Welcome to the Path to Warren podcast. This is episode eleven and I’m going to share about the reboot. The reboot. What does that mean? Early on in recovery, I heard that you don’t have to just change a few things. You got to change everything. You have to change your people. You only have to change your people, places and things. Right. What does that mean? And what worked for me? What has my experience been with changing everything? So if you could visualize with me a computer, my daughter doesn’t understand this concept, but a desktop computer, they have a CPU, central processing unit because that’s what it stands for. But anyway, you got the tower. Imagine all these wires and cables coming in to you might have a thumb drive or two, you might have a little thing controlling the mouse. You got a USB going into that, all of these inputs coming into the CPU. When I got sober and decided to stop drinking and drugging and changed my life, I heard that you need to do a reboot. It sounds like you need to have a reboot in life. And I was like, oh, man, I can understand that. That’s pretty simple. You want to change or if your computer locks up, what do you have to do? You got to do a hard reboot, right? You got to push that button or hold it down, hold down the power button so that it cuts off completely, slowly It’ll cut itself back on and it’ll be fixed or at least a lot better than it was. So I needed to have a reboot in life. So what happened was I drew on my Journal a picture of a CPU, a picture of a tower, like a little box. And I drew that Cube and I drew all of the areas of life out from it, like you’re doing a mind map. I drew extensions off of that, like rays of the sun off of that Cube. And what are all the areas that have input into your life? You’ve got family, you’ve got money, you’ve got health, like exercise, you’ve got food, you’ve got spirituality or religion, if that’s where you are in your life. But some kind of higher power, that’s five. And then you got work. How are you treating your money? So income and then expenses. That could be two different categories, really two whole podcasts right there on all that. There is to talk about with those two. But that’s seven and I’m sure I’ll come up with some more. What I heard early on is that what you got to do is you got to pull out every one of those cords, like pulling them out of the back of the computer tower, pull those cords out, look at them, assess them and decide at what percentage you’re going to put it back in, decide if you are going to plug it back into your computer. Are you going to just put it back at 50%, are you going to put it back at 20%? Are you going to change the way that program runs and then plug it back in? Trying to assess each and every one of those inputs into your life is going to make a better life. But I had to really look at them on an individual program basis and say, okay, what does my physical health program look like today? And I used to tell my doctor when he would ask, how many times a day do you exercise or how many times a week do you exercise? And I used to say, oh, I’m very physically active on my job site. And what I was talking about was I was on Adderall and being on Adderall, you walk and do things and run around and scurry around. But everything was wrong about that program. I did not go to exercise the gym. I didn’t even have a gym membership. I thought that was a waste of money. I thought that was helping out my budget. But my physical health would fluctuate. I gained 40lbs at one point. I lost 40lbs at one point. Over the last five years it has fluctuated drastically. And that was not because of working out, that was because of prescription drugs. So I needed to look at the physical activity part. I needed to look at my morning routine because when am I going to go work out? I’m not going to get home from work at 5:30 or 6:00 and then say, oh, I got to go to the gym when I’m dead tired and I really need to spend time with my daughter and my wife. Working out is something that only can be done based on my experience, can only be done in the morning. So I needed to start getting up a little bit earlier once I got sober and I needed to start actually going to a physical place like a gym and signing up for some kind of workout program. I really enjoy this Les Mills Body Pump class. So I go up here to the local gym and I’ve really gotten a lot out of their workout program. It’s Tuesdays and Thursday mornings at 06:00 a.m. That is a program that they count on me there. If I’m not there, they’ll ask about me. So it’s like an accountability. There’s a couple of guys on the front row that I work out with everyday that we say hello to and we all work out together. And I’m noticed if I’m not there and I like that a lot, it helps keep me accountable. Also go to the gym most Saturday mornings, work out with my wife. There’s a couple of classes there as well. And then like this morning it’s Friday morning. So Mondays and Fridays I like to go and walk around the neighborhood and try to get out and do some walking. But that’s all part of now a program for physical activity at least 30 minutes. Most of the time it’s an hour. So that’s one section of my life. The next was working. So I was working 90 hours. I had it up one time. I was working 90 hours a week when I had my solar business prior to the crash. That’s not sustainable. It’s not sustainable. If you want to have a wife and a family and health and spirituality and grow as a person in recovery, you cannot work. Excuse me, I cannot work 90 hours a week. No period. I’m gonna end that sentence right there. There’s no way you could do it. So what I had to start doing is I realized that I was overworking. And what that also means is I’m under earning. So if you’re getting paid $70,000 and they’re counting on you to be there for 45 hours a week, but you’re working 90, you’re technically getting paid $35,000, right? If you’re getting paid $70,000 and you’re only working 23 hours a week, then you’ve got all this extra time and you’re technically getting paid $140,000 for your time. So the boss expects me to be there between 40 and 50 hours a week. So let’s just call it 45 hours a week. That’s a healthy work life balance. I didn’t know such a thing. I did not have a program of healthy work life balance at the time. So 45 hours a week. What that really meant was I started hanging out with a guy in recovery who was a member of this program called Debtors Anonymous. And he said, hey, you say you’re a serial entrepreneur, and I use the term serial because I hadn’t made a bunch of money yet, but I definitely had a spending problem and an overworking problem. He said, Why don’t you look into Debtors Anonymous? And I was like, really? What’s that? He said, yeah, it’s the same twelve step program, and it mimics AA. It’s a twelve step program that I think will really help you. It’ll help you with your overworking and your under earning, meaning I was overworking but making the same amount of money. So I was under earning. It was like I was making that $35,000 number instead of the $70,000 because of the hours I was putting in every day. So he said that under earning is something that this program will help you with. And one of the first principles of that program is, hey, we want you to start tracking your time. Can you start tracking your time? And you got to understand, I grew up with a father who was extremely good about tracking his time, extremely competent at tracking his mileage. We wouldn’t even get in the car. And he wouldn’t start up the car a lot of times or pull it out. He would start up the car and get the air conditioner going, but he wouldn’t pull it out of park before he would pull up his mileage log and log where we were going and what the mileage says before we started. I mean, it’s just such a routine that I often laughed at. You know, I laughed at because I didn’t think it was necessary. But when it came to clients, he gets paid by the billable hour. So every hour he bills down to the 15 minutes. And this is just standard in the industry, but every 15 minutes he gets paid for it. So if he’s not tracking his time, well, if he’s not keeping track of how many hours he works, then he’s not going to get paid for it. So they recommended hey, Matt, I want you to start tracking your time. And so I knew the principles that my dad had put into place as far as track it down to the 15 minutes, I don’t need to know that you were there at 1:23 or 1:07. None of that craziness. But I remembered I had an accountant one time who I needed to ask a question about a financial situation. And I sent her an email. And I got an invoice about a month later or a couple of weeks later for her time because she answered the email. But she was charging by the 15 minutes increment for pulling up my file, going in and checking something, emailing me the answer and then closing the file, putting the file away. And then she billed me. So it was like a $90 question. I’m grateful she answered the question. I needed the answer. But what I learned was if I’m going to ask a question in the future, just know that it’s going to cost me to get the answer. That 15 minutes. And she said yes, I bill in 15 minutes increments. So what that means it’s helpful because if you got to go use the restroom or something, I don’t need to know how long that took or when you went and did that on the time tracking log, it just rolls just round off to the closest 15 minutes. And already had experience with this, too. Because when I was keeping track of people’s time, when they work for me, spreading pine straw or working for the lawn service, I got very good at tracking time and paying people to the closest 15 minutes increment. But I never tracked my time. I had never, ever, ever in all of my 36 years tracked my hours every day. Talk about a reboot. Nothing like a reboot right there. I had seven or eight categories that I use to track my time so that I’m balancing family work, balancing recreation and things I do for fun. I’m balancing drive time. I had no idea that I drove 2 hours a day. 2 hours a day. Can you believe I drove 2 hours a day every day on average? And you might say, where in the world are you going? What in the world are you doing 2 hours a day? Well, if 15 minutes to the gym, 15 minutes back. It’s 30. Then it takes 30 minutes, at least 22 minutes to get to work. But I’m going to go ahead and round it to 30 because I got to get out of the car, get in the car, get situated. It’s 30 minutes to get to work. So right there we’re up to an hour. And then most days at lunch I go to twelve step program down the road. So that’s 15 minutes there, 15 minutes back. Now we’re up to an hour and a half and then it takes 30 minutes to again get back home. That right there is exactly 2 hours. So on an average day, 2 hours a day is spent driving. I had no idea. So what I started doing was listening to podcasts, listening to videos that are helpful to me, that I can learn something. I started whatever I was wanting to learn that day or whatever, I needed help with whatever area I was listening to podcast now. So I’m learning for 2 hours a day. I’d never jumped on that opportunity. If I’d have not known how much time was being spent listening to the radio, listening to the news, that’s a whole other category, whole other topic. I also had to reboot. Social media was an area that had a lot of influence on my life. I was following a couple of people who said that if you’re posting whatever you’re posting, if you want to grow your business ten times the amount of sales that you’re making, you need to start posting ten times as much on social media. You got to get out there. If nobody knows about you, nobody can buy from you all that kind of stuff. So I quickly found myself spinning about that all the time. And I was looking on the feed of things like Facebook, looking at the LinkedIn, Twitter. I was scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And there were so many things on there that were not healthy for me. So many things caused me to spin mentally. And here again with that obsessive thinking, I couldn’t help it, but what I could control was cutting out social media. So I took my phone and as part of the reboot, I went through and I deleted the apps off my phone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. I deleted every one of the apps. I did not close my account because I had all these people following me and I was following a bunch of people. It’s very awkward when you defriend somebody because you close an account and then try to come back and friend them again later. So I just deleted the apps off my phone and my iPad to stop the temptation there. I found one time that I was really I got to go to the bathroom in the morning after having some quiet time early on in recovery, reading in the Bible, reading in the books that are program related recovery books and go to the restroom take a second, take a break. Pull out my phone, check Twitter. I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a ten second little video there of an inappropriate guy with the video camera on his private parts relieving himself right there on social media. Well, what did that do to me? It triggered bad thoughts and triggered lust and wanted me to go take care of something myself. So I quickly realized, oh, my gosh, there’s a major input. There’s a major cord coming into my CPU here that’s called social media. Could I have a social media addiction? Could that be a real thing for me? So I did the test of test. I said, I’m going to go 30 days. I’m going to try it for 30 days. And I promise you, I had no idea. I really had no idea that I could make it 30 days. I did not know how to live life without social media for 30 days. That, my friend, is how you know you have an addiction. If you can’t go 30 days without something, without a person, place or thing, if you can’t go 30 days, this is Matt Warren’s interpretation. This is my understanding and my experience. If there’s anything in my life that I can’t go 30 days without, that is an addiction. And I need to look at that very hard. I need to look at it really close and say, what is it exactly? So I went over a year before I decided to plug back in and reengage social media wise. Now, with work and being in sales and business development, I needed to be active on LinkedIn. I needed to post things for the company. I was able to delegate to a coworker to do the Facebook post. But it was my job to create the post for our company page, and it was my job to post them on LinkedIn. But there were many days where I would check in with my accountability partner and say, hey, in a text. I text them and say, hey, just checking in. I’m getting ready to go on LinkedIn, post a post for our company. I’m going to be off at this time, which is like 20 minutes later. I’m only going to allow 20 minutes on this social media site. I’ll check in when I get done. And that helped a ton, having that accountability there. So social media was something that I had to really assess and what I found with social media. And this could be a whole separate podcast. But stop looking at the feed, the spinning and the intriguing. Looking at Instagram and seeing all your buddies who don’t have an alcohol problem, seeing all their shots and all their Margarita pitchers, seeing them sitting on the beach with all their Corona lights. Seeing those Instagram pictures and Facebook pictures when you’re trying to stop drinking does not help things. It does not help when you see if you’re trying to stop lusting and trying to stop having sex with self. If you’re seeing pictures of cleavage and short skirts and really attractive people, that does not help things. That didn’t help me, at least. So it helped me so much to go 13 months or so before I even started engaging more or slowly letting it back in. But still, to this day, there are certain accounts that I don’t go onto and I’ve learned to really keep that in check. So there are other parts of this life, like the money part. I mentioned a lot about that already. Spirituality. I started tracking and making notes on how many meetings I go to a day, I mean, a week. How many twelve step meetings do I go to a week started tracking that, tracking how many hours I spent with my family. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you’re divorced and you have a daughter that doesn’t know you, what good is all the money? So it’s all about the balance. And I had no way of knowing the balance, no way of knowing what I was doing. Too much of we tend to go to excesses. So the only way to start learning about what I was doing was to start tracking it on a daily basis. So this morning, as I go to my desk, part of my morning routine is I will track the hours that I did yesterday. So I look at it on a 24 hours basis from 12:00 midnight yesterday to midnight last night. Those are the hours that I put down for Thursday. So I got up at 03:45 AM Yesterday morning. I prayed, meditate, and read that’s in one category. I did that for an hour and a half. Then I went to the gym for an hour from six to seven. So I put a one by that and then like, for example, last night I was in bed by 8:15pm. So I’ll put that I had 3.75 hours of sleep yesterday. I’ve got a formula in there that it adds what time I got up. So if I got up at 3:45, then it puts 3.75 hrs in that function for sleeping. Yeah. There’s something I haven’t mentioned yet. Sleeping. That’s one I knew I was missing. So sleeping is definitely an input into your life. I used to brag that I didn’t sleep much and that I’m okay. My life is just fine. I’m sleeping 4 or 5 hours a day. That’s a bunch of junk. That was all Adderall induced and I was not thinking clearly. I used to get up early so I can go smoke weed before anybody would catch me. I’d go out behind my shed or go to my Tahoe and use and I’d get up early so I could do that before anybody would catch me. That’s not getting up early to be productive. It’s called an addict, so tracking my time. Everything I read says between seven and 8 hours is where I need to be so if I see that I’ve only got 6 1/2 hours two days ago or that I’ve been tracking 6.75 hours or I’m not getting my target sleep, I don’t have any problem taking a nap on a Saturday like tomorrow I don’t have any problem at all taking a nap for an hour or two I don’t take a nap for an hour taking a little nap though to catch up because I can see that I’m slow that I haven’t been sleeping enough I can sleep very well knowing that I’m getting enough sleep and making up for that lost sleep. So this is a little bit of a share that I think will really help people when you’re trying to come in to recovery and trying to reboot your life, look at all of those areas and write it out in a Journal draw a little Cube as the CPU if you want like I did make a mind map and put all the categories like I said around and make notes on things that you need to change and start working on them one day at a time. So I hope this helps if this helps you share it with a friend that might need it hit subscribe you have a wonderful day and remember make your contribution. Thank you.