Lessons From 1000 Days of #NoDaysOff
I have been working towards this for almost 3 years. Also, ow - my legs hurt.
On Saturday, December 18th, as I wrapped up my morning cardio and got off the elliptical machine, my Apple Watch buzzed to let me know that I had received a new award for my “longest move streak.” It’s an easy thing to miss - just a little tap on the wrist and a notification – but I had been waiting for this one. In fact, I had been waiting for this particular buzz for a while, just a bit less than three years: my move streak had reached 1000 consecutive days.
I didn’t start out with the goal of getting to 1000 days. I didn’t originally have a goal at all. I had an international trip in March of 2019, and when I crossed the international date line twice it messed up the streak that I had going (something like 45 days), and I thought that it would be fun to see if I could beat that streak. I committed to getting to 60 straight days just to see if I could keep it going that long. I thought that two months seemed like a bit of a stretch without being impossible.
I decided there had to be some ground rules, so I set my daily calorie burn count to a count that simply couldn’t be reached during a normal day without getting an intentional workout in. That would mean that I had to go to the gym (either on campus where I work, or at a private gym about 5 miles away from my home) every day including weekends. It was also high enough that I had to do primarily cardio; I wasn’t going to be able to do much strength training because I needed the “steps” for the calorie counter. I feel like I should confess that I do not actually enjoy going to the gym, so this was a commitment to doing something that I didn’t enjoy as an exercise in discipline. I probably wouldn’t be writing a blog post about how I went to Disney World 1000 days in a row... though now that I mention it, if someone does want me to write that post I’m happy to talk about sponsorships.
I hit my 60-day goal, and then decided to try for 100 days because it seemed like a natural stopping point – only I ended up missing the notification for day 100. I remember checking my watch and realizing that it was day 103. I felt like because I missed noting the milestone, it didn’t count. By now we were in summertime in New England, so I was able to take more of the morning walks or jogs that I enjoy doing while listening to podcasts. That made me feel like I might be able to take it to 180 days. Six months of no missed workouts felt like an incredible milestone that I would be proud of. Only, I missed seeing that milestone notification too. So, I did what any reasonable person would do – decided I would do this for an entire year. I figured that I had already done it for six months, and I was feeling okay, so it stood to reason that I could make a go of it for another six months.
I didn’t get a Peloton, because I don’t buy the high-end model or brand of anything. I got a Schwinn IC4. It’s solid, and no monthly fee!
I was getting incredibly close to the end of a year when the world shut down in March 2020. I had an internal debate about whether my “year” was actually 365 days or 366 days, because 2020 was a leap-year and so February 29 fell during my streak. I had planned to intentionally not exercise on the day after my year was up and to just let my year be my longest streak and move on – but by then I felt like I needed to keep going, if for no other reason than to keep me sane during the lockdown. After all, it was only going to be a few weeks, right? Of course, with the gym closed I scrambled for a few days – but at least the weather wasn’t totally horrible, so I was able to go outside. I bought a cheap exercise bike that I thought would last me long enough to get through the lockdown. It did not. It failed in multiple ways within 6 months, because I was riding it for 60 to 75 minutes a day. Every. Single. Day. It wasn’t built for that. In order to keep going over the rest of the continually extending lockdown, I ended up getting myself a proper spin bike and a home elliptical machine, both of which are currently in my bedroom. Those two pieces of machinery combined with 5-to-7-mile walks with about 1-2 miles of running mixed in have carried me the rest of the way.
On this side of 1000 consecutive workout days, I feel like I’ve learned a few things both about exercise and (not surprisingly if you’ve read this blog before) about working in IT. I’d like to share some of those thoughts with you, if you don’t mind. Let’s jump in.
First, focusing on only one side of the equation doesn’t matter. I have been grinding out over a million active calories burned over the duration of this streak, and I’ve weighed anywhere from 140 to 165 (maybe a little more) pounds and not always felt my best. The reality is that if you’re trying to focus on your overall health, you can’t ignore the other side of the equation: what you eat. Frankly, I started to balloon up and feel sluggish during the early part of the quarantine because like many Americans, I thought I could eat my way out of a pandemic. Turns out that wasn’t true. I shifted the focus to include a healthier diet, lost 25 pounds, felt great, and then had an awful summer of 2021 and stress ate my way back to an unhealthy weight, and not feeling as well. The point is that you need to focus on both sides of the equation to maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle.
What’s the IT connection? Well, you can’t focus only on development and engineering without thinking about support; and likewise, you can’t just focus all your efforts on support without investing in innovation and new projects. Either path with lead to ruin. If you overinvest in development and underinvest in support, your users and customers won’t be able to effectively use whatever you’ve built. If you do the inverse, you’ll end up stagnating and wake up one day to find out that your competition has left you way behind. Balance is important, not just in health management but in application portfolios.
My second tip is that you need to change it up occasionally. I couldn’t have gotten to 1000 days if I was limited to only doing one type of workout. If I had to use the elliptical every day for 1000 days, I would have blown up my foot so bad I’d be back in that roller scooter I was riding around during VMworld 2017 never mind that I would have gotten bored out of my mind. It was essential that I have multiple options to hit the goal, or I would have failed soon into the journey.
I can say with some experience that the same thing is true to be successful in IT over the long haul. Because the technology changes so often, if you decide that you’re going to become an expert on one particular vendor, software, or architecture you’re definitely going to find your career obsolete at the same time that you find that technology being phased out in favor of whatever else came down the pipeline. Said differently: what do they call the world’s best Windows NT administrator in 2021? Unemployed.
I have found that some days, it’s OK to just barely get by and limp across the finish line. There were days I crushed my move goal and would crank out something obscene. Like one day (actually before this streak), I cranked out 42,000 steps wandering Las Vegas, or I’d hit a 3000-calorie burn day because I had hit the gym and then also did a bunch of physical activity throughout the day. But there were also days that I just didn’t have it in me, and I barely made it across my daily move goal to “close my ring,” in Apple parlance. And that’s OK. The goal wasn’t to double my move goal every day (though I did do that a bunch of days), it was to just simply meet it. While it’s great to go above and beyond consistently, if you can do it every single day you set your goal too low.
Likewise, it’s OK to acknowledge that IT professionals are prone to burnout, and you need to listen to that. Yes, we all have stories about how we’ve slept at the office or have pulled off miracles in 36-hour work sessions or something, but if you’re just killing it every single day, you’re going to flame out pretty severely. I’ve seen this firsthand; it’s OK to have a few days where you get your job done, but nothing more. Better yet, take some vacation time. It’s OK (and necessary) to rest up sometimes. Don’t forget that.
Potentially the biggest lesson I learned is that momentum matters. It would have been easy to quit this little endeavor around day 75. I didn’t have that much invested and getting it back would only have taken two-and-a-half months. And it was tempting – especially on a Sunday morning when my wife made pancakes, and it was sunny out, and my hammock looked super inviting. It’s actually a miracle I got to 100 days. However, once I got into the groove and had invested something like 837 days, it went from something that I wanted to do to something that I just did. Every day, no exceptions – because I had invested so much and had gone so long. It didn’t matter what else was going on – if I lost the streak, I would have to take more than two years to get it back, and that was easy motivation.
The same is true in IT or really any career. If you commit to learning something new every day, if you read a blog post every day over lunch or while you sip your coffee in the morning, you will be smarter in the long haul. And building that discipline pays off in other ways as well. Like committing to getting your TPS reports done on time regularly might get you a raise or a promotion. Another way to think about discipline is the advantage it gives you in the cybersecurity wars – in order to maintain a secure posture, you need to continually keep your environment patched, and that doesn’t happen if you operate irregularly.
Well, I couldn’t have come up with this image if I tried. Score one for stock photography!
Of course, I also learned that there will be trade-offs, sacrifices, and pain. Some days I had to get up at 4:00 in the morning to get my workout in before I had a full day of work, (though the gym is pretty empty at 4:15 am). I also got injured a few times during the 1000 days, and so I needed to switch exercises. This caused me to need to go outside for a low impact hike a few times in weather that was simply not conducive to doing so because my knee was sore and I couldn’t do the bike. I also have a bum foot that would sometimes just sort of give out on the elliptical causing me to need to switch to something else. And of course, having spent conservatively the equivalent of almost two solid months straight exercising since I started, there were some things I didn’t do because I was doing that – like weeding my yard. It looks terrible, by the way, but as Lee Cockerell puts it in his book “Time Management Magic”: I wasn’t willing to miss this appointment with myself.
Similarly, a career in IT will offer you choices. You cannot build the best of everything. Sometimes you will have to (and should) sacrifice one project for another that is a higher priority. Priorities matter, and sometimes you can’t keep low priority projects alive or low-value systems updated with the latest code because you need to spend your time or effort on higher priority tasks. That’s just kind of the way it goes. And there will be disasters, fire drills, and things that keep you up at night. In fact, sometimes when that happens it’s better that you are awake all night; it makes it easier to answer the phone when it rings at 2:00 in the morning. Still, you need to keep your eyes and mind on the prize: the long-term goal.
I suppose the final thing I learned is that I was able to actually keep the streak alive for 1000 days. I mean, that seems obvious but there were certainly days that I didn’t think I could do it. I got sick at one point and felt horrible – but I was able to push through (probably in poor judgement) and hit the goal for the day before getting back in bed. This actually happened after I got my Covid booster shot in October. I felt like a train hit me for 24 hours, but I got on that bike and cranked out an hour of spin class and then did yard work with my family in the afternoon. My wife reprimanded me and made me tea – but I did it, darn it!
I suppose the moral of the story is that if you set a goal (even if it’s an arbitrary one like 1000 days of no missed exercise) and you apply consistent discipline, you can do things that are either amazing or incredibly pointless. I haven’t decided which mine is yet, but I’m not stopping. Yet.
In fact, as I stepped off the elliptical on December 18, trying to catch my breath and with my heart rate sitting just above 150, I went downstairs to show my wife that I had gotten to day 1000. She congratulated me, and I looked at her, and said – still sort of panting – that I was only halfway to my new goal.
Maybe. Probably not, but maybe. Check back here on September 13, 2024.
Questions for reflection:
Have you ever set a goal that you didn’t think you’d be able to hit? Did you end up hitting it?
What areas of your life could you benefit from more discipline in?
Do you feel like you have the freedom to just hit your goals and not exceed them sometimes?
