My *New* Morning Routine

In today’s article for Early To Rise, I want to share my new morning routine and daily routine now that we have two girls under the age of two.

Be sure to share this with your friends and comment down below if you have any additional questions about my crazy morning routine and my daily routine and how I’m able to do this with a couple of awesome kids.

So, the first thing that I want to talk to you about is my wake-up time.

I used to get up at 3:57 AM. The weird time is because you have a better chance of getting up at a weird time than you do at the top of the hour. But, I started getting up at 3:00 in the morning now that we have two girls.

And there’s a very important reason why.

But, I want you to stop for a minute if you’re asking yourself, “how the heck do you get up at three o’clock in the morning?” Well, the answer is that you take your legs out from under the covers, you put them on the floor, and you stand up like you do at any other time of day.

And I don’t want you to get hung up on the fact that I get up at 3:00 in the morning. I don’t care if you get up at four, five, six, seven or eight.

What you do is you get up at the right time for your life.

And for me, getting up at three o’clock in the morning is the right time for three reasons.

Number one, I’m weird, obviously, and I like to be alone.

The second thing is that I need that alone time, that big thinking time.

When you have two under two, that’s about the only time of day that you can get to yourself unless you’re going to stay up really late. But most of the time you’re too tired to stay up late, and you’re too tempted by Netflix to stay up late. So, it’s actually a lot easier to be a morning person than it is to be a night owl if you’re an entrepreneur and want to move your business ahead. So I get up then.

And the third reason why I get up at three o’clock in the morning is the big why that I have, which is my family. I do everything for my family to live this amazing life.

For example, as you’ll see, I spend six hours a day with my kids.

What I do at three o’clock in the morning is I get up and come down the stairs, and then I go into my office, and I work from three o’clock in the morning or three thirty in the morning until five o’clock when my daughter gets up.

I work in very spartan conditions. So I don’t have a lot of stuff. I don’t have a fancy office. It’s very, very simple.

The reason that I do that is because all I want to do is focus on my work. That’s it. I come into my office, and I’ve planned and prepared the night before the number one thing I have to work on.

Then, I open up the computer, open up a document, I write the sales script, or I write these video scripts, or I create my presentations for going to my mastermind, and then I get it done.

Then at five o’clock in the morning, I hear my little girl get up. Isabella sleeps exactly 10 hours and one minute every single night. Doesn’t matter what time we put her to bed. We can’t get her to sleep past 10 hours and one minute every single night.

So what I do is I go upstairs, and that’s when the daddy daycare shift starts. So I go up and she feeds and she reads and it’s super cool.

She loves to read books… So we hang out upstairs and we come down at about 5:30 and I give her some more breakfast. We have sweet potato pancakes. We have yogurt. We have frozen popsicles, there are coconut water, yogurt and berries.

She absolutely loves those, and then what we do Is we go for an hour-long walk. She absolutely loves it. She doesn’t say a word for an entire hour that we’re out there. She just gets to take in the world. Our other baby is only a few weeks old, so I don’t have to take her for a walk right now. Soon I will, but after the hour-long walk my two-year-old and I come back and Mama and baby are up.

Remember our baby is only a few weeks old when writing this. I make breakfast for my wife, and obviously, I don’t make breakfast to the two-week-old my wife makes breakfast for the two week old and then after that, at 8 o’clock in the morning, we have a nanny in the daytime and this is a very important message for entrepreneurs… Probably the most important message of this article, which is to buy back your time.

We invest in the nanny. It doesn’t cost very much because we do live down here in Mexico. We don’t have to spend a lot of money on daytime help. So, we invest a few dollars in that, so I buy back my time, something I’ve been saying for years and years and years in my books.

You want to eliminate the $10 an-hour tasks, such as editing your videos and doing your own websites, doing your own customer service, and cleaning your house. That’s not what you were put here to do. In fact, the worse you are at those things, the worse you are at editing, the fact that you don’t know how to do your own websites, I don’t know how to turn a broom on, so I can’t clean the house.

You need to be bad at those things so you’re not tempted to do them. I see so many entrepreneurs who do those things because they know how to, and it stops them from doing the selling, the leadership, the communication, the marketing that grows their business, and then they’re always stuck and struggling, and they wonder why.

It’s because they don’t have that mindset of buying back their time. So our nanny shows up, it takes over with our two-year-old, there’s not two, she’s 18 months, but let’s call her two, round up, right? And she takes over with Isabella, which allows me to go back to work from 8 to 11, and I do revenue-generating activities.

I do one thing at eight o’clock, is I make my smoothie, my green smoothie with coconut water, protein, creatine, lots of spinach, blueberries, and bananas. So, sometimes it’s a purple smoothie, sometimes a green smoothie, depending on how many blueberries I put in… Then I go back to work from 8 to 11, and then at 11 o’clock in the morning, I go and do a 30-minute resistance training workout.

We’re very lucky, the gym is right across the road, but back when I lived in Canada, I had the home gym because I’m not wasting time doing the commute, so it’s a 30-minute workout. You should do resistance training at least twice per week for your health.

You want to be strong in your old age, but then the rest of the time, the exercise that I get tends to be from with the kids, right? Hour-long walks every single morning.

I speed walk, you should see my airport walking speed, it’s like four and a half miles per hour. Most people jog at that level, but I get my activity with my kids, and that’s what you should do; you should blend in your activity, your exercise with your family time because this is good role modeling for your kids to stay active – but it’s also good for you.

Then from noon until one I spend time with the family, I have lunch, relieve my wife, give her a break, sometimes I take my daughter to swim lessons. My 18-month-old she loves swimming, and then at 1 o’clock to 4 o’clock I do calls, I do filming, I write articles like this one, and then at 4 o’clock I’m done, and it’s back for another 4 hours of daddy daycare.

Then I take Isabella upstairs for a bath at 6:30. I used to hate baths until I started eating at 4 o’clock. I know what you’re thinking, “you eat dinner at 4 o’clock?” That’s right, I eat dinner at 4 o’clock.

Craig – How do you eat dinner at 4 o’clock? With a fork… That’s how I eat my dinner!

And the reason why I eat dinner at four o’clock is that I go to bed so early, and I used to eat dinner like 5:30 or 6:00, and I’d be so full and I’d have heartburn, and I wouldn’t sleep well.

So, I started moving my dinner up until when I usually had a snack and I just eat a big dinner at four o’clock, and it helps me sleep better.

It helps me give Isabella a bath better.

My life is better even though it’s a super weird time to eat dinner. So we had the bath at 6:30 and then hanging out with Isabella, she goes to sleep at 7 o’clock. I come down and help my wife as we put our other baby to bed.

She doesn’t sleep very well for the first couple of hours. So two nights per week, it’s just me and my wife taking care of our baby, and I help out as much as I can.

Last night, for example, I was up from 10 until 11, you know, bouncing the baby, trying to get the baby back to sleep, doing my part as much as I could. And five nights a week, we have a night nurse, and this is an absolute game-changer.

Again, we’re buying back our time.

We’re buying sleep so that we can get up and run our businesses and do everything that we can with great energy. It prevents any tensions and frustrations, and it increases the amount of time that my wife and I are able to spend together.

So, those are the things, the different approaches to life that I have compared to a normal person, I guess you would say, where it’s all about buying back my time.

I wasn’t put here on the earth to clean a house.

I wasn’t put here on this earth to be always exhausted.

I was put here on this earth to make content, to create systems to help entrepreneurs, to network with other people to make introductions, to hold mastermind events, and to then be able to have quality time with my family and to stay healthy for my family.

So I take a very different approach to life. My friend, Bedros Keuilian says, “I’m a control king with my time, and that planning and preparation that we do makes our days so much better.”

Whenever there are meltdowns in the house from our kids or from myself, it’s because we didn’t do great planning and preparation. But whenever we have a really amazing day, it’s because we did better planning and preparation than ever before.

So, I’m still living my perfect days, as I wrote about in the Perfect Day Formula almost 10 years ago. I’m still living my perfect weeks as I wrote about in my Perfect Week book, and I’m still being unstoppable like I wrote about in my Unstoppable books.

If you don’t have my books, I’d love for you to grab them at craigballantyne.com/freebooks.

That’s my daily routine. I’m a boring guy, but I’m a wholesome guy.

I don’t go out and drink and party or anything. I just want to be with my family. I just want to have the freedom. That’s why we are here. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why we moved to Mexico – so that we could have our free life with our family and we can live life on our terms.

I want to help you do the same.

Drop a comment down below about why you think I am crazy? Tell me, what won’t work for you? What WILL work for you, and what other questions do you have about my daily routine? Let me know your thoughts!