happy monday, friends! anyone else hoping for a less volatile stock market week? we’d love to just coast into labor day weekend without thinking about the markets. let’s see if we’re so lucky! and now for our regularly scheduled blog post…
lately we’ve been noticing more of the bad habits that are part of our lives because of work, the things that would otherwise be invisible to us if we weren’t paying attention. work is in a busy period for both of us at the moment (don’t our clients know it’s august?!), so we’re spending even more time than usual daydreaming about what life will be like when we can say sayonara once and for all to our careers. a top priority for us then will be to change our habits, replacing the bad ones with good, healthy ones.
but of course it’s so easy to be blind to our own bad habits, and so to avoid forgetting about the bad ones we’ve recently identified, we’ve started making a list of what we want to change just as soon as work is in our rear view mirror. we’re calling the list our resolutions for retirement, and expect this list to grow over time. here’s what’s on the list so far:
our resolutions for retirement:
stop sleeping with our phones right next to the bed. nevermind all those cell waves creeping into our brains all night long… our cell phones are the last thing we interact with before we fall asleep, and the first thing we reach for when we wake up. once we quit our jobs, those phones will live outside the bedroom! same goes for the ipad, but the kindle can stay so long as it’s in airplane mode. ;-)
get dressed in the morning. we should probably start this now, but being in the west working for companies in the east, we often wake to a full inbox, and feel like we have to get right to work. getting dressed when we won’t leave the house all day feels like a waste of time. but, sitting around in pajamas all day certainly isn’t good for our sense of self. and — no joke — if we ever have to do something by videoconference, we make ourselves look professional from the chest up, but still have pj pants and slippers on down below. once we can actually ask ourselves each morning, “what will we do today?” we’ll have the motivation to dress accordingly!
stop treating lunch like a frantic scramble. we often get so busy with work that we forget to eat lunch, and by the time we remember, we’re way beyond hungry, and will eat pretty much anything you put in front of us. this means that lunch is often chips and salsa, or a bowl of cereal, or something else equally devoid of nutrition. once we quit, we’ll make lunch with as much intention and focus on health as we do our other meals. and closely related…
stop eating at our desks. even though we work from home, we still eat breakfast and lunch at our desks virtually every day. often we’re trying to gulp down bites of food while on mute on a conference call, which has many times led to awkwardness when a question comes up, and we try to respond with a full mouth. after we quit, we’ll actually eat at a table and take our time. how luxurious does that sound? ;-)
stop waking up at unreasonable hours. we’ve mentioned before that we often end up on 5 or 6 a.m. flights, which means waking up at a completely unhealthy time. we’ll book our own fun travel at more civilized hours as soon as we’re able, and get the sleep our bodies and minds need. preferably with no alarm clocks.
stop neglecting fitness. this is a huge one. we can’t wait until we can devote some time every day to getting outside and being active. right now it’s such a struggle to motivate to exercise, especially when the work day never really ends. it’s hard to stop working at say, 6, to work out, knowing that we’ll just have to get right back to it when the workout is over. and never mind working out at hotel gyms when we don’t arrive until after 10 pm and have to be out at 7 am the next morning. (schlepping a backpack through airports counts as a little exercise, right?)
start rocking some fun hairstyles. back in one of our very first posts, we said we’d get some punk rock haircuts. let’s just say, after we no longer have to look presentable to clients on the regular, we might change up a few things. :-)
do you have some bad habits that you know are just a result of your career and its demands? do you have a list like this? what’s on your list?