As the beginning of a new school year approaches, you might be wondering what you can do to make the upcoming one better than the last one. After all, practice makes perfect, right? Well here are a few things that we should all be doing:

1. Fill the Gas Tank the Night Before

Filling up gas in the morning is the worst: you're pinned down at the gas station with a lot of people and everyone's in a hurry, and it's their own fault (including you), and they all have an attitude about it (including you?). It's not a good place to be at and it will change the dynamic of your morning drastically, making you grumpier and more negative. Mornings start the night before. Just like part of your morning is going to bed early, part of your morning is making sure you're never short of gas (or making sure you charged your electric car).

2. Go to Bed Early

Time is a precious commodity, but most of what makes it valuable is how easy it is to waste, which is the reason why most people don't spend it right. We rather spend time staying up late, which makes getting up in the morning harder, and that turns getting the kids on time to school into a challenge.

For a lot of us, making that decision is hard, but think about this way: the time we waste late at night by not sleeping will make us less productive the next day and will likely prevent us from enjoying our mornings. Maybe you do very important stuff late at night, but most of us do things that aren't really productive.

3. Family Breakfast

Alright, so we're going to bed early, we're starting the day off early, and we're feeling great: let's have breakfast. Let's have a good breakfast. Let's have a healthy and nutritious breakfast! Let's have scrambled eggs and toast... with fruit and yogurt on the side or something! And let's have some damn good coffee too! Do we have some OJ? Let's have some OJ too, let's have it all, alright? Don't let anything stop you. Making your morning great will set the tone for the rest of the day, so kick it off with energy and a positive attitude.

4. Don't Waste Time Waking the Kids Up

We're going to bed early, right? Don't waste your time in the morning waking your kids up, make waking up a by product of the family breakfast: be noisy about it. From the moment you get up from bed, walk with a heavy foot, put some music on while you're making breakfast. Don't hold back. If this doesn't work, then go back to waking them up in whichever way you used to wake them up, but give this method a trial run. Try it before the school year begins; you don't wanna be late at the start of the school year.

5. Take 5

Once you're done with everything: your kids are at school (and were on time), you're at work - or back home - (and were on time) and the morning is dealt with, take five minutes off of your day. Pat yourself on the back. You did good. Think of some small way of rewarding yourself - maybe a small sugarless dark chocolate (works for me), or maybe something else.

Now it's time for more good doing, get on with the rest of your day. You go do your thing.