10 days in; 10 profound changes
10 days ago I decided to change a number of aspects of my life. There’s no major backstory here beyond having reinforced a bunch of bad habits during lockdown. I both gained 10kg and felt frustrated that not travelling to and from work for four hours a day hadn’t translated into a healthier way of living.
So I changed a number of things. This is far from all I want to change and none of them has required a really challenge or sacrifice.
But maybe that’s what makes it so powerful. Real positive change with minimal real effort.
Bigger and tougher changes will be required if I am to achieve all my health aims but I’m so pleased with this start and want to share.
1. What to eat
It’s a truism that the best way to stop doing certain things is to start doing others. With food, finding ways to default to a healthy option easily stops certain behaviours.
When working in the office the unhealthy foods were in the vending machine the other side of the building. That’s a natural blocker compared to a kitchen with cheese, biscuits and bowls of cereal simply sitting there waiting for you!
Therefore at the start of each day I take 3 or 4 pieces of fruit — banana, nectarine, apple, mandarin, etc — and place next to my desk. When a snack-attack comes I may desire something other than the fruit, but it is right there, and I know I must eat it (see point below on tracking and gamification)
2. What not to eat
Most of us trying to manage our weight know a key step is keeping the house empty of tempting things to eat. This is straight-forward if living alone or if the whole family is following a similar regime. But when others don’t need to be so careful, or children actively need certain foods, this is tough.
Doubly tough for me because there could be times where I would end up eating 3 or 4 large bowls of cereal and milk in a day. Not unhealthy food per se but clearly a disaster from a weight management point of view.
Therefore some simple rules. I bought some porridge and that was the only cereal I will allow myself. Porridge requires you to boil water and leave for a few minutes. It is not instant food. There’s a natural break in the process. It’s worked! On those mornings I want cereal I prepare some porridge (the right amount, no second bowl). In the evenings when I sneaky bowl or two of other cereal might previously have been eaten? Nothing!
Find the ways to put automatic blockers in a process and you give will-power a real helping hand!
3. Gamification of the food
I re-found an app someone had mentioned years ago. It sets bold targets around certain types of food — e.g., three portions of beans, five portions of different types of veg, nuts seeds, herbs and spices and so on. Plus a session of exercise.
Turning my day upside down and defining the aims as being “how little can I eat while still covering all of these” has been educational and impactful.
It takes quite some effort to get that range in but by not being too prescriptive it forces some thinking not just pure rule following. (See the point above about now selecting the fruit in the morning and having it in my sight line).
It also helps when planning the shopping and previously I wouldn’t have had this range of food available at any time.
And of course as you eat healthily you challenge your other decisions around whether to have that beer or quite how large the portion needs to be (as per the point above I ate vast quantities of healthy cereal for years that added on pounds in weight).
I know that some people would find simply hitting the target not enough. They might want to use one of these commitment apps or find a more public way of showing and sharing. I don’t need that; I’m more than happy with this simple box ticking as one of my many ‘nudges’.
4. Gamification of movement
Another gamification element is trying to stick to daily movement tracked via Strava and a website called ChaseTheLadder. (I’ll do another post on that sometime).
I also chose to record my walks as “runs” on Strava which means they show up on the Strava Heatmap, creating yet another dimension of dopamine hits to encourage more walks. (More on this too soon)
Getting enough movement in can be hard if you’re not doing a long walk for the commute. Therefore I added in walking calls to my day to hit my targets.
5. Commitment
There is a running group I wanted to join for years but never did as they run at the same time as I had to take my son to tennis and at 9am on a Thursday.
I finally signed up thinking I would go occasionally if tennis was cancelled. What has happened with work-from-home is that Thursday morning becomes an option. But that of course means 9–10 on a workday. Well, given that I’m regularly starting work at 7am anyhow it doesn’t feel inappropriate to reclaim a couple of hours on a Thursday morning.
The challenge naturally is that the work calendar is solid 8am–6pm weeks in advance. Thus the need for commitment. Starting several weeks out I rearranged things to keep the time free (though of course available if something critical were happening). I’ve now managed to attend 75% of the time and have had some of the truly most wonderful group runs of my life. As well as the benefits of the exercise, the fresh air and the fellowship of new companions (who will hopefully slowly become new friends)
We’re all busy. It’s so easy to say “next time”, but to recall a quote I once heard
If you spend too long getting ready for the party it might be over by the time you get there
6. Sleep
Far more informed people than me have written about the importance of sleep. It is of course vital to our very being, and inadequate sleep impact health, weight, mood, those around you and so on….
Without fully understanding the science I’m working hard to sleep more. Some is gamification here as well as the Sleep cycle app I uses is data rich. Some is about going to bed early to reduce the risk of eating in the evening. Some is just being smart enough to realise that many of the other changes can’t be impactful if I’m not getting far more sleep than I have for the last 20 years.
And with no early morning commute the main excuse has gone away.
7. Order from Chaos
This is one that’s not quite working so I’ll share the aspiration and then we can see how it goes.
For most of us a tidy workspace is more efficient for work and better for our minds. Yes, there are numerous stories of the chaotic workplaces of creative geniuses, and even books that describe how too much focus on having things in order detracts from what you job should be.
Well, I challenge you not to see some resonance in these stories
I really needed the sheet where I’d written down the quote from the insurance company as now they are tell me a different number. I wonder where in this mess it has gone?
What were the three things that needed buying for Duke of Edinburgh that need some planning as they won’t be on Amazon Prime? Did I keep the sheet or give it back to my daughter?
Had I filled in the paper form from the kid’s gym course that needed to be completed and returned by the end of the month? Did I send it back or has it slipped into the tax return pile?
Those key points of feedback I need to give my staff member in a call in 20 minutes. Where did I put them?
It’s not hard to tidy places and then keep them tidy. Yes there’s all sorts of art to sorting out drawers and throwing away clothes, but I’m simply talking about the desk/table, the top of the sideboard and the pin-board. No excuse, just do it, and if it drifts put a recurring action in Trello (see below) that prompts you to tidy up each week!
8. Carpe Diem
Just do stuff! I always prided myself in an approach of bundling together similar tasks to do all together — all the non-urgent online shopping tasks; various paper forms that needing filling in; a number of small DIY items. This conceptually felt more efficient.
What happens in reality? Well, two things — one is the list becomes long enough that it looks like a burden and you start to put it off; the other is that the different relative priorities of the actions means that you don’t always apply the right level of urgency and suddenly find out that its two days until the day you needed an item of clothing so you pay 10 quid more for express delivery, or you actually forget to process the parking ticket and end up missing the half-price window.
Most people have at least briefly come across David Allen’s Getting Things Done. It’s not perfect but there’s more right than wrong, and principle of knocking out the little things immediately stands valid most of the time.
So look around you, tackle a bunch of things quickly even if it doesn’t feel like they move the dial, and more importantly as new “stuff” comes through the door (real or virtual) see how quickly you can deal with it.
This change of approach is really starting to make a difference for me.
9. Order from Chaos II — your online life
These days it’s actually quite easy to have a clear desk, office or house but still have chaos behind the scenes. Not because everything is stuffed in the drawers or under the bed, but because it’s a mess online.
200 outstanding emails; 7 different locations for storing scans of important documents; 3 different to-do apps.
I’ve become good but not great in this area. A few years ago this was much trickier due to how badly tools integrated and the fact most of them only did one thing well. These days it’s easier.
I manage the bulk of my online life like this:
Gmail for emails, making major use of the Snooze function to push things out a week or a month where appropriate (see Point 8 for making sure it’s not just as a buffering technique). This can effectively act as a to-do list as well for things that have arrived by email such as the promise of a refund of a good within 28 days. Snooze the email for 28 days and then see if the refund has appeared
Trello for to-do lists, including shared ones. (Microsoft Planner is probably as good and is integrated into Microsoft if that makes a difference for you.) There are a lot of ways you can use Trello to manage things better. I’ll share in more detail in a more specific post.
Evernote for document storage, including the nifty Scannable tool they offer for scanning in paper documents.
Yes I also use various online storage tools for files and photos etc and DO NOT have them well managed or under control. I’ll get there one day maybe or simply carry on increasing the number of terabytes given how cheap it is*. (*Though look out for a post I will do one day on the environmental cost of cloud computing.)
10. Taking time for myself
This will be the basis for a standalone post soon so I won’t go into much detail here except to say I’ve always been bad at this and I working hard to get better.
‘Me time’ makes a difference!
There are only a finite number of hours in the day so this is about being smart. Some of it is about setting boundaries and sticking with them. Including with regards to friends and family who want more of your time. I received input to a 360-feedback exercise once where an ex-colleague (I figured out it was him despite it being anonymous) wrote “When he gets home he forgets to stop being in work mode and treats his friends and family as clients, constantly prioritising them over himself”.
Not only do we deserve the joy of some me time, however we might use it, but even if we haven’t flown for a while we’re all well aware of what we hear at the start of each journey
Remember to put your oxygen mask on before helping others
That’s what ‘me time’ is about.
So, what was supposed to be a few quick thoughts got a little longer than planned but the ease it flew off the keyboard reminds me of how straight-forward these steps have been compared to what I expected. Especially the eating , drinking, sleeping aspects which are the most recent and the most obviously impactful.
Let’s see how the next 10 days play out!
