My Routine

If you follow this blog or my social media, you already know I talk a lot about the importance of having a routine. A routine does not mean acting like a robot, having no surprises, or doing the exact same thing day after day. Having a routine is essential for anyone with long-term goals, because it lets you control how you manage your time and which tasks matter most (not urgency, but IMPORTANCE). People who work with me regularly ask about my routine: What do you do from morning to night? What time do you wake up? I bet you barely sleep! and so on.

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A routine does not work for everyone

My routine is not something that will work for everyone. Each person should find what works for them and keep refining their processes over time. I lived a long time without a well-established routine. For more than three years I was testing what served me and what did not.

In the same way I analyze the professional and personal lives of my clients, one day I stopped and did a full introspection of all my experiments.

The result was not great. I had gained weight, I could not breathe well after climbing stairs, and I never had a night that left me waking up completely fresh. The reason came down to two things:

1. I was trying to copy my mentor’s routine: He has more experience and more years practicing his routine. It was like racing a Prius against a Tesla. I needed to take things at my own pace, not at the pace of someone whose routine had been refined for years.
2. I was lazy: Stopping certain foods, doing a set amount of exercise, reading a certain number of pages, and so on. I love numbers, but I did not like applying that kind of thinking to my personal life.

The first step

The first step for me was realizing I had problems in certain areas of my life. Not necessarily things that would hurt me on their own, but combined with other habits they created a snowball that was very damaging to my well-being.

To see clearly what I needed to change, I downloaded a very simple app on my iPhone: Counter. It is free and lets you create many categories. The idea is that every time you do something that falls into one of the categories you want to track, you tap once to add “1.” Then I had an Excel sheet where, at the end of each month, I entered the monthly total for each category in the right cell.

In my case the initial list was:

• Exercise
• Cigarettes
• Wine
• Beer
• Liquor
• Coffee
• Sick
• Waking up fresh
• #2 (bowel movements)
• Sex
• Bar
• Restaurant
• Club
• Vacation

After a year the result was simple: exercise was at zero, coffee was over 7 a day, alcohol was above normal, I was sick more times than my wife and two daughters combined, waking up fresh was at zero, vacation days were at zero. It was negative. The next exercise was to analyze where in my life those bad habits had started. Once I understood the origin, it became much easier to change them.

But wanting to change them was not enough

The mental work of deciding you want to do something is simple. Applying it is the real challenge. In my case I took a few vacation days and started writing down all my projects and dreams for the short, medium, and long term. As soon as I could visualize my goals and how to reach them, I started to feel my motivation grow.

The second step

What came next was starting the routine. In my case I began overnight. I was sure that taking things slowly would make me lose momentum, so:

• I quit smoking
• I stopped drinking (except at business meals with clients of my wine company)
• I replaced coffee with tea: one caffeinated in the morning, one decaf at night
• I started exercising twice a day (morning and afternoon)
• I cut flour and fats
• I increased my fish intake and reduced meat
• I replaced Netflix before bed with a book (not fantasy books, but books on business, economics, marketing, finance, and so on)

When I present my routine, many of my clients ask why so many changes, especially in my diet. They know I love good food, and choosing to set aside products I love sounds hard. But it is important to understand that a healthy body gives you a healthy mind. Just because you love eating something that makes you sick does not mean you should keep eating it.

A client from Mexico shared her story with me recently. Read it here: Healthy Body, Healthy Mind.

Result

It has not been easy. It has been progressive, and it took me more than three weeks to get used to this new pace of life. I am still adding new pieces to parts of my routine, but essentially it is already built and it works very well for me. Now a normal day for me looks like this:

• 7:30/8am Wake up without an alarm
• 8am Breakfast and read the news on Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox, Le Monde, and Entrepreneur
• 8:15am Exercise
• 8:40am Cold shower
• 9am Office to review pending items, reports, and so on from the previous day
• 9:15am Meditation
• 9:30am Start working
• 1:30pm Lunch
• 1:45pm Meditation
• 5:30pm Exercise
• 6:20pm Cold shower
• 6:30pm Dinner and family time
• 8pm Time with my wife
• 9/9:30pm Book
• 11pm Sleep

That is the routine that works for me. On weekends few things change: work blocks are replaced by family time, unless I have a few pending items that need my attention. Essentially I try to keep as much free time as possible to be with my wife and daughters.