I Was Wrong About This Post
And now, years later, I need to set it straight.
I was wrong.
I wrote a post a few years ago about my morning routine and I published it in a Medium publication called Personal Growth.
I included a lengthy list of habits and tasks that were part of my morning routine.
I had just quit my day job and I was working full time on a side project, in addition to starting out some consulting work for the first time.
What a dumb idea that was—but that’s for a different post.
When I published it, I got some feedback. Most people really liked it, but there were a few people who criticized it, saying that it was unrealistic for most people because of their 9-5 work.
At the time, I thought “they’re wrong. I’m not telling them to do exactly what I do, I’m just sharing to be helpful. They can carve their own path, the principles are the same.”
What I didn’t see was how much my schedule’s flexibility impacted its capacity.
I didn’t have a commute (I had a 5-minute bike ride to a co-working space), I didn’t have a family, and I certainly didn’t have urgencies like health problems that demanded my attention above all other priorities.
I was completely free, in basically every way, to optimize my schedule for productivity. I could schedule meetings for times that I was feeling uncreative. I could schedule creative time in the mornings when I felt the most energetic. I could completely block out entire days so that no meetings could be scheduled and I could dive completely into one area of focus.
I was a productivity monster—but it was my environment that afforded me the ability to leverage my work ethic and obsessive, productivity-focused nerd brain.
I didn’t account for that, at all, in my post.
Fast forward a few years to today. It’s so obvious now.
I still have a completely unfair amount of control over my schedule, but I’ve watched more friends get married and have babies. I’ve watched more teachers try to stream to their class from a loud kitchen table. I’ve heard more, intimate details about the realities of working from home than I ever imagined I would.
You people woke me up.
Thanks.
This is just one of the many ways in which I’m privileged. One of the signs of being privileged is not even knowing what the absence of privilege feels like.
“But Chris! Everyone has the same amount of time on this earth! Each day is 24 hours! Can’t you do math?”
You’re smarter than that. The control we have over our time has a direct impact on our capacity for output. It’s just not a fair fight.
So, years later, I ended up editing the post to be a little more approachable. Now, it doesn’t detail the specifics of what your schedule should look like. It just details how to approach it—which I think is much more useful.
The lesson in all of this comes back to listening and empathizing with others. The more we sit in our own world-view and perspectives, the less likely we are to see reality as it actually exists. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see 100% of it, but it’s worth trying to get close.
By loosening my grip on what I believed to be true and attempting to see what others were seeing, I was able to improve my message.
I know you can do it, too.