Starting Simple: Making My Bed

May 2020 Progress Goal

This month, I decided to start simple. I will be focusing on building one of the most minimal and least time-consuming habits—making my bed each morning.

I had been doing this quite consistently over the past year but after graduating school and taking some time off, the habit sort of fell by the wayside.

Now, in the renaissance of my blog and monthly goals, I have decided to focus less on fun projects or large-scale goals and more on small habits that will slightly improve my life and over time become second nature.

To be clear, it’s not that I necessarily care that much about the physical act of making my bed. Although I do agree with former navy SEAL, Admiral William H. McCraven that it provides a small sense of accomplishment each morning that can spill over and give you momentum for the rest of the day.

More than being a person who performs the action of making her bed in the morning, I hope to become the kind of person who makes her bed every morning. One survey commissioned by Sleepopolis, a company aspiring to be the “most trusted and comprehensive sleep resource,” found that people who make their beds are more likely to be morning people, wake up without an alarm, and take shorter naps. Another survey (funded by a mattress company) found that 74% of people who made their beds in the morning felt accomplished at the end of the day compared to 50% of those who didn’t.

The 1 minute each morning that I spend actually making my bed won’t automatically make me that kind of person, but you have to start somewhere.

So, I’ll end it with this:

“You get those mundane things right, the things you do every day. You concentrate on them and you make them pristine. It’s like you’ve got 80% of your life put together. These little things that are right in front of us, they’re not little… and they’re hard to set right. And if you set them right it has a rippling effect.” -Jordan Peterson