If you’re going to go through ALL the effort to get up early during your Disney World trip, you better do it RIGHT!

Hitting the parks early can make a huge difference in the success of your day, but if you’re going to take advantage of perks like Early Theme Park Entry, you need a legitimate strategy. And as part of our go-to strategy, there’s one rule that we enforce for our Early Entry mornings!

Early Theme Park Entry is a perk available to guests of Disney Resorts that allows you to enter the parks 30 minutes earlier than off-site guests. It applies to all four theme parks every day, and that head start for some of the rides and attractions can be a huge benefit. You’ve just got to use your time wisely!

If you want to do Early Theme Park Entry during your visit, it’s imperative that you check the list of attractions available during that time for each park. For example, at Magic Kingdom, only Tomorrowland and Fantasyland are open for early entry, so if you tried to go to Haunted Mansion at 8:30 AM (on a day that the park opens at 9 AM), you wouldn’t be able to get in line or ride. Once you check the list of available rides, choose where you’re going first AHEAD of time. You don’t want to be locked into decision paralysis when you’re already inside the park.

The good news is that most folks are pretty good at that first part. They have a ride they want to prioritize and plan to visit it first thing when Early Theme Park Entry starts. Unfortunately, the decision paralysis often comes into play if you get through that initial attraction quickly and don’t know where to go next. We call this the 8:45 AM problem.

Most of the year, three out of four of the Disney World parks open at 9 AM, which means Early Theme Park Entry starts at 8:30 AM. If you’re hoping to make the most of that time, you probably arrived well before 8:30, and then when Early Entry started, you were off to the races right away. That’ll put you in the first few batches of folks on your chosen ride, but THEN what?!

We’ve seen it happen time and time again that Early Theme Park Entry goes smoothly at first, and then around 8:45 AM, there are families and groups who’ve already completed their first choice and are hovering around trying to decide where to go next. But you’re wasting precious time if you’re putting yourself in this position! If you wait too long, the off-property guests will be let inside the park, and you’ll lose the edge for getting into ride queues first.

So, the solution here is to have an initial ride that you want to do for each park, likely the ride on your to-do list with the longest projected wait time (or one you don’t have a Lightning Lane booked for), and then ALSO choose a second ride to head to once you finish the first. Even if you get in line for that second ride five minutes before the park opens for the day, that could make a massive difference in your wait time.

When looking at this strategy, it’s a good idea to choose rides that are physically near each other, so you don’t waste time walking. For example, this could mean rope dropping Slinky Dog Dash in Hollywood Studios and then walking next door to Galaxy’s Edge to do Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. Or this could look like knocking out Seven Dwarfs Mine Train in Magic Kingdom and then heading for Peter Pan’s Flight.

But here’s the thing — if you hesitate, you could ruin this strategy completely. My family squandered our time a bit when we found out that Slinky Dog Dash was closed during our Early Theme Park Entry time in Hollywood Studios. We panicked and rode Alien Swirling Saucers instead and then wasted more minutes deciding what to do before heading to Smugglers Run. By the time we got there, the park was about to open, and the wait was up to 45 minutes, because the queue was full of three groups of folks: 1) those who chose to rope drop that ride, 2) those who’d rope dropped Rise of the Resistance and headed there second, and 3) those who’d seen Slinky Dog Dash was closed and chose the closest “big” ride nearby instead. We skipped out on riding, and by the time the park opened, the only thing we had to show for our waking up early was a ride on Alien Swirling Saucers.

When developing your early entry strategy, come up with a main (hopeful) plan, along with a backup plan or two. You never know when a ride might have a delayed opening or a weather-related closure. And if things go wrong, you can quickly pivot and use your backup plan. Don’t get stuck with the 8:45 AM conundrum!

To see more rules we follow in Disney World to help make your trip better, check out the YouTube video below.

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4 8:00 AM Habits Disney World Experts Practice

Do you rope drop the Disney World parks? Tell us in the comments!