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Morning and Evening Routines That Prevent Baker Burnout | Episode 96

  • Aug 19, 2025
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Your alarm goes off at 3:00 AM on bake day, and you have already been awake since 1:00 running the numbers in your head. You get the bake done and the orders out, and by two in the afternoon you are staring at your inbox with nothing left in the tank. When that is a normal week, your whole business is running on an owner with no plan for how her day starts and how it ends.


Sleep is one of the most valuable things a baker owns. When you are the person mixing, shaping, baking, packing, posting, invoicing and answering every message, your energy is the asset the whole business runs on, and it deserves the same attention you give your pricing.


So let me walk you through my actual morning and evening routines, including the parts I do badly. Take what serves you and leave the rest, because none of this is one size fits all.


Why a routine is a business decision, not a wellness trend

A routine is a set sequence of events you decide on once, ahead of time, so you are not making those decisions fresh every day. Here is what that buys you as an owner:

  • It reduces decision fatigue, because you already know what comes next instead of spending your good thinking on whether to answer email or start the levain.

  • It protects your energy for high priority work, so baking, sales and real business strategy get your best hours instead of your leftovers.

  • It helps you stay present, since you are not putting out fires in your own house.

  • It minimizes distraction. Without one, you bounce from task to task and end the day feeling like you worked constantly and finished nothing.

Full transparency, I do not do this well every single day. On the days I drift with no plan, I get to bedtime knowing I did not give my time to what mattered most. On the days I follow my rhythm even loosely, I feel focused and I am actually there for the people in front of me.


Treat it as a framework, not a rigid schedule

No two days in a microbakery look the same. Bake day is not admin day, market Saturday is not a slow Tuesday, and if you have kids in the house, someone is going to throw a curveball. So build your routine as a framework for your ideal day. It gives you structure to fall back on without falling apart when the schedule shifts, and that flexibility is the whole point.


My evening routine, because a good morning starts the night before

Everything in my day traces back to the night before. Here is how ours goes.


Early dinner. We aim for 4:00 or 4:30 PM, and I know that sounds wild if you are used to a six o'clock dinner. It works because we eat a hearty breakfast, a light lunch, and then a real, intentional dinner. My husband is a firefighter on 24 hour shifts, so he is gone every third day, and even when he is out the kids and I sit down at the table together. We keep a deck of conversation cards on hand and pull a couple of questions while we eat.


Clean up and wind down. After dinner we clean the kitchen, sometimes play a board game, and start heading toward bed around 7:00 PM.


Starter and bedtime, at the same time. While the kids are in pajamas and brushing teeth, I spend 15 or 20 minutes feeding my starter if I am prepping for a dough day. Mine are seven and eight now, so they handle most of bedtime themselves. I tuck them in, hand them their books, and say goodnight.


Screens off. We are not a big TV family, so instead of a show we head to bed and read. We try to put the phones down somewhere between seven and eight and we run a red filter on our screens to cut the blue light. Some nights are much better than others. I went down a research rabbit hole way too late more recently than I would like to admit, and the healthier version of that is a notepad on the nightstand so I can write the thought down and let it go until morning.


Tea and skincare. I drink Valerian tea in the evening, the Traditional Medicinals Nighty Night Extra, and it helps me sleep deeply instead of waking up all night. While I sip it I wash my face, then toner, serum, moisturizer. I am fully in my skincare as self care era and it makes me feel like a person.


A room built for sleep. Blackout curtains, no glowing lights anywhere, AC turned down and the ceiling fan on, because a cool dark room gives you deeper, more restorative sleep. Our little dog hogs the bed, so on nights I truly need the rest, he goes in his crate. Lights out around nine or nine thirty.


My morning routine on a non-bake day

Bake days start between three and four in the morning, and those mornings do not leave room for a ritual. Here is what the other mornings look like.


Fifteen minutes of cuddles. The kids climb into my bed around seven and we just talk and ease into the day. That small bit of presence changes the tone for all of us.


Outside, barefoot. I step outside, let the dog out, water the garden. Two or three minutes of fresh air, feet on the ground, and I am awake in a way coffee does not manage on its own.


Get fully dressed. Even on a day when I am not leaving the house, putting on real clothes makes me feel noticeably more productive than staying in sweats until noon.


Skincare again. Wash, toner, serum, moisturizer, sometimes a gua sha tool. People argue about whether that thing does anything, and it might be a total placebo, but it feels good and it wakes me up.


A real breakfast. We go protein heavy. Most weeks I prep a breakfast casserole ahead, just hash browns, eggs and sausage baked in a nine by thirteen, so we cut a piece and warm it up. Otherwise it is English muffin sandwiches from the freezer. I have a bad habit of skipping breakfast when I get going, and I know for a fact I feel better when I do not.


Coffee, slowly. A shot of espresso with about eight ounces of steamed raw milk and a splash of maple syrup. We weigh the beans, grind them, prepare the puck, steam the milk. It takes five minutes and it is my favorite five minutes of the day.


That is the whole thing, and it is not elaborate. I do not journal for 30 minutes or run through a yoga flow. If a walk, some stretching, reading, meditation or prayer serves you better than what I do, put that in instead. The part that matters is that it is decided ahead of time, that it is a structure and not a requirement, and that it leaves you ready for the day.


If you are a few years in and running real volume

At this stage you are the bottleneck in more places than you realize. You are the only one who knows the bake schedule, the only one who talks to the wholesale accounts, the only one who can fix it when the mixer walks across the floor.


Try this audit. For the next two weeks, write one line at the end of each day: what time you went to bed, whether you ate breakfast, and how the day went on a scale of one to five. You will see the pattern within ten days.


Then pick the single tweak with the biggest payoff and hold it for a month. For most owners at this stage it is bedtime. When your bake day starts at 3:00 AM, a midnight bedtime is a business expense you pay in judgment errors, slower shaping, and short answers to customers.


And if the honest answer is that no routine can fix your current volume, the problem is capacity, not discipline. That is when you start looking at bringing in help before you hit the wall, rather than after.


Start with one change

If you struggle to get to bed on time, make that the only thing you work on. Hang blackout curtains, turn the AC down a couple of degrees, or drink a cup of tea before bed for two weeks and nothing else. Commit to one tweak and add the next when the first feels automatic, because if you try to overhaul both routines at once you will not stick with it.


Your morning and your evening go together. It is very hard to have a solid morning without a solid evening, and the reverse is true too. So make small adjustments on each side and do not expect to go from a midnight bedtime to a 9:00 PM bedtime and hold it perfectly forever.


Final thoughts

Every choice here comes back to protecting your health and your energy so you can show up for your business, your household and yourself. If you are not caring for yourself with some intentionality, burnout is coming, and we are very much not about that life around here. If you want to go deeper on spotting it early, I have a whole episode on that.


So give yourself grace, do it imperfectly, and celebrate the small wins. Celebrate the night you got to bed 30 minutes earlier, or the morning you ate a real breakfast before the chaos started.


Even if your morning kicks off with school drop off and getting everyone out the door, you can still step outside barefoot for two minutes and breathe. Two minutes changes the rest of the day more than you would think.


Your business needs you at your best. Your family needs you present. And you deserve to feel good!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


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