Business and Productivity Gurus Stack Habits to Stay Fit

You can be busy and also be in great shape

John Fawkes
Better Humans
Published in
10 min readAug 28, 2019

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Photo by worei via Pixabay

Fitness isn’t solely the realm of fitness professionals, like trainers and bodybuilders. In fact, some of the best health and fitness advice I’ve heard has come from people who weren’t fitness professionals — in particular, from businesspeople, productivity coaches, and lifestyle bloggers.

As I’ve explained before, it’s still entirely possible to get into amazing shape even if you work 60+ hours a week, and you can lose weight even if you have a slow metabolism. I’ve done it, friends and clients of mine have done it, and all of the people quoted in this article have done it.

Here’s how the world’s leading business people and productivity coaches stay in amazing shape, even when fitness isn’t their top priority. They do it by combining habits and lifestyle choices that reduce the friction that could derail them from their fitness goals.

Minimize the Number of Decisions You Have To Make

You’ve probably heard the story of how Steve Jobs wore blue jeans, running shoes, and a black turtleneck every day. He purportedly did this in order to reduce the number of decisions he had to make every day, conserving his mental energy for more important decisions.

Knowing exactly what he would be wearing every day also helped him build momentum in the mornings — since he never had to take time to decide what to wear, it was easier to get off to a running start every morning.

If you’ve ever wondered how some people seem to stay in amazing shape with very little apparent effort, this strategy is a big part of it: they minimize the number of fitness decisions they have to make by having a few things they do the same way over and over.

The most common expressions of this strategy are working out at the same time every day and eating the same thing for breakfast every morning. Fitness and productivity guru Tim Ferriss famously experiments with different breakfast routines, eating the same thing almost every morning for months at a time before switching to a different breakfast.

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