Where everything sits in my day
The shelf in our kitchen is the second cupboard along, above the kettle, and it’s a mess. Tubs at the back that I need to shift to get at the tubs at the front. It takes up more of the kitchen than it strictly needs to and I’m aware of that. But that cupboard is where the habit got built, so that’s where it all stays. Move the lot out to the garage and I’d stop opening it. I know myself.
So I thought I’d walk you through what’s up there, in the order I get to it. Not the what, just the when, and what I’ve already got in my hand at the time.
Because that’s the part nobody really talks about. A routine sticks when every piece of it gets bolted onto something you were doing anyway, and it falls over the moment it needs you to remember it. I’m in my forties now and my memory is a joke. Nothing in my day survives on willpower. It survives because it’s sitting next to the kettle.
Right. Shelf tour.
Morning, while the kettle’s going
ESSENTIAL AF is the first one I get to, and it’s first for a completely boring reason. It goes with breakfast, and breakfast happens whether I’ve planned anything or not.
That’s the whole trick with a morning one. You already eat in the morning. You’re already stood there for two minutes waiting on the kettle with nothing to do. Drop it into that gap and after a while you stop thinking about it at all. Keep it in a drawer upstairs and you’ll keep it going for a bit and then quietly stop, and you won’t even notice the day you stopped.
The house is loud at that hour, for what it’s worth. Two kids, the older one now old enough to have Opinions about breakfast, the little one narrating everything at volume. Nothing thoughtful is getting done in our kitchen between seven and eight in the morning. Which is exactly why the morning slot has to be the one that asks nothing of you.
Mine sits at the front of the shelf with nothing behind it, so I can grab it one-handed without knocking anything over. Sounds like a stupid detail to write down. It’s most of the reason it’s still going.
Before I go
El Chapo is the pre-training one, and mine doesn’t live in the kitchen at all. It lives by the front door with my keys.
I mix it at home before I leave rather than doing it at the gym, and that’s on purpose. Gym-carpark me is already late and patting his pockets. Kitchen me has a tap and thirty seconds. Same act, completely different amount of friction, and the low friction version is the one that’s still happening six months from now.
The keys are the anchor there. I can’t leave the house without them, so I can’t leave the house without walking past this. If you’ve got a spot by your door where the wallet and the keys go, that’s your slot, and it costs you nothing to use it.
Read the label before you scoop, and start at the low end. I’d say that about anything on this shelf, so please don’t read anything into me saying it here.
While I’m in there
AMINO AF BCAA + EAA is the one that’s already in the bag.
The shaker’s coming with me regardless. That’s the anchor for this one, and it’s a good anchor because it asks for no new behaviour at all. I’m not adding a step to the session, I’m putting something into a bottle I’d have been carrying anyway, and then it gets sipped across the hour without me having to manage it. Honestly, half the reason it holds up as a habit is that it gives me something to do between sets other than look at my phone.
If you drive to the gym, keep it in the bag permanently and top it up on a Sunday. Don’t pack it fresh each time. Packing it fresh each time is exactly how a thing stops.
My son’s started training lately and I’ll admit I’m quietly delighted about it. Watching somebody start from scratch, when you’re looking at it from the other side of twenty years, is a very strange and very good thing.
The one with no slot
CREATINE MONO is last on the list, and it’s the one I need to actively stop myself overthinking.
There’s no natural place for it in my day. There’s no meal it hangs off and no session it sits in front of. And that makes it harder to keep up rather than easier, which surprises people. Anything that can happen at any time has a way of happening at no time.
So I gave it a fake anchor. It goes into whatever I’m already drinking, at whatever point in the day I next open that cupboard for something else. The scoop stays in the tub and the lid stays loose. If I need to go hunting for the scoop in the bottom of the tub, that’s the day it doesn’t happen, and I learned that about myself the hard way.
Follow the label for the amount. I’ve got no system past that and I’m not going to invent one to make this section longer.
What I left off
There’s more on that shelf than these four, and leaving the rest out of this isn’t a ranking. Every one of them has my name on it. These four just happen to map cleanly onto the shape of an ordinary Tuesday, and this was getting long. I’ll do the others another time.
If you take one thing away from this, take the boring one. Pick the slot before you pick the product. Find the thing you already do every single day without deciding to do it, and hang the new thing off that. The kettle, or the keys by the door.
That’s how it survives a bad week, and everybody gets bad weeks.
Stay Swole,
Justin 💪
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.