My Journal

Morning Routine And General Diary

My morning routine didn’t quite go to plan today as I woke up at about 3:30am and therefore decided to publish a change that needed putting live on our booking system product, PlanIt-BookIt. The change was to get people to opt in to getting their scores published on a proper league ranking site called Squash Levels.

Du to my early rise I ended up getting up a little later than I normally would. Still followed most of my morning routine though, including reading out loud my new affirmations that I created yesterday and then trying to visualise myself doing them.

I started the morning with a call with my business partner Steve, together we deleted all of the assets associated to an old Azure server that we had. Needed to do this to reduce our monthly Azure server costs.

That said, I didn’t progress too well as I got side tracked, the profit shown on the emails form the horse gambling bot didn’t match the profit shown on the exchange website. I hate not understanding something, so I decided to go through every email, 2 for every race and there were 30+ races yesterday, matching each email to the actual profit or loss shown on the exchange website. It turns out that one race the bot thought we had one on, that the horse later got disqualified, so we actually lost, hence the discrepancy!

I’m running horse gambling bot with a different strategy today, while yesterdays was just profitable, it didn’t really improve on what we had before.

Still doing my Keto diet today, the weight is still falling off me. I was down to 111.95KG or 247lbs and was weighing in at 114.05 or 251lbs only two days earlier! So I’ve lost 4lbs in 2 days, that’s not bad going! Still been having a few beers and the odd glass of wine at night too.

Late in the day got an email from one of our main booking system customers asking us whether we could supply them with a bespoke EPOS system. Steve and I are going to discuss this on Friday morning and get back to him with a proposal.

Food Diary

12:30 pm I had a cheese and ham Omelette, so very low on carbs

Tonight’s planned dinner is chicken pasta, I guess I will just have to have it without the pasta.

I made a lovely chicken and ham, arrabbiata style pasta and I was good and avoided all of the pasta, I just had the chicken and ham source, plus a big chunk of cooked ham as I was making the dish. So hopefully more pounds to be shed tomorrow.

In the SAVERS acronym R is for Reading

My goal today is to get to 65% complete of my Miracle Morning book. I’ve cut this back yet further, the reading is great and really helping me, but because I am taking notes at the same time in this journal it is taking way too much time.

It may be better to just block out either 30 minutes or 1 hour for reading and stick to that. That way I will have more time to focus on the business growth and improvement tasks!

My starting point for today is location 1875 of 3144 60% complete

My completion point was location 2114 of 3144 67% complete

In the SAVERS acronym, S is for Scribing

My learning from reading a tenth of the book…

I need to be creating a vivid vision, a tool that looks 3 years into the future and then works backward to achieve annual goals. This all requires super focus. It’s about doing the right things.

Need to move from being busy to being productive.

Have a room for focused efforts, mine is my office in our basement, it’s usually a little cold, but I think that actually helps me if anything.

Make sure that the room is free from clutter, strangely enough, in the last few days I’ve been slowly decluttering my office anyway, I remember the importance of a decluttered, clear space from my days running Lean workouts at General Electric. My office is slowly looking a little more organized. I’ve been aiming to hide away, throw or tidy just a couple of things a day, and now it’s starting to pay off.

Some questions the book says to pose in terms of having unwavering focus:

What’s working? Do more of
What do I need to start doing? To accelerate results
What do I need to stop doing? Holding me back

I like the above questions so much that I think they may need to be added somewhere in My Core Journal

At the end of the week, you need to make a list of everything that you have accomplished. It’s about praising yourself for what you have achieved. Perhaps an Accomplishments page again somewhere linked to this journal. To remind me to do this I’ve scheduled it as a recurring weekly appointment every Friday at 3:30 pm. My old boss in Corporate land, who I had little respect for, by the way, used to hold team meetings at 5:30 pm on a Friday night, What a ******!! 🤣

It says to try a technique called Pomodoro for doing tasks. Where you basically focus all of your attention in 25 minute sections. I’m going to try an App called Forest: Focus for Productivity – tried it quickly, just a graphic of a growing tree and a timer, I cancelled and then it wanted me to watch an ad to delete what I’d done. Don’t think it’s going to be for me!

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What would make today great?

Focus on 2 to 3 Important tasks per day

Work in bite-size chunks or do thin slicing to recall some book I read ages back.

Follow pomodoro (25 minute tasks) – 1) Decide on task 2) Set timer 25 mins 3) Work until timer rings (any distractions write down and them immediately return to the task) 4) When timer rings place checkmark on paper 5) Take a 5 min break 6) 4 checkmarks take a 15 to 30 min break

Today I really need to make some progress on my customers’ website, I created a new affirmation just for this task. Not sure that’s quite right, as it will hardly be life-changing, it would, however, slightly add to my monthly revenue, so definitely some positives from completing it!

I actually failed again today, didn’t achieve anything of major importance. I think getting up to publish my PlanIt-BookIt changes, while important, threw me off track a bit as then I got up late and ended up in an impromptu meeting with my business partner.

Morning Routine And General Diary

Well, once again I started the day with my new and constantly improving morning routine.

Going to try and continue with my Keto diet again today, so hardly any carbs. I lost 1Kg from yesterdays efforts, down from 114KG to 113KG, I need to lost a lot more though!

As our son is really poorly with aplastic anemia, my wife and I called the fees office of the school he attends to see if they can offer any reduction in fees, here’s hoping.

The horse gambling bot that we built and run on a daily basis for a bit of fun and for hopefully a small profit. Well we decided to do some A B testing with it today. There are 37 UK and Ireland horse races today, so we are betting two separate £1 bets on each to test two different gambling strategies. Fingers crossed that they both show good results.

It’s nearly 4pm already, and if I’m honest, it’s not been the best of days. I’ve not really done much productive work. I even spent 40 minutes watching some of last nights “I’m a celebrity get me out of here” on TV

I’ve not done any work on my customers website and I haven’t created any affirmations either. Maybe I try and create at least one affirmation now, as I doubt I’m going to do any website work now.

Ok, well at least I did manage to create two affirmations, which are now firmly locked into my new and evolving morning routine…

“To ensure that I get a new squash club as a customer of PlanIt-BookIt and therefore increase revenue, I am committed to making the PlanIt-BookIt website best in class, growing my community through madaboutsquash and Facebook and making 5 connections per day to new clubs, between 11am and 12am.”

“To ensure that I lose 24 pounds and get down to 16 stone so that I look and feel better I am 100 percent committed to eating in an eight hour window, avoiding carbohydrates and playing squash or racquetball 3 to 4 times a week when I am allowed to do so again”

Food Diary

No entries yet as I try and skip breakfast these days, like to try and fit all of my eating into an 8 hour window, between 12pm and 8pm.

Ok…

12:30pm had lunch, one left over Lincolnshire sausage and some Chili left over from the other night, but with no rice to keep the carbs relatively low.

The plan for evening meal tonight is pretty simple, just some slightly breaded fish from Costco. I will just eat it as is, the rest of my family can have it with chips and mushy peas (possibly and English thing! 🤣)

In the SAVERS acronym R is for Reading

My goal today is to get to 60% complete of my Miracle Morning book. I’m dropping my target to 10% of a book per day as 13% is taking too much time.

My starting point for today is location 1559 or 50% complete

Target is complete, my ending point for today was location 1875 of 3144 60% complete

In the SAVERS acronym, S is for Scribing

My learning from reading a 1tenth of the book…

So far the Miracle Morning book has predominantly focussed on diet and healthy eating, but I disagree with much of what they have to say. I think Hal needs to read the ultimate diet book the Obesity code by Dr Jason Fung! Snacking according to Dr Fung is a big no no.

Next it mentions sleep, apart from nearly always waking up for an hour or so every night at approximately 3am, I do pretty Ok with sleep. I need a minimum of 7 hours a night and I usually manage to get that.

And then the importance of getting regular rest.

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What would make today great?

Today I need to keep some of my customers happy, I’ve reset a password to the mini-league system for Nottingham Squash Club and I intend to check in with and electric charge point fitting company that I work with. Probably need to do a little more work on a website I am building for my charging people.

Ideally though I would like it if I can to get my affirmations in place today, at least one anyway.

Started the day with my morning routine. I’ve made a copy of it and put it in a personal OneNote folder so that I can check off items as I’ve completed them.

I’ve also decided to try and do a keto diet this week, I have followed it before and I do tend to lose weight, however, I get to the weekend and forget all about it and then put all of my weight back on. This week I need to apply more discipline.

Food Diary

I’m going to use this journal as a bit of a food diary too. Starting today:

12:00 pm – 3 slices of ham, approx. 10 spicy chicken wings done in the air fryer, and 3 breaded chicken goujons – so very few carbs there.

For a great book on diet, fasting, and keto take a look at The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss, it’s an excellent book.

For dinner tonight I’m slow cooking a big chunk of gammon on my green egg BBQ, I intend to have it with fried eggs, although I will probably do some chips and peas for the rest of my family.

Morning Routine

Anyway, back to my new morning routine, I still haven’t created my affirmations yet so am also unable to do the visualizations. Will get to completing those soon.

In the SAVERS acronym R is for Reading

For now, I thought I’d focus on getting to a stage of 50% complete of my Miracle Morning book, however, I kind of stumbled at the first hurdle as the book listed a load of recommended books, which I now have to add into my new books to read page!

Right, all the recommended books have been added, so now back to trying to get to 50% completion and summarizing what I learn as I go…

The new starting point is location 840 with 27% completion.

Hal Elrod, the author, lists more recommended books on his website, but I’m not adding them to my books list yet. For now, I will just list the extra ones on my book page as a kind of reminder to add them properly later.

Reading lots of books will improve your mindset.

“If you don’t believe your business or products are highly beneficial for the customer, it’s impossible to convince others to purchase from you.”

“You must believe in your product in order to be able to sell it.”

“Take 100% responsibility for everything in your life.”

“Set aside 10% of your income” possibly not in a position to do that at the moment.

“Take 10% and give it away” giving quite a lot of stuff to charity shops at present, that might have to do for the time being.

In the SAVERS acronym, S is for Scribing

This is what I am doing here scribing or writing in this journal. Use it for documenting what you are grateful for and documenting learnings, ideas, breakthroughs, successes, etc.

It says to write your appreciations: Right now I think that my number one appreciation is the incredible NHS staff at the Oncology and Haematology department at the Clarendon Children’s Hospital in the LGI who are helping to fix my very poorly son. This team of people is simply incredible!

In terms of working for myself, I love predominantly being able to do what I want when I want, occasionally customers get in the way of that.

From the Miracle Morning, the journal is for:

Clarity and understanding
Capturing my ideas
Reviewing lessons learned
Acknowledging your progress
Improving your memory

My Core Journal

Here is my core journal, the part that I don’t expect to change too much on a day-to-day basis

What would make today great?

Days other than today, I guess would be to achieve some micro goals. For today though, get to 50% complete of my book and complete my to-do list.

General Diary of the Day

Food diary (lunch, snack, dinner)
1. Lunch: ham, chicken wings
2. Snack, a cold sausage
3. Ham and eggs
Morning routine progress
1. Detailed above
Notes on what I have read
1. Detailed above

Done, I’ve made it to location 1559 or 50% complete, tomorrow I need to take my journal template above and maybe put it on its own page as something that I can keep referring back to

Today has been a relatively productive day. I started the day with my still-in-progress morning routine. I created a rather decent, large Full English breakfast for my wife, son, and me. Then I also created a decent chill for later in our slow cooker. I find the chili recipe on BBC website to be one of the best, I add stewing steak and 85% Cocoa Dark Chocolate and slow cook for 6 hours plus.

My son is currently quite poorly with a rare bone marrow disorder called Aplastic Anemia, it’s a rare and quite scary condition. He’s currently awaiting a bone marrow stem cell transplant from a generous, female donor in Germany. If they both stay fit and well and everything goes to plan then his transplant will take place on the 23rd of November so 🤞.

That said, if you’re reading this and you are aged between 16 and 30 then please volunteer yourself as a donor at the Anthony Nolan site, apparently, it’s quite a simple and painless procedure these days, but you can read more about it on the site.

As my son is soon due to go in hospital on an isolation ward, with filtered air, etc. My wife and I decided to go have a Sunday tour of the hospital to try and determine if there are other places with easy access to the hospital that we can park at. It’s a big hospital with few parking options, so we ended up not really getting any more knowledge than we had. We did however go to get the car cleaned on-route, so there was some use from the journey.

I did lots of work on this site today, adding my journal entries and starting a skeleton outline for my morning routine, plus I added a books sections for books that I am currently reading or books that I plan to read.

Need to catch up on my reading a little today seeing as I missed out on reading yesterday. I’m starting the day where I left off at location 700 or 22% complete of my Miracle Morning book that I’m currently reading.

In the SAVERS acronym, V is for Visualization

Use visualization to create a compelling picture of your future – it’s meant to provide you with extra clarity and motivation to make your vision a reality. Apparently, sports people can improve their technique simply by visualizing themselves and going through the motions. Don’t focus on the past, visualize the future.

After reading out your affirmations visualize the specific actions that are necessary for your long and short-term goals.

Don’t visualize the results, just the actions required. For example, having fun and entertaining conversations about say my squash booking system with prospects. Feel the relationship developing. Respond to objections and questions about the product. It says to maybe play classical music such as J.S.Bach while doing your visualizations. Might be worth a try – however still need to add it to my morning routine yet.

Breathe deeply, close your eyes and clear your mind, let go of any limitations now visualize what you really want. Involve all senses. Make the vision vivid. Visualize flawless execution in a clear mental picture doing precisely what you need to achieve, with confidence and enjoyment. Engaged in the actions… Exercising, writing, selling, presenting, public speaking, making calls, sending emails, etc.

In the SAVERS acronym E is for Exercise

Even a few minutes is good, other than racquetball and squash I do little other exercises, and seen as I am isolating at the moment due to my son’s illness (see yesterday’s journal entry) I am doing next to no exercise. So I need to plan something into my morning routine.

Exercise improves health, self-confidence and emotional well-being, concentration, etc.

My ideas for morning exercise are either to use my wife’s subscription to a fitness website and/or to start using my treadmill again.

In the SAVERS acronym R is for Read

The miracle morning book says that you can learn practically anything by reading. It’s like having lots of mentors that you can call on. I’ve gone and added reading as a requirement to my morning routine.

The book is now listing a load of recommended reads that I am going to have to add to my new reading list page. So I’m going to close here for today and go try the chili that I’ve been cooking in the slow cooker most of the day.

I’m not at location 817 of the book and 26% complete, so way short or my 13% per day target. Maybe I can improve tomorrow.

Today was a bit of a blur if I’m honest and I’ve forgotten most of what I did.

I did kind of start the day a little with the start of my (in progress) morning routine. One of my many projects is a gambling-AI-bot project of which there are two of them, one of which focuses on football and one on horse racing. You can read a little about the football one at my gambling strategies website, another work-in-progress website!

Well anyway, Saturdays in the UK tend to be quite a big day for football (soccer for my American friends) and I have started trying to prove whether the AI value bet computer bot that we have built actually works. Saturday the 5th did actually turn out to be quite a good day, you can see the results here.

I missed my reading goal today. Need to get more organised with the morning routine.

Ok, for now, my second journal entry is going to continue with more learnings from my Miracle Mornings book that I am currently reading.

The book started explaining the benefits of meditation, which is something that I definitely need to learn more about. Apparently, meditation reduces stress and improves your overall health. It has also been shown to increase brain density.

The book said to look at some meditation apps to help with the process…

Headspace – I’ve also seen a TV series on Netflix called Headspace, must take another look.
Calm
Omvana
Simply being
Insight timer

Maybe I should add a meditation book to my reading list!

The book also said to take a look at Holosynch which is a site that apparently assists meditation by using sounds.

The A in SAVERS stands for Affirmations

This is all about repeating, articulating and reinforcing sentences created specifically for you in order to upgrade your own personal mental programming.

Define what result you want to accomplish
Why is accomplishing it important
What specific actions are required to produce a result
When (what specific date/time are you going to commit to taking the actions

We don’t get what we want, we get what we are committed to!

So the action to take is to write down a specific result or outcome that you want to happen, it should be one that challenges you or that significantly improves your life and that you’re ready to commit to creating right now, even if you’re not quite sure how you’re going to do it.

You reinforce your commitment by including your Why… The compelling reason why you’re willing to stay committed. There are some examples for creating your own affirmations in the book – was location 631 on my kindle.

So in summary what are the necessary actions that you are committed to taking and when. You affirm what you are committed to do.

Action: Clarify the specific action, activity or habit that is required to achieve your ideal outcome. When and how often will you execute it. There are more examples on my kindle at location 638. Frequency, quantity and precise time frames.

When you have your affirmations, recite them every morning with emotion. Feel its truth, feel the excitement and the determination. Who do you need to become.

Action: Schedule time each morning to read your affirmations. Put them on a car and display them somewhere that you will be able to see them often.

Constantly update, amend and evolve your affirmations.

It can be a good idea to have one for:

Finance
Health
Happiness
Relationships
Parenting

Lookout for quotes and other strategies as you read more – there were more examples in the book at kindle location 674

I intend to put a page together to document my morning routine.

I am now at location 700 in my kindle which is 22% complete.

Well here we go, this is my first-ever journal entry, and currently, I really don’t know much about journaling so I will probably just use it, for now, to summarize what I’m learning in the Miracle Morning book that I am currently reading and maybe add one or two things as I go about my day or anything that is on my mind.

So, today I read 17% of the Miracle Morning book, which took me to location 533 on my kindle, which is no doubt useful for my own reference.

The author Hal Elrod mentioned that he likes to have goals for different areas of his life. The areas are health, happiness, relationships, finances, and spirituality.

It also recommended a book to read, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I have actually read this book before, but it was some time back, so maybe I should revisit it. Might be an idea to add a page to this site on the books that I am currently reading and the ones that I intend to read. In fact, I like that idea a lot so I will do it now. Give me 5 minutes!! 😁 Here we go, a new page that shows the books I am currently reading and what I intend to read or that I have read… My Books

The book started hinting at things that you should be doing first thing in the morning. It also, every so often, has a write-up about some successful entrepreneurs’ morning routines. I noted the following…

Mindfulness – I don’t currently do this, need to learn more about it.
Gratitude Journal – I don’t currently do this but I plan to start soon.
Meditation – I need to learn more about this, I don’t think I currently do this, I do however do the Wim Hoff Breathing exercises and take a cold shower every morning. The breathing is possibly a little like meditation.
Take Health Supplements – I do this every day, as I read a book ages back, of which I forget the name, I think some guy had avoided all kind of illnesses and he put it down to taking every supplement available at his local Costco. So now, I do the same, I take one of almost every supplement that can be purchased at Costco, daily.
Drink a large glass of water first thing – I didn’t do this, but I have immediately started, and it does seem to be quite effective at making me a little more ready to start the day. The theory is that during the night you get a little dehydrated and so a good early morning strategy is to down a large glass of water almost as soon as you get up and then follow it by brushing your teeth. For me I have to have a coffee in the morning, I love the stuff. I have a D’Longhi machine that I use that grinds the beans and makes a lovely coffee.
Exercise – I currently don’t exercise first thing, however I do usually play a lot of squash or racketball through the week, usually about 3 or 4 times a week. Here’s a link to my madaboutsquash website, another project started and not quite finished! I think my wife has a subscription to some Davina McCall fitness website, I must ask her about it as maybe this is something that I can incorporate into my morning exercise routine.
List three things that you want to get done today
Read – I think I am personally going to set a goal of reading a minimum of an eighth of a book a day, so approx 13% on my Kindle
Intentions Journal – where you can write and review both short and long-term goals.

The Miracle Morning book said to start the day with SAVERS, where each letter respectively stands for:

S – Silence
A – Affirmations
V – Visualization
E – Exercise
R – Reading
S – Scribing

So that’s it for today, I am 17% through the book and at location 533 in my Kindle