Category: Daily schedule

I have blogged every day for 100 days; this is what I’m learning

I started my daily blog after reading Attempts by Dan John and listening to a podcast with Seth Godin about this new book, The Process. I have always loved the idea of being an essayist, developing ideas about things, being informed, coming to my conclusions on something I feel is important, and sharing them with anyone that might find value in it. I had also just finished Percy Cerutty’s biography, written primarily using Cerutty’s writings, found in his study after he died. There seems to be a connection between great thinkers and a habit of writing. Dan John and Seth Godin’s books kicked me into committing to this practise of daily writing.  

If you know you have to write a blog post tomorrow, something in writing, something that will be around six months from now, about something in the world, you will start looking for something in the world to write about. You will seek to notice something interesting and to say something creative about it. Well, isn’t that all we’re looking for? The best practice of generously sharing what you notice about the world is exactly the antidote for your fear.

Seth Godin

Like many people, I consume a lot of content:

  • I read The Economist weekly paper
  • I get at least one audiobook a month with a subscription to Audible 
  • I read books on Kindle 
  • I view the Kindle and Audible daily deals and pick up more books than I can read
  • I watch a little too much YouTube
  • I always have an online course on the go

I wasted a lot of this content, doing little or nothing with the ideas I found. I relied on my memory to trigger some relevant reading when I wanted to discuss things or solve a problem at work. Regular writing solves this issue; the stuff I write pulls together the things I am reading and my thoughts. Each post is filed away to be searched when needed and used, and the active recall in writing aids in assimilating the ideas into what I already know.

My daily blogging goals are to develop beautiful writing, build a habit for delivering that writing every day, and improve my thinking, mainly related to my work, by putting it out into the world.  

What I did not realise is that people would read it. Today I have one hundred and seven people on my email subscription list and get around twenty unique views per day. WordPress.com’s reader is the main place I get new traffic from via the keywords I add before publishing. I also use the WordPress Twitter integration to tweet links to each post and add two relevant hashtags to help people find the tweet.

I use Grammarly as my word processor to improve my writing. My spelling at school was terrible, and that psychologically stopped me from learning to write well. Using Grammarly premium for the last few years, initially to check my papers at work, and then later for everything I write on my laptop has fixed this. I am still really self-conscious about my writing ability, but the app gives me the confidence I need to communicate my ideas, and the continued use has significantly improved my work. 

My Process

  1. Read a lot to find trigger material
  2. Use the dictionary, Wikipedia and other sources to learn more
  3. Collect my research in Readwise through Instapaper and Adobe Acrobat Online 
  4. Draft an outline in Grammarly
  5. Go back to the source material to filling gaps and details
  6. Copy into WordPress.com and format
  7. Publish with keywords and share via Twitter using two hashtags

Seth Godin suggests committing to 200 days of writing every day to develop the practice as a habit. I have learned a lot, and I am only halfway through. Each post takes me between an hour and two hours in the evening to generate around 500-700 words. For the next 50 days or so, I will start adding some audio recordings of some of my posts and then move to video for my most-read posts in the final 50 days. 

If you like my blog, get in touch with me on Twitter.

30 minute clean

Dan John suggests in most of his books to have a cleaning routine and a cooking menu. The John house routine includes a set day for specific tasks like Monday for white laundry, Tuesday for black laundry etc. to free up headspace for work and thought. If you need scientific studies to prove that having a clean home is good for you, there are many, but as David Allen describes in Getting things done, you should do everything you can to reduce the background noise in your head to focus your attention on the task at hand. Having set days for specific chores does that.

For the last month or so I have used Saturday mornings for a two-hour ride on Zwift and then a quick clean of the house, mainly sweeping and washing the wood floors downstairs and vacuum the stairs and the rooms upstairs. I found a list for how to clean your entire home in 30 minutes on the Art of Manliness website and thought I would use it to add to my Saturday morning cleaning routine.

Saturday morning cleaning routine

  1. quickly organise each room you visit
  2. bathroom: spray all surfaces including the toilet leave to soak
  3. spot clean kitchen
  4. Wipe and dust all surfaces downstairs
  5. Vac all carpets
  6. Sweep, and wash wood floors
  7. make the bed, put away loose items, put laundry in the basket, and clean bedroom, 
  8. Return to the bathroom and scrub
  9. Take out bins

It took me 60 minutes to complete the ’30-minute’ routine this morning, and my wife did most of the bathroom. Yes, I did use a stopwatch, and yes, next week I will be quicker.

2021 daily routine.

My first blog set out my daily schedule, but since then, with all the writing and research I have done each day, I have updated my routine significantly. I have linked to the posts where I have written about any additional daily practice. This routine is the idea but is regularly altered based on the work I am doing that day. I have recently added several daily techniques to improve my sleep, making this list much longer than the original.

I put regular four-minute movement breaks throughout the day, including the 100-Up exercise, between meetings or after every 25-minute Pomodoro. My bike workouts are following a five-month programme to improve my four kilometres Individual pursuit power. My strength training is a mix between squatting everyday, heavy kettlebell swings, and the Rite of passage kettlebell programme.

6:00 Wake up

  • 10-100 sit-ups
  • 5-minute activity to wake up and get the heart rate going
  • Weigh myself
  • Protein shake
  • Granola

7:00 – 

8:00 – 9:00* – Get a coffee and start work

9:00 – Daily stand-up

9:30 – 12:30* – 2 hrs of deliberate practice (Work)

12:30 – Lunch

15:00 – 18:00* – Strength session

18:00 – Cook, eat, and spend time with my wife

19:00 – Daily blog

20:00 No more food

21:00 – Bedtime

  • Clean the kitchen
  • 10-100 sit-ups
  • Read in bed on the kindle Oasis 
  • Take ZMA

21:30 – 11:00* Sleep 

*Sometime within this period

Thirteen tips for getting better sleep

I go through stages of having issues sleeping. I usually find it easy to go to sleep, but either dance around like a fish out of water or wake up between 2 am and 4 am and then don’t get back to sleep. If you sleep like a baby, ignore these and keep doing what you are doing, but one or more might help if you have issues like me.

  1. Have a sleep routine: go to bed and get up at the same time each day, even on weekends to take advantage of your natural circadian rhythm.
  2. Sleep for between six and nine hours every night: The amount of sleep you need is dependent on several factors, set a fixed wake-up time and move around your sleep time depending on how you feel each morning until you find the duration you need.
  3. Get as much sleep before midnight as possible: research suggests that this is when the best quality sleep happen. Set your bedtime between 9:30 and 11:00 pm.
  4. Get light outside for at least 30-60 minutes per day: Getting out right after you get up will help anchor your master clock that controls your circadian rhythm. A lack of Vitamin D affects sleep, so supplement if you don’t get exposed to a lot of sunshine, particularly in Winter.
  5. Don’t eat anything after 8 pm: Leaving time between eating and going to bed will allow your insulin levels to get back to normal.
  6. Have a wind-down routine: have a hot bath, write a todo list to get things out of your head, do some light relaxation stretches, listen to relaxing music, read a book (use a Kindle Oasis with no blue light)
  7. Avoid screens for at least an hour before you go to bed: blue light from screens will trick your brain into thinking it is daytime and make it harder to get to sleep.
  8. Don’t drink coffee after 1 pm: Caffeine can affect people for up to six hours after a coffee. If you can, only use coffee for those times when you need a cognitive boost.
  9. Make your bedroom a cave: keeping your bedroom dark, quiet, and at a cool temperature (between 18C and 24C) to help you get to sleep quicker.
  10. Eat more protein during the day and carbs at night: Protein is a mild stimulant and carbs activate the orexin pathway that makes you sleepy. 
  11. Take a ZMA supplement 30 minutes before sleep: The magnesium specifically aids sleep but prepare for some strange dreams the first few nights. 
  12. Exercise but not too much: Staying active throughout the day is essential for your general health and insulin responsiveness, but training twice per day or long and intense cardio sessions will negatively affect sleep. Consider regular movement breaks if you work at a desk all day and strength training three times per week between 3 an 6 pm.
  13. Track your sleep and monitor things that affect its quality: I wear my Garmin running watch at night to monitor my sleep duration and quality during periods where I don’t sleep well. I find I get good sleep duration but low quality with minutes of deep sleep in the single figures. Tracking your sleep will help you learn which of these tips you can ignore and which you need to follow.

Daily stand-ups for remote working

From the first day of lockdown in March, I have held a daily catch-up with my team first thing each working day. The main intention was to give the team a feeling of connection and maintain a level of routine. It also helped to get us through a hectic work period moving a university of 33,000 students from campus-based delivery entirely online. 

The daily conversations kept everyone aware of changes, got quick answers to questions, and it allowed emerging problems to get identified and fixed before they got too big. Interestingly, I tested the idea of scrapping the catch-up after planning the new academic year in October, and the whole team rejected it. I wanted to give everyone back a couple of hours of their week, but the team saw it as the best part of their working day. We had a week off the meetings in the end, but they have become the centrepiece of how we plan and run our projects.

A ‘stand-up’ meeting is 10-15 minute informal meeting where attendees stand to force them to keep it short. Queen Victoria introduced stand-ups with her Privy Council in 1861 to minimise her public duties. More recently, it has been adopted by various agile project management methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban. The goal is to increase workflow through collaborative problem solving and signpost things that will soon cause problems. 

How to run a daily stand-up

  1. Book out a daily meeting first thing in the working day. I book mine for 25 minutes to keep some space reserved in the calendar if follow-up conversations are needed. The aim is to have them complete in 15 minutes.
  2. Keep them as conversations but short and to the point. I use the first 5 minutes for social discussion and then a quick update from me including a what I completed yesterday, what I am doing today, and what I need from the team.
  3. Get each member of the group to do a 60-second status update. Ensure each person shares and let some conversation naturally emerge but once it starts to get into detail intervene with “Let us carry this on outside of the stand-up”. Each member should share:
    1. What they are will complete today.
    2. Requests for collaboration.
  4. End the meeting with an opening for questions or issues that the team want to raise. A final opportunity to talk usually brings up a few questions, and so is worth adding. 

We use Microsoft Teams with a reoccurring meeting invite to host the video call. Using Teams allows the chat channel to stay open for social and work conversations to continue for the rest of the day. We set a rule early on that video is needed to make the calls more personal and people stick to it most days. Working from home can be isolating, and the social element of an office is hard to replicate. A short daily call acts as an icebreaker and helps keep the team collaboratively solving problems while having some fun. 

Have a go with your team and let me know how it goes on Twitter. 

Make time for what is important

I like a level of routine. Without some routine in my day, I can quickly waste away days in front of the TV. A simple way to get around this, particularly now while having a stay at home holiday, is to have at least one ‘highlight’ each day. The todo might be small, like go for a run or something fun like having a long call with a friend or family member, but something each day.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

Seneca

In their book Make time, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky of Google sprint fame, share a framework for designing your day around what matters. The four-step process focuses on choosing a highlight for the day, something you want to use to answer the question ‘what did you do today?’ and then gradually testing out tactics to help get this thing done. Over time you will test and adopt tactics that together build a daily system tailored to your life and priorities.

We want you to begin each day by thinking about what you hope will be the bright spot. If, at the end of the day, someone asks you, “What was the highlight of your day?” what do you want your answer to be? When you look back on your day, what activity or accomplishment or moment do you want to savor? That’s your Highlight.

Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

The four steps

  1. Highlight – start each day by choosing a focal point
  2. Lazer – Beat distraction to make time for your highlight
  3. Energise – Use the body to recharge the brain
  4. Reflect – Adjust and improve your system

The most important step is choosing your days highlight. The book suggests asking yourself each morning ‘what is going to be the highlight of my day? Choose an activity that takes around 60-90 minutes, it can contain multiple steps and might be work-related, personal care or even something from your honey-do list. Before you go about your day, select the time you will do this highlight and protect it. Add it to your calendar and let people know that you are busy at that time.

Once you get to the scheduled time, you need to make sure you can focus on that one task and nothing else. Becoming distraction-free might require you to turn off any technology not needed in your task or go somewhere away from your usual setting. To make sure you have the energy to do the things you want the book suggest a load of tactics from taking care of your body with regular exercise, good sleep patterns (naps!), and healthy food, to the strategic use of caffeine before your task for a quick pick up.

Each evening, the authors suggest taking a few notes on how well your new system is working. Did the tactics make time for your task, focus on it, and have the energy to do it work? If yes, keep them, and if no, ditch the ones not working and replace them with new tactics to test.

Try it tomorrow

Tomorrow morning, get up and write down a task you want to do that will take around an hour and choose when you will do it. Make it something that you really want to do but might not make the time for usually due to the day’s natural run. When that time comes around, make a coffee, turn off your phone, and do it. In the evening, think about how you got your highlight done, your energy levels, when you scheduled it. What could you do better to get tomorrows highlight done? Simple, but maybe not easy.

Pick up a copy of Make time: how to focus on what matters every day to find the full explanation of the process and an extensive collection of tactics to help you build your system. Let me know on Twitter what tactics work for you.

Taking control of my daily schedule

I have been working from home for seven months. Working in online learning in Higher Education, the period has been the busiest of my working life. Still, it has also allowed me to take control of my day in a way that the daily commute and traditional working day never allowed. I read more, I am healthier than ever, and my team and I have helped more the organisation we work in forwarding many years to deliver good quality blended learning under government social distancing guidelines. 

The Goals

At the start of the year, I wanted to achieve three big goals:

  • I want to be strong, healthy, and full of energy.
  • I want to master my specialism around learning, design, technology, and digital strategy
  • I want to build something the lasts and makes the world better. 

A modest home gym in the garage and some Dan John books have helped me to develop a strength routine. A commitment to run almost every day and reach a total of 2000 miles this year, with the help of Jon Albon, has forced me to leave the house for my state-approved daily exercise to get into the countryside and get some fresh air. A copy of the book Be fit or be damned has filled in the day with other times to stay engaged and healthy.

To master my area of Learning, Design, Technology, and digital strategy, I read a lot; online courses, books, articles, and newsletters. I have begun to read books on Kindle and almost everything else on the read later app Instapaper. These apps allow me to highlight key points and export these to Readwise. Readwise is a more recent addition to my tech stack; collating all my highlights and sending me spaced reminders in a daily email. My highlights sync to Roam research, where I collate and organise them into themes. I have started to write directly into Grammarly and will begin to publish on this daily blog. 

In May 2018, I started my current role leading the online and flexible learning at a large University. I was given a blank sheet of paper and asked to create a plan to move the organisation towards hyper flexibility. The groundwork before March 2020 and a growing team has allowed the University to change and adapt to the lockdowns and social distancing to deliver a significant proportion of all courses online. 

The schedule

A rough working day with timings is listed below. Most days I wake up at five when my wife gets up and go back to sleep, and might wake up at six or sometimes seven. Some days when I am tired or sore from the previous days training, I open my phone and cyberloafing, reducing my learning time or meaning I start work a little later. Sometimes my scheduled meetings or a hard deadline mean I do not follow this at all and work into the evening. Each day is different, but I am slowly finding ways to become less reactive and take control of my time. 

  • 6:00 -wake up
    • 10-100 sit-ups
    • 5-minute activity to wake up and get the heart rate going
    • weigh myself
  • 6:20 – Get a coffee and start learning
  • 8:20 – Shower etc. 
  • 9:30 – Team stand up
  • 12:00 – Running or a walk
  • 13:00 – Back to work
  • 17:00 weights or some tonic work (stretching or mobility)
  • 18:00 – Cook, eat, and spend time with my wife
  • 21:30 – Bedtime 
    • Clean the kitchen
    • 10-100 Sit-ups
    • Read in bed on the Kindle – running or mountaineering biographies
  • 22:00 – Sleep