What did you differently to make it stick?

Each year I tried different things, not in any particularly strategic fashion. I think the biggest was moving it to be the first thing I did in the morning. And also using a predefined workout so I didn’t have to think about. Then following Tony Horton’s advice of “even when you’re not feeling it, just press play.”

There were so many days I didn’t want to but just pressed play and figured I’d get 10 minutes in. But I knew it I just decided to do the whole workout.

Eventually moved off of P90x and mixed in a variety of predefined and made up workout to keep it interesting. But now I don’t feel on my game if I didn’t get a chance to workout in the morning, so it’s become a pretty strong habit.

My guess is, he did not do anything different, he just finally managed to establish a routine. There are thousands of reasons out of your control that can help or block you. Mostly it is other people, though. One stupid person at the gym might be a reason to not go this day ... and that was it for the routine, as the next day, there is something else vs. looking forward to meet nice people again at the gym and having the time to do it.

True. And disruption to a routine can be fatal to the habit. Switch places to live, new SO, new school, kids, life events, etc.

Thankfully I don’t have any known disruption events on the horizon. But for little things, like when I have to fly at 6am I get up at 3/3:30 to get a quick (and intense) mile in around the neighborhood. And I workout in hotel rooms, etc.

The main complaint in this thread seems to be that the chunks of time reported are misleading.

You can be a software engineer and not know a lick about syntax or write algorithms, but you have good intuition and can use tools (LLMs, autocomplete, etc) to take what others have done to make something others will like/use/pay for/etc.

Why use tools? Just be a product manager and you'd attain the same result.

This is great, thanks. Commenting to bookmark for future reference.

Your argument is that employers will eventually have the leverage to say, “come in to the office or else we’ll replace you with AI”.

If it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that AI is the more cost-effective employee, then it won’t come to that; employers will just replace their employees with AI. Office presence is completely unrelated.