At the end of May, I turned 36 years old. I suppose you could still say I’m in my “mid-30s,” but 40 (40!) is so close I can almost touch it, and I have a feeling I’m going to blink and it’ll have arrived, complete with all the wonderful and terrible things that come with for-real middle age (wisdom, wrinkles, and so on).

I’m not a big believer in resolutions because to me resolutions are basically just ways to siphon guilt directly into your brain, but on my birthday, I decided I wanted to make some changes to how I treat myself (which is historically not especially well, as both my best friend and my therapist could tell you; they certainly tell me all the time). Even I can resolve to do something small - anything - to care for myself every day. A few minutes of meditation. A playdate with my children where no phones are invited along. The permission to take a few minutes each morning and night to care for my skin. Vitamins.

My skin has been a trouble area for me for the past couple of years; I’ve written about this extensively. I’ve tried various strategies to handle the one-two punch of having some parts of my face be broken-out and red, while others are Sahara-level dry, and what I’m finding is that for me, there is no one-size-fits-all solution: the only constant is that I have to pay attention to what’s going on with my skin; how it feels today.

I wish I was the kind of person who woke up an hour before the rest of the household to make coffee and lunches and whatnot, and be all showered and human by the time my kids emerged from their rooms. Maybe I will be one day, but not today. Today, I am all about The Night-Before Hack, because it is during those hours after dinner and before bedtime that virtually everything gets done.

Want to know the real way I “get everything done” at night? I do it all at the same time. All of it. (OK, perhaps talking on the phone while reading a book, brushing my teeth and watering the plants is a tiny exaggeration - but only a tiny one.) But that’s not especially helpful advice - so here are some more specific ways I make things happen at night so that they don’t have to happen in the morning.