Ask HN: How do you maintain good habits with a disruptive career and life style?
If you travel regularly or have work deadlines etc that disrupts any kind of healthy routine how do you maintain good habits like exercising, meditation, etcetera?
I was on a crash course for 15 years as a tech exec. 90+ hours work per week, travel, etc. not by compulsion or financial necessity but by personal drive to be the best at what I was doing. Unfortunately I was literally killing myself.
In 2013 I stepped back, applied an engineering/tech startup process to researching and analyzing what I really wanted and needed in terms of health and family and built my career and lifestyle around those healthy choices.
The result: get more done in less time, focus on things that really move the needle in career and work, tolerate very little noise vs signal, and financially doing 2x better while working 1/2 the hours. I’m in better health now than when I was in college. By coincidence, I had a totally unrelated emergency surgical procedure not long after I got into a healthy state, and because I was fit, my body was able to recover very quickly, and my work processes were now so effective, I barely missed a beat in terms of productivity. An MD friend of mine assured me that had I been in my previous poor health state, if I had survived the surgery (his opinion unlikely) recovery would have taken months to years with likely long lasting debilitating effects. And I almost certainly would have lost my career.
It will be scary at first, like sweating all night awake with gut wrenching fear scary, but compared to the inevitable health crash that is likely, I expect you won’t regret it.
I wonder whether anyone could do it. I tried traveling all the time for work and I just kept getting sick. But, I also didn’t like that job and resented it taking me away from my home city.
I don’t know if many roles in which people are always under deadline pressure. If that’s you, either plan around the deadlines or stop committing to unsustainable deadlines (which, I know, is easier said than done).