happen for one minute and then it'll all be ruined. And I was just I was really in flow, and I asked, Frankie, you know, do you know what it means to be in flow? And she said no, no, And so we're talking about that concept, which I feel is all about just being really present and losing yourself in the moment. So what has helped you be present with your children? Because I feel like that's easier said than done.
It's paradoxical, But what I've discovered is that when I try to do it all, I feel stressed and pressured and frustrated, and I feel like the world is moving too fast. And the great paradox of this is I've had to recognize that I am finite, and my time is finite, and my capacity is finite, and that therefore I can't do it all. And the tremendous paradox of accepting that you can't do it all is that you kind of sit there for a second on the sofa
and think, I'm helpless, I can't do this. But then this remarkable thing comes out of that acceptance, and that is, well, if I can't do it all, what will I do? Because I Am going to do something. And it's in that moment that you kind of get this crystal well, if you're intentionally about it, you get this crystallization of values. If I can't do it all this morning, in terms
of my gigantic to do list I'm supposed to. I mean, if you read all the health and wellness blogs, I'm supposed to meditate, and I'm supposed to have my spiritual or religious practice, and I'm supposed to exercise, and I'm supposed to work on my to do list or my mantras or my affirmation. So I've got to look at my I mean, you know the bogles that I'm talking about, and they make you feel so inadequate, because not very many of us wake uppen with our lives like that.
And what has happened instead is I sit there like, okay, so that's not going to work for me. So what can I do what matters? And that's actually part of the way we distilled our mornings. We looked at how mornings needed to work, and we realize that our children really have either four or five things to do. They need to have breakfast, make their lunch, get dressed, and do their hair and brush their teeth. And if they can do that by a certain time, what that allows
is all the other stuff is superfluous. All the other stuff doesn't really matter. And as we've taught them how to do those things themselves, as we've developed their competence. What it's meant for us is that we can actually be in those moments with them. We don't have to be rushing around and stressing and panicking about it. And it just makes it makes such a difference. Now, do we get it perfectly? Do we have calm, peaceful mornings every morning? Now, that would be just such a such
a lie. But most mornings we actually get it eighty or ninety percent of away.
There.
It might be our challenging child, or a child who's had allows his sleep or woken up with a sore head, or just got out of bed on the wrong side. Stuff happens. Sometimes it's me or my wife, But just pausing and being intentional about it, and having done that heavy lifting in those early years, those first five to
seven years, ge it makes a difference. I think that's one other thing as well that really sits in with this in a profound way for me as a parent, And it seems to resonate with a lot of parents that I talk about. Amantha. It may do the same thing for you. There's an old, old saying in the parenting literature. It's been around for decades, and that is that to a child. Love is spelled T, I M E. And if love is spelt time, I can't help but pause and wonder what hurry up says to a child?
What that means to a child? My sense is that hurry up to a child something like you don't matter. It's my agenda that is king here. We are so so focused all the time on managing time. But what if I am time? What if I am the moments that occur in time because they're happening in me. What if I choose how I'm going to not use time, but how I'm going to be right now? And what will that do to my experience of this moment? What
will that do to my experience of time? What will that do in terms of the relationships that my family have with me? That's kind of that's really affected the way that I think about my time or in other words, how I am with my family with my children, mornings, afternoons, evenings.
Now, justin for people that are keen to connect with you and consume more of your work, what is the best way for listeners to do that?
Well? I'm the co host and parenting expert on the brand new channel Line TV show Parental guidance. So basically, if you google my name, all roads from Google will lead to my Facebook page, my Instagram, my website, happyfamilies dot com dot au. I'm pretty visible on the internet and I'll be pretty easy to find.
Fantastic Justin, I have learned so much. Thank you so much for your.
Time, Amantha. I hope it was valuable. Thank you.
If you like Justin's advice, check out his podcast, Happy Families. It's one of my favorites for getting research backed and practical parenting advice. And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered to help me work better, which range from interesting research findings through to gadgets that I'm loving. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot cop That's How
I Work dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every episode and makes it all sound amazing. See you next time.