Building a Routine • Week 5

Week 5 was our first reverse habit week. We were limited to 2 “fun” coffee drinks. When your wife owns a coffee business with so many fun drinks this proves difficult. I missed it by one.

The exercise habit was maintained as was our family meal and reading habit. This week I mixed in a few chapters of a new book called How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids by Daniel Priestly. He’s got a whole bunch of other great writing on the topic of building personal brands and has a SaaS product called ScoreApp which allows you to develop short surveys that allows customers to self assess how much they might benefit from your service. For example “How Secure is Your Company’s Network?” would be a survey with questions about your firewall, your company security policies etc. We’ve found it quite useful at Melodiq.

I’m still working my way through Outlive which is a big driver of why I’m getting more serious about exercise. This week’s chapter touches on how being within “normal” ranges on various medical tests doesn’t necessarily mean “healthy” range. I think most of us probably have a sense that this is the case but it’s making me reevaluate recent blood tests that were in “normal” range. Guess I’m going down a new rabbit hole.

Speaking of longevity, my grandfather on my dad’s side passed away recently and I’ve been reflecting on his impact on my life as the funeral approaches. He was in his 90s (95 I think?) and lived on the other side of the country so I didn’t see him often, especially not over the last 10 or so years. But I still fondly remember that he taught my brother and I to ski in his 70s (!) and on another trip took me for my first 9 holes of golf. He was a creature of habit from what I could tell and when he drove cross country to visit us (sleeping in his van before it was cool) he kept a small set of weights around to stay active.

This week instead of adding a new habit, I’m going to start pinning habits to a timeframe. I think the benefit of a set of habits is maximized when you don’t have to put extra mental energy into remembering when to do them. So beginning this week, I’m going to tackle reading first thing in the morning when I wake up (7ish at the moment – I’m not a morning person though I want to be one when I grow up).