The path between “asleep at home” to “awake at work” is rarely pretty. My husband’s involves an alarm that rings at 5 am and clothes donned in the dark because I am still fast asleep.

Mine might as well be spent in a separate time zone. It involves an alarm that does not ring until 7, followed by an entire thermos of coffee, a ratty sweatshirt and a breakneck shuttle between the middle school and the high school — hoping the whole way that I don’t catch the eye of anyone I know.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to start a working day. The first is hiding under the covers until the last possible moment. It appears to be a popular choice.

Carole Langrall, for one, has destroyed all variety of alarm clocks over the years, “due to throwing them against the wall, kicking them across the floor and then, when all else fails, unplugging them while the obnoxious snooze bar sounds”. Now Langrall, a Baltimore floral designer, uses her cellphone as an alarm, because the consequences of mangling that are too high.

Lisa Daily, an author, also takes a while to get out of bed. “I set my alarm with good intentions every night,” she says, “and then hit the snooze button repeatedly for 30 minutes until the last second I can wake up and still get my son to the bus on time”. She feeds her children something relatively healthy, grabs a Coke for herself, then loads everyone into the car and drives the very short block to her son’s bus stop.

“I only have a 15-minute window between when the bus comes for my son, and when my daughter needs to be at her school,” she says. “If we walk to the bus stop, we won’t make it. If the bus is late, we don’t make it.” If she sleeps through the alarm, they don’t make it. It’s happened. Or maybe that was me.

The other approach to morning is to put in a half-day of work before going to work — even if it means tricks like putting an alarm clock in the kitchen so you have to get out of bed to turn if off. (That suggestion is courtesy of Sean White, an account executive at Fleishman-Hillard.)

Such is the approach of Ellen Weiss, a marketing director for a financial advisory firm. Her weekday schedule, as she described it to me in an e-mail message, looks like this:

4.45 am: Wake up, put on workout gear. Head to kitchen to cook whatever the dinner that night will be. Take laundry to the basement and start the washer. Hop on the treadmill — conveniently located in the laundry room. Churn away for 30 minutes. Move laundry to dryer. Head upstairs to check on the cooking dinner entree, pack non-junk lunches. Attack the “chore of the day” (depending on day of the week: mop floors/scour bathrooms/dust and vacuum/clutter management/scour refrigerator and appliances). Shower and dress for work. Put on a long lab coat to cover the nice outfit and keep spills at bay.

6:15: Wake up kids. Cool dinner entree and prep any side dishes that need to go with it. Kids eat breakfast, cereal or toast, then gather up their stuff for school.

7:00: Kids depart for bus ride/walk to school. Set table for four, wrap and store dinner entree in the fridge.

7:15: Take off the lab coat and go to work.

And lest you think that it is just having children that turns the morning into a carefully choreographed march, consider the routine of Jonathan Burbank, a public defender in Baltimore, whose children are grown, but who wakes at 4.10 each morning so he can run. He calls the predawn asphalt “my temple” and savours the time alone.

Back home, he drinks two cups of black coffee while surfing the Internet and watching something I’ve rarely seen: the light outside before dawn. Near sun-up he prepares a “beige concoction” of protein powder, fruit, yogurt and soy milk to drink on his 20-minute drive to work, where he is at his desk by 7 am.

As for me, I consider it a victory when I am at my desk by 9 am. I am usually showered by then, and have changed out of the sweatshirt. I would see that as reason to be proud of myself, but for the fact that Weiss, Burbank and my husband have an insurmountable lead.