In recent months, I’ve implemented a pretty profound change to my routine.
For years, my morning routine was 1) wake up, 2) meditate for 20 minutes, 3) drink coffee (and, if I’m in a smoking jag, smoke a cigarette), 4) commute to work via public transit (during which commute I typically would do some combination of reading and writing), 5) go to the gym near my office and work out, 6) go to work, and 7) have my day. My relationship to smoking is such that, when I’m smoking, step 3 sometimes precedes, or even replaces/precludes, step 2 – yet another reason not to smoke – but in general, this has been my routine.
A few months ago, I had a little hiccup on my commute, and ended up biking (using a bike-share e-assist bike) to the gym by my office, rather than taking public transit. I was shocked – shocked – to learn that this mode of transport was more fun, healthier, and quicker than my previous method. So my commute shortened from a slightly volatile/unpredictable 40-60 minutes to a downright certain 25-30 minutes. Since that day, I (literally) have not taken public transit to commute one time. This has been facilitated by an extended dry spell – I’m not sure I have biking in the rain in me – but it has been quite a lovely stretch of weather here, and every day’s been nicer than the last for biking.
This change to my routine has brought a whole host of improvements to my life: I’ve lost a bit (more) weight. I feel really energized when I arrive at the gym. And, I love the flow state into which I sink when biking. And/but…. There’s been a little loss, as well: an hour-and-a-half to two hours a day of time previously spent writing, reading, processing, and thinking, now has been replaced by that aforementioned flow state. I do think during that time, but my thinking has a more evanescent feel to it. I don’t generate “to-do” items on a list (if I come up with some, I have to remember to enter them once I’m off my bike); I don’t write blog posts or journal entries; I don’t draft or send correspondence. I do, though, have a lot of thoughts, and it occurred to me, I could set myself up to just dictate to myself during the ride, create voice memos, and then, somehow, use those memos to do some of the work I previously did on the subway.
Because I’m me, this has become a fun project, one in which I’ve enlisted some technology (a nifty tiny little voice recorder) that does a much better recording my voice than did my phone; some more technology (AI – in the form of OpenAI and Anthropic’s ChatGPT and Claude); and some more technology (the Pipedream workflow manager) to automate a process whereby these voice memos are scoured for various kinds of content – correspondence, journal entries, blog posts, tasks, brainstorming sessions, etc. – and each of those “types” of thoughts is processed a bit differently.
This hasn’t been quite as easy – and I haven’t been quite as successful, yet – as I might originally have imagined. But. It’s resulted in my generating a torrent of material to process. Blog posts. Accounts of interactions. Journal entries. You name it.
I expect/hope that, in the coming months, you’ll see some evidence of/fruit from this change to my routine.
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