Recently, I wrote abouthow I form my habits. In light of that post, I thought I’d write about my evening routine since it helps to reinforce the habits that I have been working to form. I wrote about my morning routine in an earlier post. That routine covers the first two and a half hours of my day.
Playbook
From start to finish, my evening routine covers the last two and half hours of my day. Bold items are ones that I try to do every day regardless of circumstance.
Blog edits (30 min)
Mind dump (10 min)
Prepare tomorrow’s to-do list (10 min)
Journal (10 min)
Workout (50 min)
Update habit journal (10 min)
Shower (10 min)
Meditate, unguided (10 min)
Commentary
Like my morning routine, my evening playbook doesn’t have fixed clock times associated with it. I usually try to get started by around 7:30 or 8:00p, but that can vary. I’m more focused on how long it takes to do the things, than when I actually do them.
Blog edits allow me to re-read the posts that I have coming out the following day, make tweaks, add finishing touches, and try to catch typos that I am famous for making. This is relatively new. In the past, I was willing to trade accuracy for speed in my posts, typing fast, but occasionally making mistakes that I didn’t worry too much about. But I’m trying to do better here, and so this gives me the time to review. I’m usually two or three days ahead in what I’ve written so I focus on the post coming out the following day. If I have time after that, I will review other posts, or continue to write ones that I started in my morning writing session.
In looking for ways to improve my sleep, one of the things that I’ve been doing is attempting to clear my head of anything that will keep me awake. The mind dump, journaling, and meditation all work toward this end. The mind dump is a very GTD-esque task. I take a sheet of paper and jot down everything that I’ve got on my mind. At first, I left work-related tasks out of this, but I found that I think about work when falling asleep so I’ve started to really try to dump everything I can. This gets it out of my head and onto paper, my simple manifestation of David Allen’s inbox. I don’t spent more than 10 minutes on this. I avoid looking at my to-do list or email or other things when doing this because if something isn’t on my mind, I don’t want to put it there by mistake.
I use that list to put together my to-do list for the following day. I pick the three things I want to get done at home, and the three things I want to get done at work and write them on an index card, which I keep in the back of my current Field Notes notebook. This sets up the next day for me and I don’t need to fall asleep wondering what I need to do.
Journaling at the end of the day allows me to get other thoughts out and provides a context for my overall day. The last thing I do is 10 minutes of unguided meditation as a final way of clearing my head, or being okay with whatever I can’t clear. I started with 20 minutes of unguided meditation, but that was too long for me so I scaled back.
I give myself 50 minutes for a workout to allow for stretching before and after. As I write this, I am focused only on stretching so that as I work my way toward cardio and light strength training, I don’t end up hurting myself. I alternate between a 30 minute stretch session one evening and a 15 minute the next.
In my post on how I form my habits, I mentioned my habit journal. I try to keep this updated throughout the day, noting when I wake up, what I eat, mistakes I made along the way, my exercise. I go to bed making sure it is up-to-date.
These playbooks are designed to be living documents. I tweak them as I make adjustments, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. So far, the playbook for my evening routine is working out pretty well.
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I am in the middle of a fairly significant lifestyle change. As part of my plan to retire in ten years, one of the things I wanted to do was get myself back into shape. When I retire, I want to be healthy and active. Being in good mental and physical shape are big part of this. It means changing habits that I’ve had for many years, and in some cases, for decades and changing habits, for me at least, is always difficult. There are two aspects to this. A new habit can be doing something new. It can also be to stop doing something that I had been doing. So I thought it might be useful to talk about how I form new habits.
Writing about habits abstractly is never helpful to me, so I want to start with specifics. What habits was I looking to form? Brace yourself. The list is a bit daunting, at least to me.
Give up sugared soft drinks
Give up caffeine
Start a daily meditation practice
Start a healthy diet that will help me stay lean and full of energy
Start exercising daily
Write every day
Mapping habits to goals
I usually begin with goals. Before I am ready to begin forming new habits, I need a reason to change. What are those reasons? In my case, my mission statement was along the lines of “Retire in ten years and be able to write full time.” That’s what I began with. From there I asked myself a lot of questions about what it meant to retire, to write full time. For me, writing requires stamina. It is not like my day job where I stop thinking about it (usually) at the end of the day. I am constantly writing in my head, constantly wondering about things, and constantly reading to pique my interest in things that I want to write about. All that work can be exhausting. Then, too, I didn’t want to be someone who retired and settled into a sedentary routine. My routine is more sedentary today than I am comfortable with. So I took that mission statement and came up with some fairly abstract goals:
Be in the best physical shape that I can manage so that I have the energy to do what I want to do.
Find a good mental balance: especially, reducing my anxiety, being more empathetic, and open to new ideas.
Be the best writer I can possibly be.
Now, these aren’t necessarily SMART goals, but they are good enough for my purposes for getting started. The next thing to do was figure out what I needed to do (or stop doing) to start down a road toward these goals. This is where the habits come in. Mapping them to the goals would look something like this:
Goal
Habit
Be in the best physical shape I can manage
Give up sugared soft drinks Give up caffeine Start a healthy diet Exercise daily
Find a good mental balance
Start a daily meditation practice
Be the best writer I can be
Write every day
Where to start: order of operations
I know from past experience that no matter how much I want to jump in and change everything at once, that is a recipe for failure. So I needed to pick a place to start. Having a long lead time helped me in this regard. After all, I’ve got ten years to retirement (3,755 days, if anyone besides me is counting). There is no need to rush things. Rather, I’d prefer to get this right and allow time for the inevitable adjustments. I ranked the habits I wanted to change from what I considered to be hardest to easiest. Here is the order I came up with:
Giving up sugared soft drinks.
Giving up caffeine.
Starting a daily meditation practice
Starting a healthy diet
Exercising daily
Writing every day
Let me talk about my rationale for this order. I’ve given up caffeine before. At one point, between 2003 and 2010 or so, I’d given up caffeine for 7 years. It was only when we had kids that I began using it again to give me that boost I needed after some sleepless nights with the babies. So I knew I could do it. Knowing that is half the battle, so I didn’t think it would be the most difficult change.
On the other hand, I’d been drinking Coca Cola all my life. I loved it, and still do. I’d hated the diet versions of soft drinks, and wondered why anyone drank them if they tasted so badly. Even when I gave up caffeine, I still drank Caffeine-Free Coke, or Sprite, or other non-diet soft drinks. I figured giving up the sugared soft drinks would be the most difficult for me.
Meditation was another tough sell for me. I couldn’t imagine taking time out of my day, every day, to sit and do nothing. Where was the value in that? I figured getting into that habit would be difficult.
The other three were all familiar to me. I’d worked with a trainer fifteen years ago, and gotten into good shape. I learned to eat better than I had been (although not great). And of course, I had at one point an 825-day consecutive writing streak, so I knew I could write every day.
The next step was to pick a habit and get started. But my mind doesn’t quite work like that.
Warming up to a habit
Whenever I am thinking about starting a new habit, I never just start it cold. It takes warming up. It is often this way for a story, too. I’ll think about it and think about it, but not feel ready. With writing stories, the key I’ve learned over the years is not to get started until I feel ready, until there is a click in my head that says, yeah, now it’s time. The same it true with starting a habit. I could go months thinking about the change I want to make (and often feeling guilty about not making it) but if I start and I haven’t warmed up to it, then I know it won’t last. I have dozens of examples of this in my own experience.
One day last spring, however, at the outside of the Pandemic, when things were looking particularly bleak, something in my head clicked and I was ready to start a daily meditation practice.
A few months later, feeling desperate to lose some weight, I finally felt ready to give up diet soft drinks. These are actually two useful examples because they illustrate the paths that different habits can take. After some experimentation, for instance, I found that I could tolerate Cherry Coke Zero, and once I realized I could do that, I simply gave up sugared soft drinks and started drinking Cherry Coke Zero instead. Within two months I lost something like 18 pounds without changing anything else. It was eye-opening.
It wasn’t quite as dramatic with the meditation, however. I managed to build a daily practice, but after a few months, I felt like I wasn’t seeing any real progress on my part, and I gave it up for a time. Eventually, I came back to it, and it was then that I began to notice some of the changes it brought about in me. I was calmer during the day, less anxious, more open. It was slow and subtle, but I could feel the changes. Feedback like losing weight or feeling the anxiety start to slip away after meditating is self-reinforcing. What I to learn was that not every habit works at the same speed. Sometimes I really have to keep at it before you start to notice a change, and during that time, I just have to believe that it is going to help, even if I don’t see changes right away.
Incremental changes
By mid spring of this year I’d been off sugared sodas for half a year, and I had a regular meditation practice. The next thing I began to think about was giving up caffeine.I knew this would be tough but I also knew I could do it. I just needed to warm up to it. And so over a period of weeks, I did that, telling myself it was time, but also telling myself that “this was my last caffeinated drink” quite a few times. (Looking back I see several journal entries from the day following such proclamations with things like, “Well, that didn’t work out too well.”) Finally, on April 16, I began to feel ready. I wrote this in my journal for that day:
On my walk today I began thinking that maybe I needed to give up caffeine again. I don’t know why I feel the need to give something up. Today I was thinking about it in terms of sleeping better. Maybe I’d sleep much better without the caffeine… if I do give it up it will have to be on Sunday because I feel like I am going to need caffeine to get through tomorrow.
This is typical for me in two ways. First, I’m usually ready when I write it down and give myself a deadline. I’d been thinking about giving up caffeine for some time, but it wasn’t until I wrote it down that I knew I was ready. Second, I always give myself a last hurrah, often hidden as an excuse to start the new habit at the beginning of the week. But on that Sunday, April 18, I started the day with orange juice instead of a caffeinated drink, and I haven’t had caffeine since.
So I’d tackled meditation, sugared soft drinks, and caffeine. I let those settle in for a while before I decided to tackle the next two items: a healthy diet and daily exercise. Typically, I need to make sure that a habit is set before moving onto the next. And I avoid trying to being more than one new habit at a time, but in this case, diet and exercise go hand in hand. I’d been warming up to both for some time and around the time I was writing my post on Project Sunrise, I knew I was ready. I’d done a bunch of research and decided to tackle the slow-carb diet. I started this a week ahead of exercise just to avoid too much at once.
There are two things I like about the slow-carb diet: first, I can be a few meals that I eat regularly and so in addition to losing weight and fat, and slimming down, I also have less decision fatigue. Second, cheat day! The first week went well, so on this past Sunday, I began to develop my exercise habit.
Habits themselves can be incremental. When I last worked out regularly, with a trainer, I was 15 years younger than I am today. What I did not want to do was injure myself at the outset. So I decided to be incremental about exercise. I would exercise 6 days a week (my cheat day would also be my day off). Rather than start with a mix of cardio and weights, I decided to begin exclusively with stretching. I researched videos I could watch and then on Sunday, I did my first 30 minute stretching workout. And wow, I felt as flexible as a steel bar when compared to the person leading the workout. But I kept reminding myself that it takes time, and for some habits, more time than others to see results. Every day makes a difference. And so I repeated my stretching exercise last night, and will do it again tonight.
My plan going forward is to continue the stretching routine 6 days away for the next two to three weeks. After that, I’ll layer in cardio 3 days a week, and after a few weeks of that, I’ll add in light strength training on the 3 days I’m not doing cardio.
What about writing? That’s a tricky one because it is so difficult to judge if I am improving. There are two things that I can do and that I have been doing pretty well at so far this year. First, I can write every day. I am writing this post on the 194th consecutive day that I have written this year, for instance. The second things I can do is get my writing in front of an audience and take what feedback I can manage to find. So far, in the first 194 days of 2021, I’ve published 213 posts totaling 128,000 words. I’d say that’s pretty good practice on both counts. I’m not sure there is more that I could do, except to keep it up.
Habit tracking
One thing that helps me maintain my habits is tracking them. There is a benefit to this, as well as a cost for me. The benefit is in seeing the day-to-day progress, and patting myself on the back for a particular streak. An added benefit is looking closely at the data to see if there are things I can do to improve.
These days, I have a notebook that I use to log all of this. A typical page looks like this:
A page from my habit journal
Along the way, I’ve been making little notes to myself about what works and what doesn’t. I’ve noted when I felt hungry or a craving, which workouts were tough and which too easy. I’m hoping that these notes will help me make informed adjustments along the way.
I used to track habits like this in a spreadsheet, so that I could see the unbroken streak (the Seinfeld method). But one thing I learned from my 825-day writing streak is that the streak itself becomes an end, and it weighs upon me. I’d rather focus on getting things right each day, and not worry so much about the streak or consecutive days. If I miss a day, it is a lot easier for me to recover when the streak doesn’t mean much, but the habit does.
Planning for the unexpected
I’ve found that habits work really well in regular, repeatable environments, but things can go sideways if something changes. What if I am traveling? What if we have plans one evening when I am supposed to do my workout? What if we go to a restaurant during the week? Or what if we go to a friend’s house for dinner and it isn’t my cheat day? In addition to settling into these new habits incrementally, I’ve also tried to think about these alternatives so that I don’t go into these situations cold. I have a plan, simple as it may be. One example of this is illustrated on my morning routine.
Then, too, as new situations arise, I made adjustments, note what works and what doesn’t and revise these plans. Just knowing that I have some idea of what to do in these common edge cases helps to take the edge off of them.
It has taken me nearly fifty years to get to the point where I understand how habits work for me. Maybe I am slow learner in this regard, and I certainly haven’t perfected this particular adventure. But I am trying to be honest about it this time. In my notebook I note my successes, but I also highlight my failures. For the latter, I try to learn from them and adjust.
The other thing I am constantly trying to keep in mind is that these habits build slowly. Some are faster than others (it took me about three weeks before I felt I no longer craved caffeine), but generally, the end goal comes slowly. Fortunately I’ve got time to improve and I’m hoping to use that time as best as I can.
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Today was my first full work day with the new sit/stand desk. I needed a benchmark to gauge how much I should stand and how much I should sit. I decided that, for today, I would stand while working and sit when I wasn’t working. Since I consider my writing work, and since I write as part of my morning routine, I had my standing desk in x-wing formation (this is how I think of my desk when it is in standing formation) beginning at about 7am until a few minutes ago, at 4:30 pm: that’s about 9 hours, with a 25 minute break for lunch, when I sat down.
So how was it? Let me put it this way: the last time I was in Hawaii (some 16 years ago), my friends and I went on a hike on the north shore of Kauai, on the Kalalau Trail. The trail goes to a waterfall, and the hike is 4 hours in each direction. Before we set out, we stopped at a grocery store in Princeville and picked up some sandwiches from the deli. The hike itself was amazing, but incredibly muddy. Two hours into our hike, we reached a beach, and we sat down and fell on our sandwiches. I content to this day that it was the best sandwich I’ve ever tasted. We decided on that beach that we’d had enough, and that the two hour hike back would be sufficient, waterfall or not. When we arrived back at the trail head, I remember walking across the parking lot to the beach, and with clothes and shoes still on, I walked into the ocean. My feet felt completely worn out.
That is how I felt after standing for nearly 9 hours today. Couple that with an ear infection that I’ve been dealing with. I ignored it for a few days, thinking it might go away on its own. But today it decided to call my bluff. The upside was that I was distracted from my aching feet by my aching ear. I finally gave in and went to the doctor and they gave me some antibiotics, but I came home and stood at my desk for the last few hours of meetings of the day. When I finally sat down, it was a great relief. Almost as much as walking into the ocean after that hike back along the Kalalau Trail.
Now that I am sitting, my ear is aching and I think maybe I should stand so that my aching feet will distract me from my aching ear. How long does it take for amoxicillin to start working?
I haven’t yet decided if I will try to stand during my evening routine. I think I need to built up to standing for long duration. Doing so today was merely a test to see how hard it was. Maybe I’ll do something like stand during meetings and sit when I am not in meetings. Or vice versa. I’m still figuring this out.
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I am in close to the worst shape (if not the worst) that I can ever remember being in. It has nothing to do with weight, although I have been hovering around my peak weight of 151 pounds for a while now. I have low energy. I have little flex or real strength. And when I do cardio exercise, it is always a strain for me.
Part of it has to do with a lack of a regular program. Part of it is nutrition. And part of it is that I have no idea what I am doing.
So I have been thinking lately about getting a personal trainer. I’ve been reading up on it online, looking for pros and cons. There are two very good gyms near my work that I could work out of, and next week, I’m thinking about interviewing some personal trainers to see if there are any potential matches.
In other, words, get myself into shape. But I have one more goal, which is perhaps more important than those three put together.
4. Learn how to exercise properly and build a program that I can keep up with.
If I do get a personal trainer to help with this, I don’t plan on keeping them forever. I’ve read online that some PT’s will “guilt” you into keeping them. I won’t stand for that. When I interview, I will be very up front. I want to see or feel results within 6 weeks, and I will continue with a trainer for as long as 10 weeks. But during that time, the trainer should be teaching me how to continue my program on my own. Beyond 10 weeks, I don’t plan on keeping the trainer. And I have some pretty high standards for the trainer to meet. So who knows if this will even work out.
I just completed my 4th run in seven days and my 6th in 2 weeks. It was probably the easiest run to-date. A few more of these and I will definitely be ready to begin extending it a bit. Still not timing myself but I am definitely under 10 minutes for a mile, and likely somewhere between 8 and 9 minutes.
Just back from my run. I went a little later than usual, when it was dark, but still very nice out. It was a good run. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I had a bowl of pasta about 2 hours ago, or psychological, but I felt like I had a lot of energy and was running strongly. I may be ready to try running a little more than a mile. I’ll see how I feel on Thursday.
The air was really fresh and smelled like newly mown grass, which may have helped put a pep in my step. There was a bright, full moon at too, and that helped as well. In any case, it felt really good. I did a really fine sprint at the very end, the whole length of my block, steadily building up speed until I was running flat out, about as fast as I can, which, for a 34 year-old, I might say, is pretty darn fast.
I was supposed to run yesterday, as I’m trying to do this cardio thing three times a week for starters, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but as circumstances would have it, I didn’t get home until late yesterday and was too tired. So I am back from my second run this week and this one felt a little better, although I slowed my pace some. I completed the entire mile circuit and didn’t have to stop. In fact, I sprinted the last leg, as is my wont. No muscle pain in my quads which is good. My legs have been pretty sore since I ran on Monday, but today they were significantly better.
My right shoulder is no longer sore so I think I’m going to start up on the pushups again tonight, after about a week or so of not doing them.
Overall, I think I’ve still got a long way to go as far as cardio goes. I was supposed to run 3 times this week and I did it twice. (I’m heading up to NYC tomorrow evening and won’t have a chance to run.) Hopefully I can keep it up, and do better next week.
I beta tested my cardio play list a little while ago when I went for a one mile walk, followed by a one mile run. It was the first cardio exercise I’ve done since last summer. I managed the entire mile without having to stop, although I jogged at a very slow pace. The music was good and helped some. I think it took me 10 or 11 minutes to do the mile, so it technically isn’t true cardio (at least 20 minutes). But I couldn’t keep going at the end. I’ll have to build up to 2 or 3 miles to get the full benefit. In the meantime, I’m going to try and keep it up 3 times a week and see if it helps.
I’ve put together a cariod workout playlist, which I plan to beta test as part of my new cardio routine beginning tomorrow. The list is below. I’m open to suggestions of songs that you’ve found work well in your own workouts. (Note: I list them in their default order, but I always play the list on random to mix it up a bit.)
1. Jump. Van Halen 2. Bad Day. R.E.M. 3. Goodbye–Goodbye. Oingo Boingo 4. Mrs. Potters Lullaby. Counting Crows 5. Kickstart My Heart. Motley Crue 6. A Little Respect. Erasure 7. Demolition Man. Def Leppard 8. On Through the Night. Def Leppard 9. Run Riot. Def Leppard 10. Come On Eileen. Save Ferris 11. Whiplash. Metallica 12. Call Me. Blondie 13. Walk Like An Egyptian. The Bangles 14. Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky). Bill Conti 15. Surfin’ U.S.A.. The Beach Boys 16. I’m On My Way. The Shimshaws 17. American Girl. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers 18. Mess Around. Ray Charles
I finally did it. My goal all along has been to gradually work up to a total of 90 pushups a night, spread over three sets of 40/30/20. I just completed a full compliment of all three sets for the first time tonight. And you know what, it felt pretty good. Here on out it’s just maintaining the 90 pushups and adding in some additional weight training. And cardio once it starts to warm up a bit more.
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