From The Straits Times    |

Image: ariwasabi/123RF.com

Unless you are Duchess Kate or Tiffany from SNSD, you have probably experienced many chaotic mornings where you just cannot pull a good look together, even with a reasonable amount of time.

You end up being late for work because you can’t decide on the shoes you want to wear, the number of bracelets you should stack on, whether to pick silver or gold for your accessories and the list goes on. Nothing ruins my day more than a horrible outfit. 

So here are 5 really useful tips that will definitely help you save precious morning minutes!

1. Plan your outfit the night before
This is a huge time saver. Before you go to bed, open your wardrobe and pick out what you would like to wear tomorrow, from your clothes and right down to your shoes, bags (including the contents of it) and even your accessories.

Be sure to steam, iron and remove lint from your clothes, ransack for your shoes from the cupboard and lay out your accessories. Basically, do whatever you need to for your outfit and leave them in an accessible place, so all you have to do the next morning is to reach out for it.

If you are really that fickle and wake up feeling like you don’t want to wear the outfit that you’ve picked out last night, you can simply edit it from there. Swop the white shirt for a navy one, or put on a pair of ballet flats instead of stilettos. Either ways, it’s still more efficient than planning an outfit from scratch!

2. Keep your accessories organised
Imagine this: you have finally decided on a particular necklace after 15 minutes of deliberation in the shower, only to find it tangled up in a massive knot with three other necklaces. In order to keep such frustrating situations from happening, you should always separate your jewellery in individual cases or hang them up neatly on a jewellery stand.

3. Store your necessities in one pouch
If you are the sort who is constantly changing from bag to bag to match your outfit, you should consider packing all your essentials (e.g. wallet, key etc) to make the transferring process easier. It saves time and lowers the chances of you forgetting an essential item during the switch.

4. Wrap your hair in a towel before blow drying
I sport long tresses, so blow-drying my hair takes up a lot my time in the mornings. Wrap your freshly washed hair in a super-absorbent towel while you put on your make up and pack your bag; a big percentage of the water in your hair gets absorbed by the towel so you’ll need a shorter amount of time to get it completely dry.

5. Keep an outfit diary
This might sound a little over the top, but I swear that this works for me. You don’t have to specially dedicate an entire notebook just for this. All you need to do is make small notes on your calendar or your work planner that you’re already using on a daily basis. It really helps to remind you of the nice outfits that you managed to put together previously so you can repeat the entire look again on days when your ideas run dry.