It is 8:07. One shoe is missing, the reading folder is upstairs, and somebody has just remembered, out loud, that it is PE today.

Nobody in that hallway is lazy. The problem is that every one of those jobs was left to the twenty minutes with the least slack in the day.

Most school morning routine checklist pages hand you a pretty printable of ten things for your child to tick. That is half the answer. The other half, the half that actually makes you late, is a short list for the night before and a way to know which day is PE day without anyone having to remember it.

A school morning routine checklist is really two lists

Look at the diagram above. The left side is the night before, the right side is the morning, and the line between them is the whole idea.

Every job that can be done the evening before moves to the left. That leaves the morning with only the things that physically cannot happen earlier: getting up, getting dressed, eating, teeth, shoes. Six steps. A seven-year-old can hold six steps. Nobody can hold fourteen.

The morning is not where the routine fails. It is where the evening before sends its bill.

The two lists also belong to different people. The morning list is the child’s, and it lives where they get ready. The night-before list is the grown-ups’, and it fails in a particular way: it lives in one parent’s head, so on the night that parent is out, it does not happen.

The night-before list, and where it should live

Five jobs, done at the same time every school night. We use 8pm because it is after dinner and before anybody is too tired to look for a book.

1. Bags packed and at the door. Reading folder, homework, water bottle. At the door, where nobody has to look for them.
2. Tomorrow’s extras. PE kit, library book, swimming bag, the costume for the class assembly.
3. Forms and money. Anything that needs signing or paying, done now, put in the bag now.
4. Clothes out. Uniform or the agreed outfit, socks included. Socks are where mornings go to die.
5. Lunch made or decided. In the fridge, or at least agreed, so breakfast is not also a negotiation about lunch.

Here is that list in Chirpy. You make a list called School night in Lists and put the five jobs on it once. It is on both parents’ phones, so on the evening one of you is at work late, the other opens the same five lines instead of texting “anything for tomorrow?”. When the trip form comes home, add it as its own to-do, assign it to your partner and give it Thursday as the date. They get a notification that it is theirs, and the day-before reminder lands on Wednesday evening.

Chirpy Basic is free for the whole household, up to six people, no card.

The weekly extras are what actually make you late

The daily jobs become habit inside a fortnight. The things that wreck a morning are the ones that happen once a week: PE on Tuesday, library on Thursday, swimming every other Friday. Once a week is exactly too rare to remember and too frequent to write down each time.

So do not remember them. Put each one on the calendar as a repeating event, once, at the start of term.

In Chirpy you add “PE kit” on Tuesday at 8:15, set it to repeat weekly, and it is on the household calendar every Tuesday until you stop it. The evening before, at 8pm, everyone in the household gets the reminder, which is the moment the night-before list is being done anyway. The kit goes in the bag at the door on Monday, and nobody says “it’s PE today” at 8:07 ever again.

The one-offs come from the school’s letters and emails, and our guide on getting school dates into family calendar covers the ones buried in a term PDF. If the after-school side of the week is the bigger mess, the guide on how to manage kids activities schedule is the companion to this one.

The morning list: six steps, in the child’s order

Now the child’s half. Six steps, in the order they really happen in your house, which may not be the order on anybody’s printable. If your children eat in pyjamas and dress after, write it that way.

1. Up, bathroom, wash face
2. Get dressed (clothes are already out)
3. Breakfast
4. Teeth and hair
5. Shoes and coat
6. Bag from the door, and out

Notice what is missing: packing, finding, signing, deciding. Those were last night. The morning list is short enough to fit on a card, and that is the point.

Where it should go

For a child of five or six who is still learning to read, a picture card stuck to the bathroom mirror will beat any app, ours included, because it is at their height and needs no phone. What Chirpy does is the half that card cannot: the night-before list on both parents’ phones and the PE nudge at 8pm, so the card’s six steps are all that is left by the time anyone sees it.

Older children with a phone of their own can be members of the household. Assign them their own night-before jobs on the School night list, “library book in bag”, and the job is theirs, with their name on it, rather than yours to remind them about.

Work backwards from the leave time

Most families set a wake-up time and hope. Set the leave time instead and count backwards, because the leave time is the one fixed point in the morning.

• 8:15 out of the door
• 8:05 shoes and coat (ten minutes, because shoes)
• 7:50 teeth and hair
• 7:25 breakfast
• 7:10 dressed
• 7:00 up

That is one family’s timing. Time one ordinary morning of yours, write down when each step actually finished, then add ten minutes to the whole thing. The ten minutes is the lost shoe. It will be needed.

Make the night-before list a shared job

Here is the uncomfortable bit. In most homes one parent does the night-before list, and the other one does not know it exists until the night it does not happen. That is the mental load in miniature, and our guide to the mental load household split is about exactly that pattern.

Writing the list down is most of the fix. Once School night is a list on both phones rather than a routine in one head, either parent can run it, and the one who usually does can have an evening off without the morning paying for it.

In Chirpy the list, the repeating PE reminder and the trip form assigned to your partner all sit in the same household, next to the rest of your week. If you want the whole week in one view, the weekly family schedule template shows how the school runs fit around everything else.

Common questions