The past few days, though, I’ve been experimenting with a treadmill workout that is slightly less boring — and gets me to do some strength training too. What I do is run for 3 minute stretches on the treadmill, then pop off and go do some sort of resistance exercises or weights (we have a dumbbell set, bands, and an old weight machine near the treadmill). I run about 2 miles, total, spread out over these three minute stretches. I set the pace a little higher than I might because, hey, it’s only 3 minutes at a time. And since I’m doing something different every few minutes it doesn’t feel quite so tedious.

If you hit the treadmill in winter, how do you make it less boring?

Aurora

The air turns cool, the dark descending fast
on this October evening, Thursday night.
I huddle in my coat, this is the last
of several happy outings, all is bright

beneath the street lamps, feel the bustle, buzz.
Two hundred people line up for a show.
They’ve stood all day, and now crowd, as one does,
to be the first inside, first standing row.

We hustle past — then “look up!” In the chill,
a streak of red makes brush strokes in the sky,
and through the camera lens more colors still.
We shout and join the faces pointed high.

The northern lights have come to play around
this autumn night, like music without sound…

—-
Bar Harbor, 4:45 p.m.

Now rocking on the porch, I see the light
turn golden, all the maple leaves aglow
on this cold island, all the aspens bright,
as even parking lots put on a show.

Some nineteen years ago we ran a race
to mark one year. A thought — did that seem long?
I only once had thought about this place.
Somewhere a book is written, we belong

to larger narratives, the great unknown.
We travel many years, if glad we can.
Tomorrow, I must wake before the dawn
with many miles waiting, per the plan.

Just always moving, here this tree still stands
a hundred autumns, chilling many hands.

On Wednesday, I put on my plan for Thursday that I would get up early(ish) and run on the treadmill. No one had to be up before 7 a.m., so I was going to set my alarm for 6:20 a.m., a time that allows me to be up and running by 6:30-6:35 or so, giving me a 25-minute workout, more or less. I have done this a few times since our new morning schedule started with the new school year. (I used to have to be up around 6:30 so this isn’t even any earlier than what I was doing all last year!)

However, as I was getting into bed on Wednesday night, I realized that I absolutely did not want to wake up at 6:20 a.m. I did not want to get into my exercise clothes and force myself to run. I wanted to have a more soft start to the day — something I’ve been wanting most days. I don’t really want to be up and running.

So…maybe running early is not the right plan for me right now. The good news is that I work at home and have a pretty flexible schedule. Most days I need a mental break by mid-afternoon. So I’m planning on blocking out an hour (1-2? 1:30-2:30?) at least a few days a week to go for a run when it’s light and when it’s the warmest it will be in winter. Or I can go on the treadmill and since that’s in the same room as my weights, do a strength workout too. That’s what I wound up doing Thursday afternoon. Maybe I’ll be a little smelly after but…hey, working from home. If I have anywhere important to go later I can clean myself up.

I have written a lot about morning routines (and I host a podcast called Before Breakfast!) but I am on record noting that there’s no reason to get up early to do stuff just to do so. The reason morning exercise works for a lot of people is that this is the only time when it fits. They can’t just stop working from 1-2 p.m. and exercise. They need to get home after work and can’t stop somewhere for an hour to exercise. And by late at night very few people want to exercise. But if I can exercise in the middle of the day, I don’t actually need to get up early. So there’s no real reason to force myself.

In other news: Content round-up! This week, over at Before Breakfast, the longer episode was an interview with Lisa Woodruff. She’s the founder of Organize 365, a company that teaches people how to get their life and stuff in order. She is running a business and getting her PhD simultaneously, so she’s not only got organization tips, she’s got a lot of personal time management tips too. Please check that out!

Other Before Breakfast episodes included “Make hay while the sun shines” (it’s often wise to change things slightly to take advantage of a temporary opportunity) and “If you want to run more, sign up for a race.” While I don’t plan to run any more half marathons any time soon, my Thanksgiving 5k is motivating me to do some speed work…

My new Substack newsletter is called “Vanderhacks” and it features an every-weekday-morning tip. This week I suggested ideas so people “Don’t get lost in transition” (are you more like a tiny boat or a big oil tanker when it comes to turning yourself around?) and behind the paywall I suggested “Little ways to level up your career” — ten things you can do today to make your career more resilient. The current cadence is 3 free and 2 paid posts per week. Please check it out and consider subscribing!

Over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community, we had a great discussion of all things meal planning during our monthly Zoom meet-up. The video is available to members. This week we’ve also been discussing teen jobs (our own and our kids’) and music lessons (a surprising source of mental load around here…)

And here’s a sonnet, called “Portland 7:45a.m.” — when I was out running (but NOT at 6:20 a.m….)

By day the heat is gentle, here the sun
has tilted, rising lower in the sky.
October feels like summer, just for fun,
comes visit for a bit before goodbye.

I run between the bricks, the city leaves
have yellowed, and the wind blows off the sound.
A hulking ship pulls in, the port receives
its guest, and I can see its bulk around

the bend, where little sails are speckled, bright
just like the clouds. A dog runs on the sand.
This morning, like all mornings, brings new light,
and all the past’s a shadow, where the hand

of time has left it. See, the bar’s old hose
will splash away the night, which — swirling — goes.

On the docket this weekend — my peak long run (for the half-marathon I’m running in 3 weeks…), more birthday celebrations, hearing the 17-year-old sing the Star Spangled Banner for an athletic event, and family photos. The photos will be an experience — the 4-year-old already complained about the sweater he will be wearing BUT I know my remembering self will be glad to have these photos, and I’m not sure the 17-year-old will really participate in formal family photos after this. So we should take them.

In the meantime, this week’s content round-up…The Before Breakfast podcast featured an interview with productivity expert Chris Bailey talking about the Rule of 3 and his point system for building good habits. I also suggested (quoting Jodi Wellman) that people “Make bit-sized bucket lists.”

Over at Vanderhacks I preached the virtues of vowing to “Leave the party while you’re still having fun.” Also, thinking about endings, I suggest people “Begin by thinking about the end.” I began a foray into video posting with one called “Send a note to your Future Self.” The (print) post behind the paywall this week was about how to finish the year strong and “Make the most of the next 100 days.” Please consider a free or paid subscription!

Over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community we are discussing how much time we spend outside and (in another outdoor-related topic) how we manage bad weather days (i.e. when kids are out of school). If you missed Sarah’s interview with Sam Kelly about how to get kids to notice what needs to be done, you can check it out here.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy my writing, you might also like my books. I’ve written several on time management topics. The most recent is called Tranquility by Tuesday: Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. I really enjoyed writing this book about my favorite time management strategies, and what happened when 150 people learned them over nine weeks. Please check it out!

However, the concept of exercising twice a day has some merit — especially if you approach it right. Sometimes people assume they need to exercise for a long time or it’s not worth it. Or they think they only have time for one kind of exercise in life — but then that gets boring.

Two-a-days can switch things up.

So, for instance, maybe you go for a 25-minute run in the morning and then do a 15-minute strength training session at night after your kids go to bed. That’s 40 minutes of activity, but you didn’t need a 40-minute chunk of time to do it.

Or maybe you can do a 15-minute yoga video over your lunch break, and then you swim laps for 20 minutes during your kid’s 30-minute swim lesson at night. The lesson isn’t long enough to cover a long workout, but it can cover something, and you can do something different at a different point to get yourself up over 30 minutes a day.

Any exercise is better than no exercise. That said, I know some people find it hard to believe that 20 minutes will do much. And yes, if you’re training for a marathon, you’ll need to find longer stretches. But my experience is that people have a lot more 20-minute chunks during the day than they have hour-long chunks. If you think exercise requires an hour, there may be a lot of days when you don’t exercise.

If you start trying to use bits of time though, you might exercise more days. And by trying different things, you keep from getting bored. Running 40 minutes on a treadmill can feel tedious. Twenty might feel like it’s not that long — and then you do something else for another 20 minutes. Or maybe you even run for 20 minutes on that treadmill in the morning, go about your day, and run for another 20 minutes at night. Neither felt so long but it still totaled 40.

In any case, I’ve been doing this some days this summer. I will sometimes run in the mornings, but I really don’t want to get up that early. So I run for about 30 minutes and then often do something later: a bike ride, kicking back and forth in the pool, a strength training session. Occasionally I even run, bike, and swim in one day! It’s not a real triathlon by any means but there are a lot of days when it all fits.

In any case, the scripts are all 500-1000 words, with most of them hovering toward the lower end of that range. I wrote the first handful separately, but I’ve kept one word file of Before Breakfast episodes for all the fully edited scripts from then on. The running word count on that file recently crossed 600,000 words.

This is an interesting number. It is roughly the number of words in War and Peace. It is not quite as long as the King James Bible (which clocks in at a bit under 800,000 words) but it is a lot of words nonetheless.

One of the items on my current List of 100 Dreams is to write an epic novel. On some level this is a daunting goal. But I have apparently recorded something equivalent in length over the last three years. It’s just that instead of a sweeping multi-generational character saga, it comes in the form of bite-sized productivity advice.

There are lots of ways to view this realization, but one positive approach is to realize that if I do want to write that epic novel, I could use a similar method. Just write 500-600 words every weekday for three years. Or for two years (I don’t need to actually hit 600,000 words!). Producing scripts has not been onerous. I can often write or edit 2-3 during my 12-year-old’s 1-hour fencing class. Fiction is harder, for sure. The organizational work will be a lot more intense. But the process is still all habit, execution, and patience. Just like anything else. Time passes. Words add up. The question is what they add up to.

(In case anyone is wondering, blog posts also add up. WordPress says I’ve published 2750 posts over the years. If each clocked in at 300 words on average, and my guess is the average is higher, that’s over 800,000 words right there…)

(I did a study in which 150 people learned and implemented these rules over nine weeks, and their levels of time satisfaction did rise by statistically significant amounts!)

Anyway, in anticipation of the book, I’m going to start doing the occasional Tranquility by Tuesday (TBT) Scorecard here on the blog. I track my time, so I can look back on a week and see…how did I do? How many rules did I follow? What was the effect on my life?

My first rule is to “Give yourself a bedtime.” Since I have to wake up at 6:30 a.m. on weekday mornings (for kid getting ready/shuttling) and I need 7.4 hours of sleep/day, my bedtime has become 11 p.m. It used to be earlier, but in the new house the baby and I are both sleeping better…sometimes it helps to be a little farther away…. Over the past week (April 18-24), I was in my bedroom by 11 every night, and asleep at 11 every weekday night. I did stay up until 11:15 p.m. on Friday and Saturday night (horrors!). As a result of observing my bedtime, I was up a few minutes before my alarm 5 out of 7 days last week (the alarm was set for 7:30 on Sat/Sun and I was up before then, plus three of the weekdays I was up closer to 6:15). I really hate being sleep deprived and so I’ve become pretty fundamentalist about this rule, though I should note that getting in bed by 11 p.m. isn’t that challenging. We’ve also made some family choices (like driving the high schooler to school) so no one has to get up before 6:30.

My second rule is to “Plan on Fridays.” I plan my upcoming weeks on Fridays no matter what (well, unless I plan on Thursdays because I’m gone on Friday or something…), so I anticipate this being a boring entry in my scorecards…

Next up is “Move by 3 p.m.” This means to get some form of physical activity before 3 p.m. each day. I went for walks outside M, T, W, and F, and did a morning run on Saturday. On Sunday the time that worked for a run was 5 p.m. Thursday I did not do any particular physical activity. My life in general tends to feature a lot of running around, but I’m sure I can aim for 7 days in the future.

Rule #4 is “Three times a week is a habit.” Things don’t have to happen daily to count in our lives. For many fun/meaningful things, three times a week can make something part of our identities. In general these days I’m aiming to run three times a week, though I only did twice last week — I’m dealing with some IT band issues and so I had taken 2 weeks off of running. I would like to practice the piano three times a week, and I did that twice last week. I could put singing in this category, though that’s structurally built in twice (rehearsal + church service). I suppose I could combine piano + singing and pat myself on the back for doing music four times per week, but I actually want to aim to do each of those three times (adding in a singing practice session and another piano one) so that’s a goal for the future.

Rule #5 is to “Create a back-up slot.” I tend to leave Fridays as open as possible in order to use this time as a back-up slot for anything important. I didn’t really wind up needing it though I did wind up having a back-up slot for a kid activity. The 7-year-old was supposed to go to karate on Tuesday and somehow that did not happen. I took him on Thursday instead, so it was good that Thursday was fairly light for activities.

Rule #6 is “One big adventure, one little adventure.” This week’s big adventure was a Saturday trip to Hawk Mountain. (For 6/7 of us — the middle schooler was on a Boy Scout backpacking trip.) I saw that they were showing documentaries in their outdoor amphitheater so we went up in the afternoon to do a 1-hour hike, watched the documentary (well, some of it…some of the little ones had to go off and play in the woods) and then we ate at Olive Garden on the drive back toward home. My little adventure could be one of a few things — I went for a short walk on Friday at Stoneleigh, a historic grounds/garden a few miles from my house. It’s open to the public and free, but it always takes an extra nudge to do something like that. I put it on the list for the week and did it! But I could also have chosen the happy hour I went to Wednesday night – I hadn’t done something like that in a while so it was a different sort of adventure.

Rule #7 is “Take one night for you.” My weekly choir practice fits this nicely. Whatever is happening with work or with the family on Thursday, it’s nice to know that in the evening I will be focusing on something else entirely. It’s like a mental cleanse.

Rule #8 is “Batch the little things.” I make a “Friday punch list” during the week of things that are not terribly important but do need to get done. So on Friday I was a busy bee hanging curtains, repairing a mug, mailing checks and change-of-address notes, paying for field trips online, filling out forms for a fundraiser, etc. It doesn’t take that long, and it’s nice to not have these things cluttering up my mental landscape the rest of the week.

Finally, rule #9 is “Effortful before effortless.” The idea is to do some form of “effortful” leisure (reading, hobbies, etc.) before screen time. And here I pretty much failed miserably. What can I say. I’m having trouble finding books I want to read right now on my Kindle app in small bits of time. On one level my reading life looks really good this year, as I’m reading through all the works of Shakespeare. I’m currently on Act IV of Hamlet. But that takes 10-15 minutes at the pace I am reading, and then there are a lot of spots to fill during the day. I did listen to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring in the car, so I guess that was something.

Anyway, stay tuned for more of these over the next few months!

On the other hand, the future is to some degree unknowable. Pandemics and wars can upend whole societies. On an individual level, accidents and illnesses can change life overnight. Unforeseen good events can happen too — a dream job offer in a different city, for instance.

I feel like sometimes these things get presented as either/or. Planning is a futile attempt to ignore or at least push forward our mortality! We should just live in the moment! Or people tell ridiculous tales of having planned out their entire lives — writing a note to their 50-something self at age 20 and it has all come true! We hear about it because some of it did happen; when it doesn’t, people don’t talk about it.

But life is seldom either/or. Instead, here’s a better way to think about it: Hold the far future loose; hold the near future close. 

The far future is the place for general hopes and dreams. This is one reason I love the List of 100 Dreams exercise. You brainstorm all kinds of desires, without holding yourself to any of them. What would be cool to do or have in life? How might it be meaningful to spend one’s days and years? One envisions possibilities.

The near future, on the other hand, is where the real work happens. This is where desires get turned into reality. I think of the next 1-2 years as an active document where I am planing steps to make things come to fruition.

In my talks I recommend an exercise of writing a prospective job performance review, and thinking about what you might be recounting at a future holiday party. It’s March now. If you were giving yourself a professional performance review in December 2022, what would you like to say you’ve done? If you were at a party in December 2022 sharing tales of what you did in your personal life over the course of the year, what would you like to be saying? To some degree, this could be done for 2023 too. I’ve been planning out trips for 2023 for instance. I am thinking about my next book. And whatever reading project will follow 2021’s War and Peace and 2022’s Shakespeare.

For near-future desires, active planning is critical. A research project and book won’t magically come to be out of living in the present and following one’s day-to-day whimsy. I have to plot out the steps and timeline. To be sure, life is still unknowable in the sense that major events could change everything. But you can start to see probabilities a bit more clearly, and there are also plenty of things that won’t happen without planning. You’re not going to do an extended family trip to an international destination without a lot of advance planning, for instance. It still might not happen with the planning but it definitely won’t happen without it.

Morning routines are fun to write about, but I soon realized that for those of us with kids and jobs, any given morning routine is going to be a snapshot in time, not an immutable law of the universe. Schedules change. If middle school starts at a different time than elementary school, that will likely change your morning once you have a middle schooler, changing again once high school becomes part of the equation. You could change jobs, or your partner could, or you could start working from home or stop working from home, or change which days you work from home, and so forth. Your partner might start traveling for work. You might start traveling for work. You might also move homes! This will change things too.

So I prefer to think of a morning routine as more of a morning “checklist” — the things I aim to do daily, but may not do at the exact same time. In any case, my current morning “checklist” is a variation on last year’s, but it’s how I’m starting my work days. Usually that happens somewhere around 8:30/8:45 a.m. I go into my office. If the morning is chilly I might turn on my gas fireplace (very easy with the remote control). I read a few pages of Shakespeare (usually about one act) as part of my project to read all the works of Shakespeare over the course of the year. I also write at least 100 words in my 2022 writing file.

I did the 100 words thing every day last year too, which built the habit, but I wound up with a lot of garbage. So this year I decided I wanted a bit more structure. Anyone who was on the December 2021 BOBW Patreon meet-up might have heard me thinking aloud about writing about a single day over the course of the year. As I thought about it, I thought that might be an interesting challenge. Since that particular day (December 14th) was a reasonably active day, I decided to loosely base my daily writing on my memories of that day, with a few extra things thrown in. So you could call it “Based on a true story” — it’s a bit more faithful to reality, at least currently, than “Inspired by real events.” There will be 365 short musings/vignettes on the main character’s life over the course of an ordinary if busy Tuesday.

I’ve just gotten to lunch 50-some days in and I haven’t yet come up dry. I’ve had to think sometimes, but that’s the point.

As for the Shakespeare, some days are better than others. I just waded through Titus Andronicus, and I can see why this bloodbath is not performed frequently. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s audiences didn’t have the ability to stream John Wick and the like. I guess you’ve got to get your violence and revenge how you can take them. (Also some historians think Shakespeare didn’t write Titus Andronicus, but I gather that’s what “some historians” think about every Shakespeare play that isn’t that good. I assume like any working creative he occasionally just had to crank something out!)

But even if Titus wasn’t up there with Hamlet or Midsummer Night’s Dream, it’s been good to see those more famous works in the context of all his work. I can see what devices and structures he used all the time. It’s felt like a worthy project and I’m not sick of Shakespeare yet so that’s promising. Morning by morning I read a little more and create a little more. It’s a nice way to start the day.

What’s your morning routine looking like right now?

Photo: My favorite picture from a morning run, even though that is not part of my morning routine right now.

However, now that my eldest is in high school — and thus the morning needs to start early — and my littlest has his own room — which means all of us are sleeping better — alarm clocks are featuring more prominently in my life. I set mine for 6:30 a.m. and I can reasonably expect that I will not be woken by something else before then.

Longtime readers know that my sleep “set point” is 7.4 hours/day. Over any longer period of time, this is what I average. I know this from almost 7 years of time tracking data. There are good nights and bad nights, but over the course of a month or two, this is where I end up.

Since I know this, I try to set my daily schedule to allow for this amount of sleep. I’m in my bed around 10:30 and relaxing, with the lights going off around 10:45 or 11. If they are out and I am out by then, this will allow for 7.4 hours of sleep. It actually allows for a little more, which explains the phenomenon of waking up somewhere between 6-6:30 on some chunk of mornings. On Friday night last weekend, for instance, I got in bed at 11 p.m., and sure enough, woke up at 6:25 a.m.

Waking before an alarm clock with no one demanding my attention is an interesting phenomenon. I often just lie there (I worry if I get up the house will start waking…). I will likely start using the time to read if this keeps happening. Though honestly, since I’m not really a morning person, I suspect this will lead me to wait a little longer before going to bed. We shall see.

Do you wake with an alarm clock or generally before? What time is your alarm going off these days?

In other news: Last call for the I Know How She Does It book discussion! I’m doing an author chat to benefit the Ronald McDonald House of Philadelphia. For a donation of $25 or more, you can join in. (That link goes to the registration form for my session; there is also a link to the donation site on that page where you can). I’d love to see some friendly faces; it will be at noon eastern tomorrow (2/11).

Photo: Sunrise from my retreat in Cape May this fall