Yes, you need a personal operating system. Here’s Mine.
Most people understand the value of a system when it comes to business. We build processes for sales, customer service, hiring, operations, accounting, and almost everything else that’s essential for growth. We know that if something is important enough, it cannot depend entirely on someone remembering to do it or feeling motivated that day.
Then we go home and run our own lives on willpower.
For a long time, I thought staying healthy while running businesses, traveling, meeting with people, and managing everything else on my plate was mostly a matter of discipline. Now, I have come to see it differently.
Discipline matters, but it gets you only so far. What has made the biggest difference in my life is building systems around the things I do not want to negotiate with myself about every day.
In our shops, we have an operating system we call “key-to-key.” From the moment a customer hands us the keys to the moment we hand them back, the process is defined. We do that because leaving important things to chance is a terrible way to run a business.
I eventually realized I needed to approach my own life the same way.
Take the decision out of it
I wake up early. I spend some time feeding my mind while it is still fresh. I walk. I work out. I try to eat simple, high-protein meals. Over the last few years, I have also cut my alcohol consumption by about 90 percent.
None of those decisions is particularly revolutionary. The value comes from the fact that I have stopped waking up every morning and deciding whether I am going to do them.
We make hundreds of decisions every day. Some are consequential, some are mundane, and all of them require a little bit of mental energy. If every morning begins with a new negotiation about whether you are going to exercise, what you are going to eat, or when you are going to make time for yourself, eventually the business will win.
So I try to make fewer decisions.
There are a handful of things I have decided in advance:
I move my body every day, even when the circumstances are not ideal.
I protect the beginning of my day because I know how easily the rest of it can be taken from me.
I eat in a way that gives me energy instead of constantly recovering from what I ate.
I drink considerably less than I used to.
When I travel, I adjust the system rather than abandoning it.
The specifics matter less than the principle. Anything you have to decide 365 times a year is probably something you should decide once.
Pay attention to what creeps Up On You
Most people do not wake up one morning and decide to completely neglect themselves. It happens slowly.
I call it lifestyle creep.
You go to a business dinner and have a couple of drinks. There is an appetizer on the table, so you have some of that too. Somebody orders dessert. A few nights later, you take your wife out. Then there is another client dinner. Then a weekend away.
Nothing about any one of those nights feels excessive.
But when you add everything up, what felt like a handful of harmless exceptions has now become your normal life. You can do the same thing with sleep, exercise, work, your phone, or almost anything else. The individual decision rarely looks consequential enough to worry about. The accumulation is what gets you.
Business owners understand this when we look at numbers. A small expense repeated hundreds of times is no longer a small expense. A tiny inefficiency multiplied across an entire organization becomes expensive very quickly.
Your habits compound the same way.
The solution, at least for me, has not been to become obsessive or stop enjoying my life. It has been to notice the creep before it becomes the default. I still go to dinners. I still travel. I still have a life. But I am much more deliberate about which exceptions are actually worth making.
There is a big difference between enjoying something because you chose it and doing something because that is simply what everybody around you was doing.
Build habits that can survive a bad day
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is building routines that only work when life cooperates.
But lives don’t always cooperate very often. Flights leave early. Meetings run late. Employees call out. Customers have emergencies. Kids get sick. You spend three days in a hotel. The week you thought would be quiet turns into the busiest week of the month.
If your routine requires perfect circumstances, you do not have a routine. You have a best-case scenario.
Take the habits that matter most to you and decide what they look like when you have plenty of time, and what they look like when you have almost none.
For example:
If your normal workout is an hour, your bad-day version might be a 20-minute walk.
If you normally cook dinner, your bad-day version might be knowing two or three meals you can order that still make you feel good.
If you read for 30 minutes every morning, your travel version might be ten pages on the plane.
If you are trying to drink less, decide what you will order at a client dinner before somebody puts a wine list in your hand.
If you need time to think clearly, your normal version might be an hour alone in the morning. On a chaotic day, it might be ten minutes in the car before you walk into work.
If sleep matters to you, decide ahead of time what you are willing to say no to when the calendar starts getting crowded.
A good system has some elasticity to it. It gives you room to be a human being without giving you permission to abandon yourself every time life gets complicated.
Environment beats intention
Another lesson from business that translates well here: people tend to rise or fall to the environment around them.
We have a group chat with more than 30 people who share workouts, steps, and progress. Nobody was forced into it. There was no big corporate wellness initiative behind it. A few people started sharing what they were doing, other people joined, and eventually it became part of the culture.
One guy has lost more than 120 pounds. Another lost 45. Another is down 30.
Now I can post my steps and somebody will respond, “Good. Gives me something to chase.”
That is culture in its simplest form. What the people around you repeatedly do starts to feel normal.
This is why I think accountability is so useful, particularly for entrepreneurs. We spend our working lives creating accountability everywhere else. We have numbers, meetings, reports, deadlines, checklists, and people responsible for outcomes. Then when it comes to ourselves, we rely on a vague promise that tomorrow we will do better.
If something matters to you, give it some structure.
That might mean:
A friend who expects your morning walk text.
A trainer waiting for you at a specific time.
A group that shares workouts or steps.
Meals prepared before the week gets busy.
A recurring block on your calendar that is treated like a meeting rather than an aspiration.
You do not need all of these. You need enough structure that the easiest choice is usually the one you already decided you wanted to make.
The point is not really health
The older I get, the less I think any of this is about having the perfect workout routine or eating perfectly.
The real benefit is learning that you can rely on yourself.
Every time you say you are going to do something and then follow through, particularly when you do not feel like it, you make a small deposit into your own self-trust. Every time you repeatedly break those promises, you teach yourself something too.
Entrepreneurship requires an enormous amount of self-trust. There is rarely someone standing over you making sure you do what you said you would do. You have to make decisions without complete information, tolerate uncertainty, and keep moving when the outcome is not guaranteed.
I have found that the small disciplines support the big ones.
The walk has nothing to do with the difficult conversation I need to have later that afternoon, except somehow it does. Getting up when I said I would has nothing to do with making a better leadership decision, except over time I think it does. The habits reinforce an identity: I do what I said I was going to do.
That is useful far beyond health.
Build a life that can support the business
Entrepreneurs talk a lot about building businesses that can scale. We think about whether the systems can handle more customers, more employees, more locations, more revenue, more complexity.
I think we should ask the same question of ourselves.
Can the way you are living support the business you are trying to build?
If the answer is no, working harder is probably not the solution. You may need better systems.
Start small. Pick one thing you are tired of negotiating with yourself about and decide it in advance. Make the commitment realistic enough that you can keep it when the week goes sideways. Then repeat it until it becomes ordinary.
You do not need to overhaul your life. You need a handful of things that happen whether you feel like doing them or not.
That is how we build reliable businesses.
It turns out to be a pretty good way to build a reliable life, too.