When you lose the routine

You may have noticed that I have not published anything in over 2 weeks, even though I was publishing pretty frequently before that. Well, what happened was my routine got thrown off, and I am a creature of habit. I rely on the habits I have ingrained into my life to make me productive.

This is particularly true in the morning and at night. I have highly structured process for the first 3 hours and the last hour of each day. These automatic routines allow me to accomplish a certain set of tasks everyday, but when they get thrown of by something I become a much less productive individual.

What happened to me was I got sick, the day I last published a post I was fine in the morning but by the time  I got home from my day job I was feeling awful. The trouble with being sick is that you need to get lots of rest, at least I do. Consequently I end up going to bed later and sleeping in longer, which cuts off two of my most important routines.

Now it is important to take care of yourself, the real problem arrises out of the fact that good habits are so easy to break. Once you have a habit in maintenance mode you don't want to get out of it. But sometimes our legs get taken out from under us and then what do we do?

For me it depends largely on triggers. What triggers the habit to occur? See the difference for me, in terms of habits, with a vacation and being sick is that when I am sick I still have all my habit triggers around me. Whereas when I am on vacation I leave them behind and go into a different environment. So when I return from vacation my habits are still triggered correctly. When I get done being sick though, my body has trained itself to ignore the triggers.

At this point it takes work to get back into the habit. It is not going to be as hard as establishing the habit the first time, because the patterns have already been made in your brain, but it will be difficult. So what I am doing is slowly adding one thing back into my morning routine each day. Today it is blogging, so you got this post.

I hope you find these thoughts helpful, and that they help you to remember to live better.

Review: Gorilla Workout

I believe that there are four basic areas you should be working on in order to improve your life and consequently be more productive: physical, mental, social and spiritual. Anybody can improve in any of these areas by setting longterm and short-term goals in them, you don't need an iPad, but there are apps that can help you in all of them. Today I would like to look at one app in particular that helps with the physical aspect.

Name: Gorilla Workout
Type: Workout generator
Price: Free (20 workouts) or $.99 (over 200 workouts)
Stars: 5

Gorilla Workout is the best app (hence the 5 stars) I have found to get me to exercise. It is a simple app that gives you a workout everyday to help you become a gorilla. When you get the app it you will be shown this screen which will help you choose where to begin. I got the free version first and began with the baby monkey level because I like to feel like I'm achieving my goals.

The free version has five workouts (theoretically one week of workouts) for each level. I completed all the workouts after a while (lets just say more than four weeks) and decided it was worth it to me to buy the full version. I use this app every weekday to workout in the mornings. If you are on the proper level for you workouts take between 10-20 minutes and if you follow them in order you will workout different muscles everyday. The app is really great because it provides you with different exercises so you aren't stuck doing the same thing day after day. I did not know how to do a lot of the exercises I started but they provide both written instructions and video examples to make it easy to learn.

Somedays I hate this app, but only while I'm using it. Check out the free version and see if it can help you.

And remember, live better.