What's Your Peak Performance Routine?

Today I want to share with you a really simple routine that I use to maintain a super high volume of output and peak performance in my life. And I don't just mean peak performance in work. I also mean performing at my highest level, both on the health front and the home fronts as well. Because if we really want to close that gap between who we are and who we are capable of being, we have to respect that. It's not just pedal to the metal on the work front. It's also the health and the home fronts, or the relationship fronts, however you want to refer to it. But it's about really maximizing those three pillars. Now, this is something I really struggled with for a long time. I was the type of person who would go all in on work, I'd have bouts of success, things seemed to be going well, and then suddenly have some kind of health issue. I'd get really, really sick, or suddenly I'm feeling palpitations or something in my heart and something doesn't feel right, or I'm feeling a bit anxious or down. And equally suddenly on the home front, I was hearing that the kids were saying, hey, we don't see you, we want to play with you. And my wife was saying the same thing. I wasn't spending enough time with them. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever felt that.

You'Re giving it your all at work, but you're feeling down about your health? Maybe you're giving it your all, but you're not happy with what you see in the mirror. You're feeling sluggish, your energy's low, you're out of weight, you're out of shape. You also feel, you know, a bit down about maybe not being present and available at home. You know, have you ever felt, you know, guilty for the amount of work that you're doing? These are all things that I felt, and these are all things that I've had to very, very consciously work on to make sure that I was improving. And I want to take you today through not necessarily what you should do. You know, everyone's unique, but I'm just going to share what I'm doing. And if it sounds like it might work for you, you might want to develop or mirror perhaps this peak performance flow and collect your own data, see what helps you operate at a higher level. So I have five key metrics that I measure myself against on a daily basis to make sure that I'm optimized in all areas of my life. And the number one metric that I guard, that I protect, that I make sure that I'm doing my best to maintain is eight hours of sleep. Now, you may think that I don't need eight hours of sleep, I'm this high performing entrepreneur, or I have this gene that allows me to survive with less than eight hours of sleep. So if you think you're that high performer that needs less than eight hours of sleep, then you probably just become accustomed to operating at a lower baseline. Or if you think that you can survive with less than eight hours of sleep, guess what? You're exactly right. You can survive. But that's not the point. It's not about surviving. Would you thrive with more and by the way, your chance of having the gene, because there's a gene associated with being able to thrive on less than eight hours of sleep. Your chance of having that gene is equivalent to your chance of being struck by lightning. And if you want to read more about this subject and you know, some of this data and facts, we read the book why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. But the first thing that I seek to protect is those eight hours of sleep because I can't perform at a high level unless I'm feeling rested, you know, restored. You know, when you go through your workday, do you feel sluggish at times? Do you feel like things get hazy and cloudy and you start to lose your focus and you're suddenly procrastinating and suddenly I'm on Facebook and I'm checking out, you know, the feeds of my friends and then I'm thinking they're sitting with regret. You know, what am I? I should have been working on this presentation. Have you felt like that before? I wonder how that's connected to your sleep. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you getting eight hours every single day? So that's the first thing that I protect in my peak performance routine, eight hours of sleep. The second thing is I like to start my day off with a massive win in terms of some deep work before I'm off and running for the rest of the day. And so the second thing that I seek to manage is 90 minutes of deep work before. Now I start my day early, so I don't want this to shock you. So I try to do 90 minutes of deep work before 7:30am yes, that means I'm starting at 6:00am, working from 6:00am to 7:30am but you also have to take into account that I'm going to bed earlier. So I'm asleep by 9:00pm, you know, 9:30pm, so I'm still getting my eight hours of sleep. But I find that when I work, you know, in a state of deep work. What do I mean by deep work? I mean just working in an intense state, distraction free, where you're only working on one particular task for those 90 minutes. When I do that before the rest of the day starts, before I wake up with my, you know, before the rest of the family wakes up.

Before the emails start coming in or the meetings start, I feel like my day's been a win already. You know, I've already accomplished so much. And no matter what happens, you know, after that point, yeah, I just feel like I'm winning. Now. The third thing that I add into the mix is exercise. But I like to do that after I've kind of earned that break. And you might be thinking, earn exercise, earn a break. That doesn't sound like a break to me. Well, when you get into a peak performance routine, it is because you start to realize that exercise generates energy, generates peak performance rather than requires it. And I like to do my exercise by 8.30am so this is a routine that works for me. And that could just be 20 minutes, it could be 60 minutes, but it's right after that deep workflow. Now all these times that I'm using here, all this is completely adjustable with the exception of sleep. You need eight hours of sleep, but maybe you just want to try 30 minutes of super focused deep work before the rest of your day begins. Maybe just 30 minutes of exercise would work for you and maybe at different times, maybe a different peak performance routine would work for you. I'm just sharing what I have found to allow me to produce at a very, very high level consistently. So eight hours of sleep, we got our 90 minutes of deep work before 7:30am we have 60 minutes of exercise by 8:30am or sorry, actually I just count that as exercise by 8:30am to give me the flexibility of it being 20 minutes or maybe 60 minutes. And by exercise I don't just mean the body, I also mean the mind. So what I mean by that is that some days I don't do physical exercise. Sometimes I'll just do maybe a longer meditation, you know, or visualization work and really work on the mind, you know, not just the body. Then the workday happens and I continue to work from one project to the next and I get to the end of the day with a shutdown ritual. So I properly shut down my day so that I can disconnect from that day, go into the evening, properly connect, be present and available with my family, knowing that I've looked at everything that was happening in the day and I can now focus on the evening and the next day and my shutdown routine.

And you should pick the time that works for you. So let's say you'd like your day to end at 6pm so what I would advise you to do is at 5:30 you have a shutdown appointment in your calendar and in the meeting description of that appointment. I have a simple five point checklist and it just says update my to do list with any action items from the day. Do a final email check, look at my calendar for the next day, choose my top three items that I'm going to work on for the day ahead and then drop those top three things as appointments as little blocks of time in the calendar of my next day so I know exactly what I'm going to be working on and when. This allows me to properly transition into the evening. Why is this important? Well, so that I can properly connect with my family, so I can properly rejuvenate, so I'm not constantly thinking about work. I've checked everything now and so I can sleep better, right? Not thinking about work and knowing I know exactly what I'm going to be doing the next day. And the last powerful routine that I have as part of my peak performance routine is a digital sunset. And what I mean BY that is 60 minutes before I go to bed, before I'd like to be asleep. I practice what's called a digital sunset where I shut off all the electronics in the household. Because the issue with any blue light coming from your electronic devices in the evening, such as your telephone or television, is that it's going to lower the melatonin production in your brain by 50% if it's happening in that hour before bedtime and with less melatonin. Melatonin is what we need to sleep deeply. It's the substance that your body creates and releases to say, okay, it's time to shut down. And without the hundred percent of the melatonin that we need, we're not going to sleep as deeply or restoratively. So that digital sunset is a reminder for me to make sure that all those blue light emitting devices are shut off and it allows me to sleep, sleep more properly and get that eight hours of sleep. So those are the five points that I monitor and manage myself against to create a peak performance flow in my day. Make sure I have eight hours of sleep, completing a certain amount of deep work by a certain time in the morning, making sure I'm getting my morning exercise, making sure that I'm shutting down my day at the proper time, and then making sure that I have a digital sunset to protect that eight hours of sleep once again.