Hello Path to Warren podcast. This is episode 17. It is July 17, 2020. Beautiful evening, 8:15pm at night, just out for a little walk. I wanted to share with you the theme of this podcast is about habit stacking. What is habit stacking? And I left off episode 16 talking about how I was going about the time tracking. I shared with you how important time tracking was to me. And I want to give you a prime example of what happened in my world today, what my life was like prior to tracking my time, and really elaborate on the step by step process that I go through. It’s pretty simple, but stacking these habits. I heard that on another podcast today and I was like, man, that’s the word. That’s the phrase for what you call what I’m doing. It’s called habit stacking. You start off with small habits. And one of the guys was explaining how he couldn’t tell that his son was getting larger and growing until his son started to outgrow clothes. And his comment was, I’ve seen my son every day and every day. I didn’t think he was getting any bigger. But the fact that we’ve been in Covid for three or four months now and he can’t wear clothes that we had before the Covid, he was explaining how he had this thought that it’s these daily unseen tasks and daily things that are happening that we unconsciously don’t know are happening that ultimately affect our end result. And he called it habit stacking, doing things every day that are so small that you start to stack them on top of each other. But one of the small things that I do every day that I call them bookend zeros. And one of those bookend zeros consists of tracking my time. So think about this in terms of twelve midnight to twelve midnight the next day. You have to have a stopping point somewhere in the day. But the best way that I was told to do it and what I think really works well is to think of it from midnight to midnight. So what I do is whenever I am first sitting down at my computer, I will open up my laptop. And I shared on the episode 16 how the first thing I do is start to fill out my Journal. And I don’t write anything about my time in my Journal except for the crucial time of when I woke up that day. And then I write down the first few things that I did to hold myself accountable and the things that I did that morning in my Journal up till about the time I get ready to get dressed to go to work. So just to recap from the last episode, my alarm goes off at 3:45AM. And the first thing I do is I get up and I go turn off the alarm. I keep my phone in the kitchen, plugged in to the charger. So it charges all night. And there’s so many reasons why I keep my phone and the kitchen as opposed to beside my bed. But let’s all go into all those reasons right now. Let me stick to my schedule before I get on a soapbox. But I turn off the alarm, it’s 03:45 AM. And then I will start the coffee pot. So the night before, I always make the coffee pot. And I used to waste a bunch of coffee by making a full pot. But I make a half a pot. But that’s neither here nor there. But the point is, I make the coffee the night before. So there’s a little incentive, just a little bit more reason to get up and not still lay in bed. My alarm is not so loud that it wakes up the whole house either. This iPhone app that comes with the phone, it’s got a bedtime feature on it. Like if you go to the app where you could have a stopwatch or you go to the app and you can record or set a timer from the Apple app that comes with a phone, there’s a bedtime feature there that you can play with these two hands on a clock and you can set it for okay, at 09:00 PM., I went to bed. I go to bed at 09:00 PM. And I wake up at five. Then that’s 8 hours of sleep. You can play with these two hands on the clock and be able to know, okay, well, if I make this target and get to bed, I’m at least going to get X amount of hours of sleep. That’s helpful, especially when I’m traveling. But the point is, the ringtone is not something that some people might say, oh, well, I don’t want to leave it in the kitchen because it’ll wake up my kids and wake up my wife at 4:00 in the morning. I don’t want to set my alarm and leave it out there. I need to have it next to my bed so I can cut it off in the morning. And that’s just not a real fear. There’s nothing there that wakes up the family. But once I start the coffee pot, I’ll then go use the restroom and I try to follow the simple rules that my sponsor shared with me. He said, Always remember, in the morning RPM, RPM stands for Rise, Pee and Meditate. Also, it can mean rise, pray and meditate, but you got to go to the bathroom first thing in the morning. So while the coffee is going to head to the restroom and by the time I get back, the coffee is getting close to being done. But I then will use the rug in the kitchen and I’ll get on my knees. It’s a soft rug. I’ll get on my knees there in the kitchen and I will say the third step prayer, “God, I offer myself to build with me and to do with me is Thou wilt relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of thy power, thy love, and thy way of life. Amen.” So after I finished the third step prayer, I have started off my morning right with a nice prayer offering my life and my will over to my Higher Power. I then get up from the rug and the coffee is there. I’ve got my mug and I fill it up. I didn’t go and sit down in my little library study. It’s basically a little breakfast nook that we’ve turned into our library and for at least five minutes. Sometimes it’s seven or eight minutes like this morning. But for at least five minutes I’m doing a guided meditation, just surrendering my thoughts and trying to stay focused on my breathing. I’ve got an app that I’m using right now called Audio Joy. I did find a couple of other apps that are podcasts actually that seem to have some more guided meditations. I’m going to be trying soon, but the point is just something to help guide me through a nice meditation. So by 4:00AM in the morning, within that 15 minutes time, I’ve already gotten up, started the coffee, used the restroom, got on my knees, offered my life and my day to my Higher Power and done a five minute meditation. All of that done, I mean done in 15 minutes. If you do that alone, I feel like you’re already ahead of 90% of the world. So the rest of my morning routine is going through books. I start off trying to read a page in the Bible. I started in the beginning. Now I’m in the Deuteronomy chapter. I’ve already read through the whole Bible last year just reading a page. A day after I finished that, I’ve got a couple of other books that I go through. A Daily Reflection type book. I read one page in the Big Book in the AA Big Book. I also read one page in the Al-Anon Twelve and Twelve book. And I’m studying to get my private pilot’s license. I’m studying real hard to get a private pilot’s license so that I can learn to fly. And I spend probably about 20 minutes every morning reading a page in this big old manual that I’m trying to learn. All that is done. That’s done at the end of my reading. And right now I’ve got eleven books or so maybe twelve books that I’m reading just one page in every morning. And I’ll dog gear that page. And it’s actually neat. One thing I really found that’s a new rule for me that helps me so much in my reading because it is so early and because the chair that I’m sitting in, I’ll start getting back aches and cramping up reading basically for 2 hours every morning. Every time I finish a page in a book, I will physically stand up and put that book on the bookshelf that’s behind my chair, and then I’ll have to turn around and come back and sit back down. That was inspired. That little bit of activity was actually inspired by my father in law, who teaches contractor seminars. And he told me when I was attending his contracting seminar training one day, he highly recommended that people who are studying, people who are in the exam and actually taking the contractor’s license exam to take breaks to let the blood flow from their butt to their head. He said, when you sit down in a chair for extended period of time, all the blood goes down and stops and lodges in your butt because you’re sitting on it. And by the act of standing up, you start that blood flow and you get it moving through your body again. And that really works. That works so well for me. Every book that I read a page in, I just turn around and get up from my chair and stick it on the shelf. Turn around. I might go refill my coffee cup, top it off with some warm coffee if I’ve read in three or four books. And then I’ll come and sit back down, prop my feet up on the chair in front of me, and continue on with the next book. I’ve also haven’t shared about this, but it’s just something a small little tool. I’ve got a clip on light that clips to the book that I’m reading, and it’s got a little light that pulls over and helps to provide extra light for my reading. I heard somebody say that a guy ended up having to wear glasses and having poor eyesight because he was reading in prison. He was reading a bunch of books in prison, and he had poor light, and ultimately it affected his eyesight so that he had to have glasses. So I tried very hard to use that light to help me see in the morning. So with the whole time tracking, I don’t write down everything I did every 15 minutes, I write it down in, like, chunks. So when I get to work, I’ve written down in my Journal those things that I did that morning. And then I’m looking at the day before. So when I’m working in my spreadsheet, I’ve got all of my expenses, and I’m looking at the bank account to see. I look at the activity and I Scroll down and I see, okay, what expenses did I have? Everything that I’m putting in is for the day that was just for yesterday. I’m tracking the expenses that went through the account yesterday or the income that we had yesterday. And then I’m also assessing my 24 hours. So let’s say, for example, I’ve got a little spot that the first number that I put in on my spreadsheet is what time I woke up. So I already told you I woke up at 3:45 this morning. So I put 3.75 because a whole hour is 100%. If it’s 3:45, it’d be 3.75. If I got about 3:30 in the morning, it’d be 3.5 and so on and so forth. So by me putting 3.75 in that top line under today’s column for Friday, I’ve got a formula a few lines down. That one of the rows that I’m tracking. One of the rows that I like to track and keep good eye on is my sleep. So my sleep is the addition of adding up what I got in the morning with a couple hours that I got in the evening for that day. So let’s keep going with this. So today I looked at it and I said, okay, I got up at 3:45, but I didn’t get to bed until I didn’t get home from Charleston. I had to go to Charleston for a work event to wind out. I didn’t go to sleep until about eleven after I showered and everything. So I only put down 1 hour for Thursday. And I did actually get up Thursday morning. I slept in until five and I was a little tired. I was off of my normal routine that day because I went to a Buddy’s birthday party on Wednesday afternoon and I didn’t get to bed at my normal 8:00 in the evening. It was a little later, it was more like 09:00. So at least today I’m conscious of it. At least today I know that if I went to bed at 10:00 on Wednesday, that’s 2 hours that I’m putting down of sleep that I got that night for Wednesday and I didn’t get up. I got up at 3:45 in the morning. 3.75 + 2 = 5.75 Hours That is not enough sleep. It’s not enough sleep at all. That was Wednesday. Thursday I slept to a five to try to help make up for that. And I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel like I was not sticking to my routine of getting up at 3:45 by sleeping in until five. I mean, I was able to justify and say no, I got to catch up on a little bit of sleep here because I only had 5.7 ………welcome back to the Path to Warren podcast. I left off, we were talking about tracking my sleeping hours are very important. The other categories are obviously work. And what I found is I mentioned when I get to work, I do my numbers. It takes about five or ten minutes to get my bank account pulled up, get the numbers off of that, put it in the Journal, put it in the spreadsheet. Whatever time I got to work, I’m logging it in. So if it’s 8:15 or 8:30 in the notes, I put 8:30 for that day. But then I go back to the day before on the column of the day before and if I left at 5:30 or 5:45 from work, I’ll fill in what time I left. If I slip away to a lunch meeting right down the road, we have some great programs. I go to a meeting at lunch. Normally I’ll put there that I left at twelve and returned at one, then in the cell in the actual Excel spreadsheet, in that little cell, if I got there at 8:30 – 12, I’ll put 3.5 hours. +, if I got back from the lunch appointment at 01:00 and I stayed till 5:30, then I’ll put 4.5 hours. So the formula there. If I Hover over it or click on it, I can see the actual amount of hours down to the 15 minutes of tracking my time at work. I don’t track if I go to the restroom or if I stop and close my mind or my eyes for a five minute meditation. In the middle of this break from working on something hard. It’s the time that I’m at work that I put down. This is very helpful because the columns all add up to the end of the week and I’m able to see okay, I worked 47 hours this week or I only worked 35 hours. I need to work some more to get my 40 hours that I’m supposed to do or 45 hours I’m supposed to do. And then there’s a couple of other categories there that are broken out in self care, like going to the gym, going to meetings, walking around the neighborhood. Those are things that I do for self care. I’ve got some things I do for fun. I’ve got a category for family. I’ve got a category for sleeping. Like I said, if I find that I’m only spending 15 minutes or 20 minutes or even probably an hour a day with family, I might need to start working on that. But on a Friday afternoon or Friday evening or whenever, really, if I spend 3 hours with my family watching a movie or just playing Legos with my daughter to be able to track that and get credit for it in my spreadsheet, it makes it all work out. I’m happy to go play Legos and not feel guilty about working if I know I’m getting credit for it on my spreadsheet because I’m trying to achieve this balance of happiness. I can’t tell you how many times I would have been playing with my daughter early on when I was still active and out there using when I would be playing with her and be thinking about what I need to do on Monday or what I need to do the next day at work. That’s not a sane, and it’s not how you practice Serenity that will drive you crazy and it causes all kinds of stress in my back and just going mentally crazy thinking about what I have to do for work, tracking my time. I never knew that it allowed me to be present and enjoy special moments with my family. Enjoy the moments with the in laws or my parents or with friends. I get to log that under “fun” going to my Buddy’s birthday party. He turned 43. It was very special. I needed to stop by and say hey and happy birthday instead of feeling guilty and kicking myself, hey, I need to be in bed. No, this goes under my fun category because I need to have some fun in my life in order to be balanced. So tracking time on this spreadsheet daily and not like I don’t carry around my Journal to fill in what I’m doing throughout the day. I simply look at it the first thing in the morning when I’m doing my numbers. This is the part of my numbers I do my time tracking and I will look at and think about the day before. If it’s part of the whole reflection process of the last 24 hours and planning for the next 24 hours, I think about the last 24 hours and say, okay, I remember what time I left work. I remember what time I got back from lunch. Remember what time I left lunch. Okay, get those logged in. I got lunch figured out. That’s a big chunk of the day. And I know what time I woke up and I know what time I went to bed. If I went to bed at 09:00 the day before, then it’ll already be populated. Like I said to say 3:45 from the morning I got up. So it’ll say = 3.75. And I’ll put +3 because I went to bed at 09:00 and I’ll hit Enter and so that will fill in my sleeping hours. And then I just try to think about in a general way, where did I drive? That’s what I forgot to tell you about drive time. I’ve got a category for drive time. I had no idea. I drive 2 hours a day on average. It blew my mind. 15 minutes to the gym in the morning, 15 minutes back, 30 minutes to work, 15 minutes to a meeting at lunch, 15 minutes back, 30 minutes back home. It’s 2 hours. That’s 2 hours. So I track all that. But I just roughly think about okay, well, I was at dinner with my family from 06:00 p.m.. I helped them clean up dinner, play with my daughter, read her a book in bed till 08:00. That’s 2 hours. So I logged 2 hours in for that. I remember I went to the gym early in the morning. So under self care, I’ll put equals one. That was 1 hour. And then I went to a meeting. So plus another hour. And then what else for fun tonight, I went out and watered my plants in the yard and worked in the yard for 30 minutes when I got home. So under self care, I’ll put .5 and when you add up those things, they will add up to more hopefully more than 24 hours. If it didn’t add up to 24 hours you need to figure out what you were doing and try to come up with where was it? Was it watching TV? Maybe that needs to go under fun so that’s a little bit about how I keep track of my time and the time tracking has rocked my world. It’s one of the small habit stacking techniques that I’ve been able to adapt in my life and highly recommend it to anybody and everybody in recovery or not in recovery. It’s a game changer. I promise. Hope you have a wonderful day. God bless you and make a contribution. 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