Circling the wagons at BWI Airport
Today I noticed that I said “I’m about to dial in for the meeting”. It felt weird.
Do I say “I’m about to click join” instead?
My Journey with the Whoop Strap: Lessons Learned and Tips for Getting Started
For over five years, I have worn a Whoop strap, and it has made a significant difference in my overall health and happiness. Its impact was so profound that when I decided to go without the Whoop strap for an eight-month trial period, I noticed a decline in my health behaviors and promptly went back to using it.
Advice for Getting Started with a Whoop Strap
- Use your recovery score as a guide. A red recovery score doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise. Instead, use it to gauge how you feel and adjust your exercise accordingly.
- Get your baseline set. Don’t try to change too many behaviors the first few weeks after getting your Whoop strap. Set a baseline so you can see how the new behaviors are taking effect.
- HRV (Heart Rate Variability) is personalized. Your HRV reflects your health and overall fitness. Focus on trends rather than absolute numbers. Look for upward trends, but avoid comparing your numbers to others.
- Utilize the journal questions. These questions help identify trends in your data.
- Every few months, review and adjust the questions in your journal. Remove questions that don’t seem to have much impact.
- Understand that some questions act as proxies for other behaviors. For example, not sleeping in your own bed often indicates business travel.
- Keep questions that make a big impact even when “you know what to do”. The act of answering a question every day will cement the behavior
- Review your heart rate during sleep every morning. Review your heart rate data each morning to understand the effects of late meals, alcohol, and workouts. If you notice significant spikes in your heart rate during the first few hours of sleep, assess whether the preceding activity was worth it.
- Use the Whoop widget on your iPhone Home Screen. This serves as a constant reminder of your daily strain and recovery. The visual reminder is one of the biggest benefits of using Whoop. How to Install the Whoop Widget for iOS
Behaviors I’ve Changed Wearing the Whoop
- Allergy/reaction to wine: I have stopped drinking wine altogether because I experience an elevated heart rate 4-6 hours after consuming more than a quarter glass.
- High sugar content: Foods and desserts with high sugar content don’t sit well with me late in the day. Overall, less sugar is better.
- Hydration Matters: Be sure to drink plenty of water throughout the day
- No eating after 8 PM: It’s often better for me to wait until breakfast.
- Saunas for recovery: Saunas aid my recovery more effectively than steam rooms and hot tubs.
- Less recovery may be better: When I first started wearing the Whoop I would take a recovery day after a hard workout. Over time I found working out more, unless I felt really hammered, helped boost my HRV. Four to five workouts a week is best.
- Watch for respiratory rate jumps: When I really get sick my respiratory rate at night jumps. So on days that I don’t feel great but my respiratory rate is normal I push on. This has generally worked out well.
- Outdoor time improves recovery: Spending more hours outside enhances my recovery. This likely results from multiple factors:
- Being outside you are more likely to be off your phone or computer.
- Being in nature is generally relaxing and likely not under the stress of working.
- Being outside typically involves social interactions.
“Can you bring me my coffee cup off of the charger?” ☕️
Something my grandparents would have never said in their life. Ember Coffee Mug
Excellent advice for creating a happiness memory book.
Every few months, take at least one panorama photo of your kid’s room. At least annually, secretly record your kid talking for at least ten minutes. I promise you’ll treasure both, and then you will curse yourself for not having done each way more often.
Corporate Gym Membership
Salesforce.com is like a gym membership for organizations.
Everyone feels like they need it, it’s aspirational when you sign up, people don’t actually use it, and you can’t bring yourself to cancel your membership because it admits defeat.
Mastering Your Schedule: Conquering Time Confetti and Unlocking Productivity
Many people I coach often express concerns about not having enough time and the consistent feeling of overwhelm. They face a barrage of emails, distracting messages, and back-to-back meetings, leaving little room for deep thinking. Instead of focusing on important objectives, they constantly react to their inbox and calendar.
According to Adam Grant, an expert from The Wharton School of Business, this situation is known as “Time Confetti.” It scatters bits of time everywhere, making it challenging to concentrate and engage in meaningful work. While it may seem like you have no control over your schedule and Time Confetti is unavoidable, there is a way to change that. By carefully planning and managing your calendar proactively, you can take charge of your time.
TAKE ACTION: Starting with the first week of next month, create recurring meetings on your calendar to block out time for focused work and finding your flow. Schedule multiple 90-minute blocks each week and make sure you protect those periods from interruptions.
Here are three things to consider as you implement this approach:
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Find Your Prime Time: Think about when you feel most energized and alert during the day. Identify those moments when you can concentrate and be most productive.
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Collaborate Smartly: Take into account how you work with others. Do you often collaborate with people in different time zones or regions? If so, consider scheduling your deep work sessions to align with those collaborations. For example, you could plan early morning sessions for global teams or adjust your schedule to accommodate teams or customers on the West Coast.
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Tailor Your Plan: Consider the nature of the work you need to do during your deep work sessions. Are you creating sales presentations, writing product documentation, analyzing data, or simply responding to emails? Each type of task may require different times of day, access to information, or collaboration with colleagues.
By intentionally setting aside dedicated time for focused work that suits your strengths and aligns with your collaborations, you can create an environment that enhances productivity and innovation. With proactive calendar management, you can regain control of your schedule and reduce the impact of Time Confetti on your professional life.
More about Time Confetti Adam Grant: How to stop languishing and start finding flow | TED Talk
Performing a mind sweep to unlock faster sleep
Do you often experience a racing mind when trying to fall asleep at night? Are you constantly struggling to calm your thoughts before bedtime?
More delightfully yet, a study by Baylor University psychologist Michael Scullin found that people who created a to-do list fell asleep nine minutes faster, on average, than those who didn’t. (1)
To address this issue, try incorporating a simple yet effective practice into your bedtime routine. Take a moment to sit down with a pen and paper, and jot down the things that occupy your mind the most. Perform a “mind sweep”, capturing all the thoughts and concerns that hold your attention.
By engaging in this process, you can effectively offload your mental burden onto paper, allowing your mind to experience a sense of relief. This practice not only helps in organizing your thoughts but also assists in quieting your mind, making it easier for you to drift into a peaceful sleep.
(1) Wired - Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t
www.oneusefulthing.org/p/setting…
So many important processes assume that the amount and quality of our written output is a useful measure of thoughtfulness, effort, and time.
A professor from NYU said, on one of the nightly news shows, that the written word is no longer the symbol of human thought. Long term this is very true but there will be a short term arbitrage in those that can use AI tools in their work.
Will AI’s accurate code generation slow adoption of new programming languages? A lack of a broad code base for new languages may lead to bias towards existing languages.
Finished reading: The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell 📚(5/5)
I thoroughly enjoy reading and listening to works authored and narrated by Gladwell, and his latest offering does not disappoint. This captivating piece is part podcast and part historical novel, where Gladwell delves into the lives of the men who shaped America’s WWII bombing strategy. Through their moral views and beliefs, Gladwell highlights how their decisions impacted not only the war but also our present-day lives.
Self-Repo Fords
Ford has submitted a patent to automate the vehicle repo processs. www.theverge.com
Those include sending messages to the owner’s smartphone or the vehicle itself, locking drivers out entirely, disabling functions like air conditioning, geofencing drivers to only operate within a certain time or set area so they can still get to work, and in one especially harrowing example, enabling an autonomous car to just drive itself to an impound lot — or a junkyard if the car’s market value is determined to be below a certain threshold.
Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you
Finished reading: Authentic by Paul Van Doren 📚(4/5)
The making of the Vans shoe. If you enjoy books about how businesses are built, skate culture, and a bit about life in SoCal in the 60-80’s this a fun quick read/listen.
Finished reading: Taste by Stanley Tucci 📚(4/5)
Enjoyable audiobook read with the gentle and smooth voice of Stanley Tucci himself. Parts of the book ran long, but the penultimate chapter was a shock to me and put the whole book into a new context. A book about the love of food turned into a book about gratitude in a wonderful way.
Finished reading: The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon by Todd Zwillich 📚(4/5) an Audible Original.
“The story of John C. Houbolt, an unsung hero of Apollo 11 and the man who showed NASA how to put America on the moon.” It’s the story of determination, achievement, perseverance, and the struggle for recognition. Doing the right thing isn’t always rewarded at the time we feel it should be.
For the first time in my life, I heard a radio station play the same song twice in a row, and not for any type of marathon. Santeria (song) - Wikipedia. Odd.
7 marathons - 7 Continents - 7 Days
David Kilgore just ran—and won—seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. The 31-year-old American runner averaged about 2:56 per marathon, which means he ran 183.4 miles at 6:43 pace per mile.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Remarkable
Kottke.org - New Massive Image of the Milky Way with 3.32 Billion Individual Objects
It’s impossible to wrap my mind around this.
Tonight the NBC Nightly News had a story about a woman who found her father’s bucket list after he was killed in a distracted driver accident. The list included about 60 items of which about 6 where already completed. When she found the list she felt compelled to finish the bucket list and in doing so found new strength inside her as well as a connection to her father. She finished the list in about 5 years.
NBC Nightly News - Daughter honors late father by finishing his bucket list
As I watched this episode I thought about how this father’s bucket list was like a treasure map. It was a plan laid out for someone to follow. It gave the daughter a plan to act upon without struggling to think of her own bucket list (though she may have had one).
Is this a bad thing, to have a challenge laid out before you? Probably not, who knows if she would have accomplished her own bucket list in just a few years without the impetus or challenge from her father.
So the lesson here is to take the leap, find a list, any list and get started.