The Official Formula For A Perfect Day: How To Take Control & Own Your Life.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, get something done before you check your email. Even if you do nothing else. And even if you don't delay your email until 9 o' clock or 10 o', clock, but you delay it till 8:30, that's a big win and that's something that I think most people can aspire to. In general, if someone is struggling with their sleep, that is an easy place to start. Just don't have the afternoon coffee. Cut way back and see if that can help you fall asleep better. We have to be prepared to deal with it in a way that doesn't overload us with stress and still allows us to get our work done.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in one place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I actually get tons of questions about my daily routine, like do I meditate and if so, how? And on which days do I do which workouts and how many cups of coffee do I have each day and when do I time alcohol intake and do I have a special journaling routine? Well, really, I've basically revealed all of this and a lot more in articles that I've written@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I've written about my morning routine, my afternoon routine, my evening routine. I'm going to put links to all those previous articles that I've written in the show notes for today's episode, and you can grab the show notes over@bengreenfieldfitness.com theperfectday that's bengreenfieldfitness.com ThePerfectDay but in today's podcast, I have a guest who is a bit of an expert in forming and creating your perfect day. And I really wanted to get his perspective on his routine because he is one accomplished dude. My guest today is Craig Ballantyne and Craig is the author of the brand new book that I just finished reading called the Perfect Day Formula, how to own the day and control your life. Now, Craig is a productivity and success transformation coach from Canada. I actually know of him because way back in the day, I Came across this home workout program he designed that's like a high intensity home workout program called Turbulence Training that literally hundreds of thousands of people have used around the globe. It's extremely popular. But Craig's also all over the place. He writes for Men's Health, Women's Health, Oxygen, gq, Maxim, National Geographic, Men's Fitness, Muscle and Fitness, you name it. And he also runs a really cool website called early to Rise, which you can check out over@earlytorise.com he's had some, some obstacles along the way on his journey to success that he talks about in his book, including fighting pretty crippling anxiety attacks, which, which he actually details in that book. And on today's show, we're going to dig into what he's uncovered about success and productivity and time management and self improvement and all of these things that he's brought together to create this perfect day formula. And because I'm such a fan of putting together an amazing day every day, not wasting every minute of your life or any minutes of your life, and having a routine for your morning, for your afternoon, for your evening, I'm pretty excited to have Craig on the show. So, Craig, we welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much, Ben.

This is a, this is a cool book. Quick read. It's not super long. I think it's, I don't know, I didn't count the pages, but I'm holding it in my hand here. What do we got? Like 150 pages, but it's dense, it's jam packed with some really good material on forming your perfect day. And one of the first things you start off with, Craig, is you talk about controlling the morning. What's that mean when you say control the morning?

Well, most people have the greatest control of their day when it's the morning. You know, you control what time you get up, you control what you do first thing in the morning, you control what you eat for breakfast, you control whether or not you exercise then or you do meditation or whatever it is. But you have the greatest control before the world gets in the way. And so that's when we can really set the tone for the day, make the most of it. And even if we just do five to 15 minutes of work on our number one priority in life, whether that's getting out of debt, whether that's making another hundred thousand dollars in a year, whether that is finding the love of your life, whether that is getting back in shape, your best time to do it is first thing in the morning. That's why when I was a trainer back in Toronto in the 2000s. All my CEOs wanted to come in at 5, 6, 7 in the morning because they knew that if they didn't exercise first thing in the morning, there's no way they were going to get it done at 4 o' clock in the afternoon. Because the world brings you chaos in the afternoon. So that's why you have to control your morning. Get that victory that the world can't take from you because you've already got it done. And it also sets the tone for an amazing day.

Now what about. Because a while ago, I think it was a couple years ago on my website, I wrote an article about morning versus evening and how there's even this thing floating around out there called the Morningness versus the Eveningness Questionnaire. And how some people are kind of like early birds and some people are night owls in terms of their peak time of productivity. There's these questionnaires you can take online that tell you when you're most productive and when you're most creative. What do you say to folks who would tell you that, Well, I get the most done? Probably one famous example would be like Tim Ferriss comes to mind. I've heard him talk a lot about, you know, him getting a ton done between like 10pm and 2am and then sleeping until 10am what do you say to the folks who would argue that. That some people really are hardwired, you know, genetically or whatever the case may be to be night owls?

Yeah, so what I would say there, Ben, is I agree that 80% of people are actually not hardwired for either. And then 10% of people, or 20% of people are early birds like myself and then another 10 to 20% again, it's adding up to 100% eventually are night owls. And one of my friends who's also friends with Tim, his name is Joel Marion and he is a night owl. He works from 8pm till 3 or 4am and the answer here is not so much what time of day it is, but it's really controlling the environment in which you work. I think most of us listening to this call, we were college students or even high school students at one time. And we were those people who would work until midnight. Some people would pull all nighters and some of those people don't do any of that anymore because we've had to adjust to an adult schedule where we have to be in the office at 8am, 9am so the world is built around getting stuff done in the morning. If you Fall in that middle bit where you're not really an early riser, you're not really a night owl. You just want some time that you can control where you can actually think. The best thing is you're going to get it done in the morning, because again, later in the afternoon, all those work emergencies are going to come up. You're going to have a hard time dealing with those. So you're not going to have good thinking time. When you get home at night, the kids have stuff, they need help with their homework. You have to take them to sports or other activities. You're not going to carve out that time at night, it's very difficult. And then all you want to do is relax, maybe with a TV show or a book or whatever it is. But in the morning, that's when, no matter what chronological profile you have, that's when you have that control. And so that's why I recommend that people take advantage of that. But if you are a night owl, if your schedule allows you to work from 10pm till 2am and it doesn't interfere with your relationships, it doesn't interfere with your family, it doesn't interfere with your health and your work the next day, then by all means take control of it and enjoy that and make your perfect day from it. But again, just because so many people have an early start, you know, an early official start to their day, it's all about controlling the morning. And that's why I recommend a little bit of time first thing before everybody else brings their problems to you.

Got it. Well, I mean, for the record, like, I agree with you, you know, and I've said this before, I think on this podcast, that not a lot productive seems to happen after 9pm unless you're kind of locked away in your house. It seems that most of the things that happen in the later hours of the evening, in terms of things that you're engaged in are like social engagements, tv, bars, restaurants, things that don't necessarily enhance, say, your family life or your career. But the morning, dude, I don't know if you found this, Craig, but it's just freaking quiet, right? Like, there's not a lot of people because, you know, the majority of the world is, you know, perhaps lazy or sleeps in or whatever, but there's not a lot that's going on that's distracting in the morning. Even, like emails and phone calls and stuff like that. If I'm up at 5.30am, I know there's really not going to be many people calling me or messaging Me, my email inbox is not going to be full of stuff. And you literally have like this full hour to two hours to just get stuff done with zero distractions. I mean that's, that's what I've found. Is that, is that kind of along the lines of what you're, what you're highlighting when, when you're talking about getting up early in the morning?

Yeah, it is, absolutely. And so it doesn't have to be a couple hours. I mean even like I said, five or 15 minutes in the morning where you have just yourself and no one else is up and you can sit there at your kitchen table and work on your number one problem in life or your number one opportunity in life and just have some clear thinking time on it, that really is magic. And then if you want to have more and more time, like a lot of writers who have real jobs, they'll get up and write before they go to work because that's when they're clear headed. And for me personally I find the morning is a spiritual time. No one else is up and it is your own time away from the world. You know, there's not going to be emails coming in. I guess on the west coast you'd be getting some east coast emails by 6 in the morning, west coast time. But most of the time it's like Saturday mornings, I believe are the same thing. You don't expect phone calls, you don't expect emails. I was just reading an article by Chris Guillaboo who was talking about how Saturday mornings, he just dominates his email because he knows more emails aren't coming in. So that's what he focuses on and really cranks out the work. And I'm a big fan of working on Saturday mornings too. I think if somebody really wants to get ahead in life to not work Saturday mornings at least a couple times a month is really going to hold them back because you can just get so much done. You're going to be very creative and there's not going to be other things getting in your way.

Yeah, even the weekend mornings I've gotten in the habit of just getting up early, same time as I do on, on weekday mornings, which is generally, you know, for me and Craig. You'll probably laugh at this because I know in your book you talk about how you're a 4am guy. For me it's closer to like 5:30 or 6 that, that I'm up and around. But even then, you know, I, I can still get a ton done now. Now one of the things Though that, that you talk about because you get up at 4am is that you go to bed at 8pm And I wanted to ask you, like, how do you mesh going to bed so early with social life? Because I, I personally would love to be able to hit the sack early, but I mean I, I've, I'm taking the kids like I want to and tennis and you know, there are things happening later on in the evening that, that simply happen in the evening.

Right.

Like tonight I'm going to a fight and the fight doesn't even start until like 8pm do you just give up on certain things that happen in the evening? I mean, how do you go to bed so freaking early to stay on this 8pm to 4am cycle?

Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that you touched on early was that you get up at the same time on weekends. And so just to give a bit of background on the whole 8pm and 4am, the one thing that I learned for having the greatest energy and having the greatest consistency in my alertness was to go to bed and get up at the same time every day. I ignored this for years in my early 30s and I finally started doing around 34, 35. But when I started doing that, getting up at the same time every day, even on the weekends, my all day energy increased. I wasn't tired at 2 o' clock and I wasn't tired on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday morning because I slept until 10 o' clock on Saturday and Sunday. So that was big. And so then I realized, okay, how can I optimize this for my life and allow me to get a lot of writing done before I have to start my management duties in my business which start around 8:30 in the morning. So that's the only free time I have. And I realized I'm just going to shift my clock. And so that's what I do from Sunday to Thursday most of the time now when I travel for work, and I do travel probably a couple times a month to mastermind meetings and stuff like that, I'll be out till 9:30, go out for a dinner at 7 till 8 ish, and then hang around with people. But I will cut it way early compared to most people who are going to stay at the bar until 12 o'. Clock. But I'll go to bed on the road at 10 o' clock and still get up at 4 o' clock and then try and get a nap in the next day. Yeah, I still do get out a little bit, but it's not like I did when I was in my late 20s and quite frankly, I've had enough social life in my late 20s and early 20s to last most people a full lifetime. So, you know, in terms of going out for late nights, it's not something I'm really interested as I love the morning so much and what it allows me to do. And then I just try and get my catch ups with people on Saturday afternoons, Sunday afternoons, and those Thursday and Friday dinners that don't go on too far into the evening. So, you know, date nights, you know, stay out till 10:30 or 11:00 clock at night at the most, with the exception of a couple 1 or 2am nights. And then those just set me back a little bit. But I try and get back on track. I don't have a commute, so I really cut down on the amount of time that I spend in traffic or doing that type of stuff. So I really save that every day.

Yeah. One of the things that I've found is when I'm going to conferences or when I'm traveling a lot, it throws me out of my sleep cycle. It really does. For me to be on a 9:30pm to 5:30am that just doesn't work when you're at a conference or even sometimes when you're thrown off your circadian rhythm when you're traveling. But there's some really interesting research out there behind for example, the concept of using naps, or even in some cases, as I talked about on a recent podcast episode, transcendental meditation, as like a recharge in the afternoon after you've had a poor night of sleep or less sleep than you're used to. Another thing that I'll use is playing around with light. Like there's this concept, I don't know if you've seen some of this research where like bright blue light in the morning in your eyes, or even using these latest biohacking tools like bright blue light buds in your ears, or even intranasal light therapy, has been shown to be able to kind of like adjust your circadian rhythm and kind of like shove your circadian rhythm forward if you're outside of your sleep cycle. And then of course there's this, this is actually brand new research this week that shows that if you know you're going to be having a period of time where you're going to be low on sleep or thrown off your sleep cycle, simply sleeping an extra one to two hours for the week leading up to that period of time where you Might be engaged in heavy travel or going to some big conference or something that can actually mitigate all of the detrimental hormonal effects of loss of sleep. So there's some cool ways to control that, getting thrown off of your perfect routine or your perfect day. But I'm curious, do you personally experiment with any of these techniques like binaural beads or power naps or any kind of biohacks to help you when you do get thrown off your routine, for example, when you're traveling?

Yeah. So for me, what I do is I try and adjust my melatonin intake. Every summer I'll go to Europe for two weeks. This year I'm going for three or four weeks, and then I come back. I'm actually going to the Olympics almost immediately after. I'll definitely be on some different time zones. What I'll do is I'll start taking melatonin earlier and earlier in the day before I go to Europe. Then that will allow me to adjust relatively quickly when I get there. Then I always sleep on airplanes. I don't eat on an overnight flight, don't drink any alcohol, and I sleep overnight and get there kind of well rested and relatively adjusted. That's what I do when I travel. I just read that study that you mentioned earlier today about sleeping in advance. Now the problem is I just can't sleep past a certain time because of how adjusted I am mentally. It's like I can get up about two minutes before my alarm almost every single day. And so it would be difficult for me to get that extra sleep, maybe with an extra nap or something. What I usually do is I end up just if I have a couple of nights out or if I have a conference, I'll come back and just go to bed even earlier than usual by about half an hour, just conk out. And after a couple days I'm caught up. But I do travel quite a bit. I go back and forth between the Eastern time zone and Denver, so Toronto and Denver, which is where our office is. And so I'm back and forth kind of like every two weeks. And obviously going east is a little bit harder. But again, it's just adjusting the melatonin. One of the two other things that I've done, I actually look like a. An old lady when I go to sleep. I have the big eye mask on and I have earplugs in. But when you stay in hotels like I do, I stay in hotels almost 80 nights a year. And the mystery lights are all over the place and up in the corner There's a fluorescent light and then all the electronics down on the desk. And so you actually have to do something to block out all that light. And so I started wearing an eye mask, and it really made a difference. And between. So those three things, earplugs, eye mask, and melatonin, have really helped me to stick to a sleep schedule with all the travel and with all the ups and downs of staying out a little bit later and having later dinners.

Do you have any tips for sleeping on an airplane? It sounds like you've figured that out.

I think that some people are just more predisposed to being able to do it. So what I do is I make sure that I eat a couple hours before I get on the plane. Obviously, meal service on an airplane is pretty loud, but it's eye mask, earplugs, melatonin, and I'm just lucky enough to fall asleep. I know some people that couldn't sleep on an airplane in a flatbed, no matter what they gave you if you took an Ambien or whatever. But some people can do it, some people can't. But I'm. Fortunately, I can. And I just make sure that I avoid caffeine. Maybe I'm a little tired from the night before. Maybe I actually don't sleep as much the night before, so it's easier for me to fall asleep when I get on the airplane.

Yeah, I hear you. And I personally have developed a habit of sleeping on airplanes. I tend to use cannabidiol more than I use melatonin for sleeping on planes. I save the melatonin for when I actually arrive at my final destination. But a quick thought before we delve more deeply into some of the other things you cover in your book. I've found that for the time of the morning when you wake up and you want to go back to sleep, like, if you do happen to have woken up at your normal time, I'm now using pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. There's this device, I did a podcast on it a few weeks ago that you place on your collarbone, it goes right over your brachial plexus. And your brachial plexus actually has a nerve that goes up to your brain. And if you can stimulate that nerve with a certain hertz frequency, you can actually trick your brain into going back into a delta sleep frequency. It's really interesting. So you basically wake up, you press this button that's on your collarbone when you wake up at that time, when you're like, crap, I wish I hadn't really Woken up right now, I need to get a little bit more sleep. And you fall back asleep. It's really interesting. And you know, occasionally if I, if I'm throwing way off my time zone, right. Like if I've been traveling east and I've been Getting up at 6am on Eastern Time zone and so I wake up at 3:00am on Pacific time, I'll use something like that button to be able to sleep until, you know, 5:36. So all sorts of fun hacks out there. So. So another question for you regarding your, your book. You talk about how you avoid alcohol before bedtime and you also avoid coffee after 1pm what's, what's kind of your logic behind those, those beverage avoidances?

I've avoided coffee for 40 years. I've never had a coffee in my life. Believe it or not, I know that's.

Oh really? You don't just avoid coffee after 1pm, you've never had a coffee?

No, I never have. I mean, I've had 50.

You're missing out on life, man.

Yeah, I know. I've had 50 milligrams of caffeine today and I can feel anxious. So I have.

Where are you getting your caffeine from? Tea?

Yeah, Green tea.

Okay, got it.

Yeah. I'm just naturally sensitive to caffeine, so I don't consume a lot of it. So going to the formula in the book, 10 hours before bed, if you look at the half life of caffeine, it's about 10 hours, so it'll peak and then start to decline. If somebody is sensitive to caffeine and it keeps them up, they really need to stop drinking caffeine 10 hours before bed. Now my mom, she can have, we were just out for dinner with her the other week. She can have a coffee at 8 o' clock at night and go to sleep at 11 o' clock and she's totally fine. It sounds like you might be the.

Same way her and everybody else in Italy who has espresso at dinner.

Right, Right. Yeah, but me, not so much. But in general, if someone is struggling with their sleep, that is an easy place to start. Just don't have the afternoon coffee. Cut way back and see if that can help you fall asleep better with the alcohol. Alcohol does make you tired, it makes you relax. I mean, just one drink, it just takes that edge off and it's nice. But unfortunately it also impairs the sleep cycle. So you think that you're going to fall asleep better and maybe you do fall asleep faster, but you don't get into those sleep cycles as deeply as you would without the alcohol. And so a couple of drinks close to bedtime, those are the reasons why you end up groggy.

Yeah, it's really interesting. There's actually, I don't know if you've seen these genetic testing programs like an ancestral DNA or 23andMe or DNAFit.

I've done 23andMe.

Oh, you have? Okay. Have you checked out whether or not you're a fast versus a slow caffeine metabolizer?

That's not one that sticks in my head. The one I was looking more for, digestive stuff, so I don't remember that one.

Okay. Yeah, they'll spit out a bunch of info. And I actually, I just returned from Florida and I spent almost an hour in Florida going over my dad with his results because I finally convinced him to do the genetic testing because I was curious because he's adopted. I had no clue what my own genetics were. And from his side. And of course you can export your data to a website. The one in particular that I use with myself and with my clients is called Prometheus. It's this website where you pay five bucks and you can export your genetic data and find out tons of interesting and intriguing health information, including, you know, genetic snips for everything from, from baldness to your propensity for nicotine addiction to caffeine metabolizing and yeah, I'm, I'm definitely a fast caffeine metabolizer, meaning that I, I can drink copious amounts of coffee, which is great because I love it, and it just goes through my system extremely, extremely quickly. But, but for you, you know, going to bed at 8pm, getting up at 4am it sounds like part of your phone formulae for a perfect day is generally you set yourself a rule of avoiding central nervous system stimulants that might interfere with that early bedtime, correct?

Yeah, absolutely. And also just for general anxiety purposes too, to make sure that that stuff doesn't kind of bubble up to the surface.

Now, what do you say to the folks who swear by it? And this would include me a glass of red wine at some point in the evening to help one relax. Do you think that that's playing or, you know, wreaking, wreaking havoc on sleep cycles or what are your feelings on alcohol in moderation from a quote unquote healthy source like red wine?

Yeah, Well, I think that again, what I recommend how I live is not exactly how someone else is going to live. And then it's really coming down to okay, looking at cause and effect. So I'm going to have a glass of red wine tonight. How am I going to feel tomorrow morning? And for me, I know that personally, not only with the sleep stuff, but I wake up with a stuffy nose almost every time I drink red wine. So I only drink pretty much straight vodka when I have a cocktail. So if I had red wine, there'd be those two issues, the sleep and the stuffy nose. If someone has a glass of red wine with dinner at 7 o' clock and goes to bed at 10 o', clock, you're probably going to be free and clear, no issues. If you're having half a bottle, full bottle of wine, finishing it at 10 o', clock, going to sleep at 11, you're probably interfering with your sleep. So it's going to be dose response correlated. And then really it comes down to whether or not you use a Fitbit or whatever type of sleep tracker you use. Just take a look, see seven days without alcohol. Then introduce red wine back in and see what the data shows. And if there is no problem, if you look like you slept like a log, by all means live the life that you want to live. The big thing is not just with the red wine, but with anything in life is establishing that what happens when I apply this stimulus to myself? What's the response? The old scientific method. And that's how we kind of hack our way to our own right life.

Yeah, I used to have a lot of issues with the wine and I've recently started to tap into this concept of, of the type of wine like the, like they're now marketing wines that are, you know, like Mark Sisson, who's considered to be like the, the de facto leader of like the primal ancestral movement, he swears by these newer paleo wines with lower sugars, you know, grown at very high altitudes. I've been experimenting with those now for almost a year. And I find a stark difference when I'm drinking like an orange organic high altitude wine versus, you know, whatever, you know, just the average wine from the grocery store. And so that's, that's one thing that I've found to make a difference when it comes to, to alcohol and alcohol metabolism is experimenting with different forms of whatever your, your poison might be. But then the other thing that, you know, you mentioned a really good point about self quantification. And I recently discovered this because I'm working on a blog post right now on sleep cycles. But when you're using any of these devices like the Fitbit or the jawbone or I use this, I use one that's a ring. It's called the aura. You can look at your deep sleep percentage and the gold standard for deep sleep. If you want to know that something isn't really interfering with the quality of your sleep, you want about 18 to 22% of your sleep cycle. Like when you're looking at a sleep graph that any of these bracelets or self quantification devices can produce, you want to get right about 18 to 22% of your of your total amount of sleep spent in that deep sleep cycle. And that's generally a pretty good sign that you're, that what you're doing prior to bed isn't actually interfering with your sleep. So now that's the one number I'm kind of looking at when I get up is, you know, if it's at 10%, I know I probably did something that messed with my sleep.

That's really cool.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm learning a lot working on this article. Anyways though, speaking of interrupting sleep, you talk a little bit about email in the book. And I was impressed to see that you're not checking your email until noon, I believe is what you outline in the book. I'm curious, how do you actually set that up? Like how do you set up your email checking habits? Because there are so many people that would have a very hard time not checking email until noon or just not being able to manage that inbox with infrequency of checking. So what's your habit when it comes to email? How do you set things up?

Yeah, so just a bit background on that. So in about 2007 I was like everybody else, I was waking up at 7:30 in the morning checking email immediately and, and in my world, as a writer, as a seller of my products, I would, every once in a while there'd be a negative email. You're an idiot for writing this, or you're ridiculous or whatever. I don't like you. And it would send me down that rabbit hole of oh, I want to write this back. I know I never did, but I always wanted to write something back. And so it would just occupy a space in my mind all day. And so I realized, okay, I got to stop this. So it was five minutes at a time. So it was 7:30, then it was 7:35 the next day. I check email and eventually I worked my way up. I clawed my way up till 9 o'. Clock. It was a real difficult thing to do. But I set it up so that I wouldn't check my email till 9 o'. Clock. I no longer had it on my phone. And then I started implementing systems so that I didn't have to check email. One thing that people can do, especially when I was a personal trainer, and I know that as a personal trainer you're going to get emails from clients who are going to cancel that 6am session. So obviously you want to know that that 6am session is going to be canceled before you, Before I would get on the bus and go downtown Toronto and train that person. You can set up emergency emails for clients that people need to get in touch with you immediately, or just say text only for emergencies, or make a phone call and just have that communicated to anybody that needs to reach you urgently, like your assistants. Then they would use an alternative method of communicating with you. So that'll cut down on you worrying about urgent emails in your inbox. And then so that way you can say, okay, now I know that not a whole lot of urgent emails are coming in because all the people that need to contact me that way have another way of doing it then. Therefore, there's nothing urgent in my inbox and it can wait until 9 o' clock after I get 15, 60, 90 minutes of work done on my number one priority. So, you know, there's people like Gary Bensevenga, who's a copywriter, he calls it your hour of power first thing in the morning. I'm a big believer in that. Robin Sharma says first 90 minutes of your day should be focused on your number one priority because that's the 80, 20 rule. You get 80% of your results from 20% of your day, that 90 minutes. And there's other people who use that Pomodoro technique, work for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break. Get something done for a piece of time before you check your email. Even if you do nothing else, and even if you don't delay your email until 9 o' clock or 10 o', clock, but you delay it till 8:30 and you get something done, that's a big win. And that's something that I think most people can aspire to, then there's other ways that you can set up people contacting you. We have a service that we use in our business called it's not our service, but it's just a service that our team uses called I done this. And so everybody has this little area where they go in and say, this is what I got done today. And today And I got this done. And so I'll go in and check that before I'll even check my email because that's where people will put stuff that I need to reply to. So I have all this stuff that will keep me out of my inbox and away from any of the negative comments that randomly get into my email inbox, which I don't get a lot of these days. But I think there's a way that everybody.

You said that's called I done this.

Yeah. Idunthis.com and it's just one of the many kind of team tools that are out there. It's not like Slack or anything, but it's just a very simple bullet pointed of. I contacted this person today and we moved ahead with the video editing. And then I set up this other project with this person or I shipped out this product to these people. Everybody from our marketing team to our customer service team will just put two or three things in that were really important that they did. And then I can go, everybody can go in there and see what everybody did. But as the manager of the team, I can go in there and say, okay, good, they moved ahead on that project. I don't have to email them and say, hey, did you get this done? It's all just there. And with email, one of the things that's the problem is that people just respond to it with thank you. Oh, no problem. And the next thing you know, you got five emails that are just going back and forth in chitter chatter that it doesn't need to be there. So I almost teach people to look at email, treat it like it's faxing. You never fax somebody the word thank you. You wouldn't do that because it's a pain in the butt to go send the fax. So just treat your email with a little bit more care. And remember that if you get a lot of email, it's probably because you send a lot of email. Just like your mom taught you when you were a kid, before you got in a fight at school, count to 10 before you do anything. So I tell people, count to 10 before you hit send, just because you might be bored in sending an email. But if you're bored and sending an email now, you're gonna get three emails later when you're not bored and you're really actually under the gun and stressed out and all these people are gonna reply to you and it's gonna be like the worst time to get those emails. So just little things like that will help people.

Yeah, that's one of the things that I've found with email is when you send an email, you will get a response inevitably within just a few hours. And so now I use this program called Boomerang. So when I send a variety of emails, what I'll do is I'll schedule those emails to go out a few hours later, especially if it's the morning. So I'm not like you. I don't wait until noon to check my emails. And the reason is because when I'm working on a big project, I don't like the feeling nagging in the back of my mind wondering if there's some kind of fire I need to put out or somebody I need to reply to who needs my assistance before I've gotten knee deep in some big project that I'm working on. So I do actually check my email and I'm generally checking at sometime around like 9 to 10am but what I do is when I reply to the emails that are in my inbox, I'll schedule those emails not to go out until later that afternoon because I don't want a bunch of emails coming right back at me as I'm going through my inbox. Because then, you know, you, you've probably seen this before. You know, you'll log into your Inbox, you'll have 20 messages and you'll get them down to about two messages. And then all of a sudden you look and there's six messages because people are already starting to reply to those, those messages that you started to send out earlier. So Boomerang seems to work pretty well for that. But you know, that that's, that's still. Perhaps it's a, it's a mental block that I need to work on, but I have trouble working on like that one big thing in the morning if I think that there's some other little fires that I need to put out, I like to have the little fires put out and be like, inbox zero before I actually start on my major project for the day. So, you know, perhaps I need to experiment a little bit more with, with your, your formula of just getting up and doing that 60 minutes of writing so well.

You know, the one thing that's great about being up so early is even if I send an email, no one's going to be up to get it. So if it's something that is an emergency, it's not like anything can be done on it. Because most people, especially because if I'm on the east coast and I'm up at even 6 o' clock in the morning or even 7 o' clock in the morning. Our team's still not going to be in for another two hours into the Denver office. So there's no point in me checking my email really until after 9:00 in the morning, which is fortunate for me when I'm on the East Coast. And then going back to something I mentioned earlier with Chris Gillebu, he was profiled on this really neat site called mymorningroutine.com and he said he answers his emails on Saturday morning because he knows no one's going to check them until Monday or reply to them until Monday. That's almost like a poor man's use of the boomerang that you use.

Yeah. Unfortunately I found that for some reason the majority of people I correspond with seem to check emails on the weekends.

Right.

So that doesn't work for me. But you are, by the way, inspiring. I think a lot of Californians to move to Toronto and get on this whole Eastern advantage of being able to work with email in the morning. There's some other things you go ahead.

When I go to Europe in the summertime, I love that time zone so much just for that reason.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's kind of funky when you travel at different parts of the world to kind of see how especially like the email and the online routine changes, you know, some, some parts of the world you find yourself inundated with email right after you've eaten dinner and then in other parts of the world you can get it all over with in the morning and then you don't see it again the rest of the day. So the fun thing about international travel, so one of the things you talk about in the book is the 102310 formula, the 102310 formula. Can you fill us in on what exactly that formula is?

Yeah, so we've covered a little bit of it already with the caffeine is 10 hours before bed, so we're going to cut that out. The alcohol is three hours before bed, so we're going to cut that out. And this is all to get a great night's sleep. And then two hours before bed you want to stop eating, you want to stop eating heavy meals before bed, about two hours again, because the digestive system, if you have a heavy meal to digest, it's going to impact your sleep cycles as well. And again, your mileage will vary with all of these things. So, you know, take a look at your own sleep tracking to see if that impacts things. And then an hour before bed, stop, stop working on work stuff and getting stressed out. And also start to eliminate and cut down on the screen time because the blue light emission from the screen is something that is research proven to impact arousal levels and stop you from falling asleep. Pretty easy. So.

Right. Although everybody on the planet now has this. Has. Well, I don't know if people have heard of this actually, but Apple just introduced its new iOS, the nighttime version of the iPhone. Or if you go into your settings and you click on display and brightness, you can actually now press that nighttime setting on, on your iPhone and it will automatically dim your iPhone. Kind of like that, that Flux app that everyone is talking about on a computer. But Apple has apparently become aware of the blue light problem.

Oh, very cool. And then from Ari Mindzel, I read that you can actually buy. I don't know if they look like blue, blue blockers, but there's glasses that will block the blue light. So you can sit and read your Kindle in bed with these glasses on and you won't be affected by the blue light. So there's also that way to cut back on the blue light emission which will otherwise.

Yeah, I own those. The problem with them is you will also get, not, not, not get laid by your significant other because you look like a creepy stalker with most, most models of those glasses while you're in bed. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a little bit of a downer component to those. But, but they do work. Yeah, absolutely. So we've got 10 hours, we cut out caffeine, we've got three hours, we cut out alcohol, we've got two hours, we cut out eating, we've got one hour, we cut out work and screen time. And then what's the zero?

The zero is actually the next morning. And I'm a big fan of not hitting the snooze button because from what I understand, hit the snooze button, go back to sleep for five minutes and you actually wake up groggy. Or later on you get a little bit into a sleep cycle and it actually messes you up. I recommend people find a way to overcome hitting that snooze button. Either it's discipline or it's setting the alarm up across the room so you have to get up. Obviously your spouse will dictate that one. But if you cannot hit the snooze button, then you're probably going to be better off and well rested for the rest of the day. I'm a big fan of the 90 minute sleep cycle. So if I get up 15 minutes before my alarm or if I get up even 45 or 60 minutes before my alarm, I won't go back to sleep. I'd rather have a nap later on in the day than go back to sleep and kind of mess around with the sleep cycle. It's something that I've learned over time does work for me. When I was younger and I would sleep through the snooze button and hit it a couple times. It was as bad as some of the research suggested. So try not to hit the snooze button. Give that a bit of an experiment, see how that goes. And if it works for you, then add that to your routine.

Now what do you think about these devices? Now, because a lot of these sleep tracking devices will do this. They detect when you're in your lightest stage of sleep, if that occurs, say at some point between 5 and 6am, let's say you want to get up sometime between 5 and 6am that it will detect your lightest stage of sleep and then wake you at some point between say 5 and 6am not exactly at the same time each morning. But when it detects you're in that light stage of sleep. Have you experimented with any of those type of devices?

No, the only thing I've experimented with is the alarm clock that builds the light up in your room gradually.

Yeah.

Like the sunlight.

Yeah. My kids.

It was okay. It didn't really. Yeah, it didn't change my world. So I gave it to one of my relatives and they actually really like it. But you know, for me it wasn't anything life changing. So those are the only things that I've experimented with. And other than that is I just, you know, I'm kind of a manual guy. I just manually track everything so that I know I've tracked it enough so that I just know whether or not, you know, last night was a good night's sleep. You know, everything was, you know, everything seemed normal. I feel really good right now. And whatever I did yesterday, I'm going to try and replicate that again today so that you know, I have the same energy.

Yeah. And regarding the two part of your 103210 equation, you'll get a lot of people now talking about, for example, the use of resistant starch to increase lucid dreaming or sleep quality. Or you'll get some people, people talking about using like raw honey and apple cider vinegar prior to bed to improve sleep quality. Do you, do you pretty much just keep any calories whatsoever out of the body for that two hours prior to bed or do you allow for the use of like certain supplements that may have some calories in them to assist with sleep?

Well, I wouldn't tell somebody that they can't have any calories before, before they do that if they have something like that. Now there's another thing, another problem with eating too close to bed that most people don't know about, which is basically silent heartburn. And so if you know anybody who's like a guy who's 65, 70 years old and you've noticed that his voice has changed and it's real gravelly, it's probably because he has been suffering from silent heartburn, which is when you go to sleep with a full stomach, the acid creeps up and you get and you don't notice it. But over time it actually can have negative impacts on your esophagus and on your vocal cords. Over time your voice changes. If people struggle with heartburn or the feelings of that or think that they go to bed on a full stomach, then you're probably going to want to do something about that. There's plenty of articles out there even in the layperson's world, like in the New York Times is where I first read about it. So that's another consideration. So if you have apple cider vinegar 30 minutes before you go to bed, you're probably not doing a great service to your esophagus because it's going to especially, here's the thing, if you sleep on your left side, you're going to have less problem with heartburn just because of the way that your stomach is set up. But if you sleep on your right side, you actually have more problem with heartburn. So just another thing to give people anxiety about the way that they sleep at night. But it is pretty important. The more research is coming out every day about how important sleep is. And so many of us have built up this badge of honor that we don't sleep that much. But I am for people doing whatever they need to do to get a good night's sleep. But then there is other things to consider as well. And then the last thing that I'll add to that is I don't do the 16, 8 type of fasting, but I just like to do a 12 hour fast. So I'd be, you know, from when I stopped eating dinner, I don't eat again for 12 hours after that. And so for me it's easy to make that two hour bridge. I don't eat anything right before I go to bed because I do like deep breakfast relatively within a couple hours after I get up in the morning.

Yeah, yeah, I'm actually, I'm slightly different from you in that respect. I'll generally have dinner, we have late dinners, we generally eat around 8:30 or 9pm and then I'll do intermittent fasting, which means for me breakfast is typically around like 10, 10:30am or so. But yeah, I generally follow a relatively similar routine with I guess a little bit of a time shift forward from your, your 4:00am protocol. Now, now I want to talk a little bit about the afternoon too. I know we've talked a lot about the morning and sleep, but you call the afternoon chaotic. Why do you refer to the afternoon as chaotic?

Well, for most. Well, for my experience it certainly is. And for most people that I know, it certainly is in terms of, okay, the afternoon and even the morning once you get to work. For some people it's just emergency after emergency and in most cases the afternoon even more so because people want to leave work at 4:30 or 5:00 clock and then therefore they have to get their work done. So they really get serious and they start saying, oh, I need your help to help me finish this project so that I can leave on time. And so most people are getting those things brought into the world. You might also hear from your kids who have to get picked up from school or they might be sick and they have to get a ride home from school. And then you have to start thinking about all the things you have to do when you get home. I got to take little Sally to soccer, I got to take Johnny to Little League, I got to take the other kid to piano practice. And so the afternoon is generally really busy for people and there's so many deadlines that come into the way. So we really need to figure out a system for coping with that because you just can't block off and say, no, I'm not going to answer my phone, I'm not going to check my email, I'm not going to do any of this stuff in the afternoon. You guys can kind of deal with it on your own. That's just not the way the world works. And so we have to be prepared to deal with it in a way that doesn't overload us with stress and still allows us to get our work done.

So what exactly do you do about the chaos of the afternoon? What are some of your tips for folks?

The first thing is just the mental way in which you deal with it. My book was actually Written based on a little bit of Stoic philosophy and something that I interpreted from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. He has this saying, control what you can, cope with what you can't, and concentrate on what counts. And so I actually applied that to the three parts of the day with controlling that morning and then in the afternoon. You have to understand that if somebody brings you a fire or an emergency, you can't really get mad at them. Well, you can, but there's no point in getting mad at them. So what you need to do is control your thoughts, control your actions, and just do the best job that you can with the emergency that has been thrown into your world. And so with that, then it's like, okay, well, how can I apply my systems, what I put in the book the Five Pillars of Transformation and Success, into this afternoon of chaotic stuff that the world is going to bring at you? And so better planning and preparation is the first pillar there. And better planning and preparations means trying to identify every obstacle that the world is going to throw at you. And in most cases, you can know in advance that Jim from accounting is always going to come over in the middle of the week with some numbers emergency, and for some reason I'm always going to have to deal with his numbers emergency during the week. So how can I be prepared for that? What are some solutions that I have, knowing that I have experience with this, and you have these two solutions to every obstacle that you expect in life. And if you have that in place, then you can go to plan A. And if plan A doesn't work, you can have plan B in backup to make that work, so that every emergency that people bring to you causes you less stress and you deal with it faster. So those are the systems that you can start with to make your afternoon a little less chaotic if it is in fact chaotic in the first place.

Okay. Okay, got it. So in terms of the afternoon, I've kind of found some similar things happen to me on specific afternoons. Like Friday afternoon, for example. Example is when my assistant sends me a lot of, like, comments and questions and posts that I need to respond to that I've gotten from social media, for example. And I've simply found that I have to schedule on Friday afternoon a two hour buffer, meaning I have a specific period of time on Friday afternoon where I do not schedule any consults, any phone calls, anything like that. And it is simply my time to be able to sit down and reply to that one email that I get that's just jam packed with questions and So I think building in buffers like that to your calendar, you know, I do the same thing with my days. Like, I know Monday is. Is freaking, and this happens to a lot of people. Monday can be fricking hell in terms of just like fires popping up all over the place. And so, you know, one of the things that I do on Mondays is I really try not to schedule too many consults, too many calls, too much of anything between about 10am and noon, because I know I'm just going to be putting out fires that come my way. And so I think building in buffers to your day, at least that's one thing I found to be kind of helpful as far as that's concerned.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And one of the other things that you get into, because I really wanted to touch on this during the time that I have available to speak with you, are the people that you surround yourself with and you tell this kind of entertaining story in the book about the fishermen and the crabs. Can you detail that story and why you tell it in the book?

Yeah. So the crabs in the bucket story is a fun one and it's a good analogy to how we surround ourselves with people. So the story goes like this, and many people have probably heard it in one way or another, but you're visiting a place like Alaska, there's. There's a fisherman out on the dock, he's catching crabs, or however they catch crabs. And anyways, he's putting them in the bucket and you walk by and you see this one crab making a break for it. And you say to the fisherman, hey, one of your crabs is going to get out. And he just kind of laughs and says, no, that's not going to happen. Because as you watch as the crab gets closer to the top, the other crabs pull it back down to their level. And unfortunately, that is the way that the majority of people are in the world. So when someone gets famous out of a group, all the knives come out and people get stabbed in the back. Dan Kennedy, who's an author in the marketing world, has a phrase, the higher up the flagpole you go, the more your butt hangs out for people to take shots at it. And that's another way of looking at it. And it's unfortunate. Most people will say things about someone they've never met in a negative manner just to bring them back down to their level. Even if, though, they actually met the person in person, they would be the first person to put their arm around them and get a photo for their Facebook page. A lot of people just say things in a negative way to protect themselves. We have to understand that. And it could be as simple as if you're at work and you work in an office and you really want to improve your health, improve your eating or performance, eating for races or something like that, and everybody else is having cake and donuts on Friday afternoon, and they're putting it in your face and saying, oh, you're not going to have any of this. You're too good for us. And that type of stuff, real negative stuff like you'd see on the office TV show that used to be on tv, that's the type of negative stuff that we need to avoid and overcome. Really goes back to what professional or personal development people like Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar would always say about you become like the average of the five people that you hang around with the most. And so if you hang around people who go to happy hour every night and get drunk, you're probably going to end up going to happy hours and maybe not getting drunk, but wasting a couple hours there and gaining some weight and not being as effective as you want. But if you hang around five people who have amazing home lives and have really good careers, you're going to become much more like them. And there's actually a lot of research out of Harvard University that proves this point. So people that hang around obese people actually have a higher body weight than people that don't hang around obese people. And people that hang around cigarette smokers have a greater risk of becoming a cigarette smoker. And it's just social circles. And so that's what the story of the Crabs in the bucket is about. And it really is just a reminder and a lesson to us to make sure that we choose the right social influences to help us achieve what we want to achieve in life and become the person that we want to become.

Yeah, I've found that that's a tricky, tricky subject for me because I don't necessarily want to come across as, like, arrogant or too selective in terms of the type of people that I hang out with. This was something that I ran into for a while was, you know, I only wanted to be with high achievers or only wanted to be with people who were, like, making more money than me. So they. They'd rub off on me. And, you know, it. It's kind of. For me, it comes down to walking a fine line. Like, there are some people who are completely happy. Like, there's this concept of, like, deep work, right? Like, just Being engaged in, you know, something like woodworking or farming or gardening. And maybe they're not making a ton of money, maybe they're not like early to risers. But I've found that you can almost learn a little bit from everybody. You know, that that guy who works as a, you know, begging groceries, but who might be really great at jiu jitsu, and you can, you can roll with him and actually, you know, learn some cool things, or you know, the guy, you know, at church who might not be, you know, really interested in becoming a full fledged, like, millionaire entrepreneur, but who's just like, you know, a painter or a construction worker, but who might share your passion for spirituality. And so what I've found is I've had to walk a fine line between, like, choosing those people that I hang out with who are thinking on a really high level, but then also trying to understand that no matter who you're with, a lot of times there's, there's value in people, even if they don't seem to be thinking on, say, like as big a level as you're thinking. Have you run into that much like that idea where even if somebody isn't financially successful or isn't as focused on a huge legacy as you are, that you can still kind of get something out of that relationship as far as value or give something in terms of value?

Yeah, totally. I mean, one of the greatest lessons I got in finance ever was from a truck driver because I'm from a small town in Canada. My family, I grew up on a farm, a beef cattle farm. Most of my relatives are in fact transport truck drivers. And so I spend a lot of time with these people and I love how happy they are. And it's just like when you hear about people who don't have much but are just having a great life because they surround themselves with good people. And on the flip side, you can hang around very successful people who are very, very negative. There's certainly one who gets a lot of media these days down in America who, who seems to be a very negative person, even though he has quite a bit of wealth, he claims. So it's not like, does his name.

Rhyme with Ronald Rump?

Yeah, maybe. And so it's great. The big thing is you can hang around anybody, like you said, and learn something or give something to them and have a great relationship. My best friend, and I'm 40 years old now, I've been best friends with him since he and I were six years old. But he's not a financially super high Achiever, but he is known as Laid Back Jeremy at the hospital where he's an X ray tech and he's known for being a really great X ray tech and he loves the job. And on the weekends we watch golf because we just love to chill out and watch golf, and that's our thing. The last point is you can hang around anybody, but once the conversation turns, whether they're rich or poor, to talking about other people in a negative way or to complaining, then that's when you might want to say, excuse me, I'm going to go and join the kitchen party or whatever it is, or I'm going to go freshen up my drink and just remove yourself from that conversation and from that environment so that, you know, you don't find yourself gossiping, because that's kind of an empty feeling later on. At least that's what I've felt.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. You do want to stay away from the vampires without being so arrogant that you only want to hang out with people who are, you know, making as much money or more than you. That kind of thing, I guess, is the way that I try to. Try to frame it, at least. Craig, there's so much in this book and I've been taking furious notes, by the way. For those of you listening in, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ThePerfectDay to delve into some of the. Some of the websites and some of the things that Craig and I have talked about so far. But I've got one more question for you. If you were going to give like a one, one action step that somebody listening in could take today to take control of their own time, to own their day, to create their perfect day, what would be your number one action step that you'd want people to leave this podcast and go do right away?

So, number one thing is, I know, just work with me here, but get up five minutes early tomorrow, get up five minutes early tomorrow, grab a blank piece of paper and a pen and go sit at your kitchen table and think about what the number one thing in life you want to improve on or the number one priority in your life, the number one problem or the number one opportunity and just give yourself five, preferably 15 minutes of thinking with nobody else around and just think really hard about that problem. Think about ways you can solve it. Think about people you can connect with. Think about ways you can bring opportunity into your life or help people out at your company or whatever it is that you want to do. And just think, because I heard this story about Lee Iacocca when he was the CEO of Chrysler, and he said, over the course of the day, I don't even get 15 minutes to think. And he was the CEO of a very, very large car company because he was so busy with meetings and this and that. And I really believe that people who are not getting ahead as fast as they want in life, they're mostly being reactive. And you need to be proactive in order to succeed in life. If you want to run an Ironman in under nine hours, you have to plan and prepare for that. You have to sit down and really think about what your training program is going to be. And so you can sketch that out. You can really think about it sitting at your kitchen table with no other people around. Much better than if you're driving your car and trying to drive and think about it at the same time or if you're in a meeting and trying to think about it at the same time. So just give yourself some clear, quality thinking time. And first thing in the morning is going to be easiest for most people. For our night owl friends, stay up an extra 10 to 15 minutes, give yourself that clear thinking, and then go and have a great night's sleep.

Awesome. Awesome. I love it. Well, I really did not tackle a lot of the stuff that you've got in the book. Like, you have pillars in here and formulas. And I do recommend that, folks, if you're listening in, you just grab this book. It'll literally take you probably, like, I don't know, maybe a day or two to read. Like, it's not a super long, intimidating book, but it's got a lot of, of gold in there from a guy who has accomplished a lot. And Craig, and also for those of you listening in, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com ThePerfectDay I will include links to Craig's book and everything else that we discuss in this episode, along with all the articles I've written on my own routines. So check all that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com ThePerfectDay in the meantime, Craig, thanks for coming on and geeking out on this stuff with me.

Me?

Yeah.

Thank you so much. And like you said, people can read it pretty quick. It's really great for an hour and a half, two hour flight. It's the perfect book for that.

Yep, exactly. Although we know now that you should be sleeping on your flights.

Yes. For a nice little nap.

All right, folks, well, this is Ben Greenfield and Craig Ballantyne from BenGreenfieldFitness.com signing out. Have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.