How to work 16 hour days and still prioritize your health

Cru’s Letter

I get a lot of questions that sound something like this…

“How can I maintain your kind of lifestyle while also working 16 hours a day”

Short answer: You can’t

It sounds harsh but it’s true because what you might not realize is that all of my decisions, including what I do for a living, revolve around my ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

In the short term, I think you could definitely set some productivity world records and do all the “health stuff” on top of super long work hours but that’s only going to last so long. If working long hours is a priority of yours, you’re not going to be able to uphold the same health routines and standards as someone that makes plenty of time for it.

You might fall into this idea that you can do it all and, thinking optimistically, I think you eventually can but just not right now.

If you want to work like crazy, you’ll have to spend a season doing so, with your fitness/wellness goals slightly on the back burner. This doesn’t mean you should fully disregard them but to think you can be a workhorse and health junkie to the fullest extent at the same time is very unrealistic.

Priorities are the biggest driver of proper decision making and if you don’t know your priorities, you’ll always be conflicted in how you should be living your life.

For example: Reading is an awesome thing to do. Sometimes I think I should read daily but there’s only so much time in the day and if I were to choose between 20 minutes of reading vs 20 minutes of thinking, I’d choose the thinking nearly every time. In this case, I’m being honest about my priorities and then setting expectations from that awareness.

The hardest part of prioritizing is discerning between the decisions you actually want to make and the decisions you feel like you should make because of other people.

I promise you if you create a lifestyle and set of responsibilities that feel like a conflict to what you actually care about, you’ll burn out faster than you can say “burnout.”

If you’re watching someone on instagram thinking, “I should do what they do” you ought to ask yourself if your lifestyle allows for their exact choices and if not, you can set more reasonable expectations that set yourself up for success.

-Cru

P.S. A major pillar of a healthy lifestyle is simplicity. I recently posted a youtube video about why it’s so important to get rid of unnecessary complexity and I think you’ll really enjoy it…

Check it out here: