All posts in Brian

As I sit here at my home office desk, I glance over and see a pile of books sitting waiting for me to dive into them. This pile has grown over the last 2 years, such that I suspect it may topple over any one of these days. This backlog of books is caused by 2 things: thinking I don’t have enough time to read, and my inherited fascination with buying books I find even remotely interesting (you should see my dad’s home office!). The second cause is easy to fix, I am not buying another book for the rest of the year; boom, solved. The former though is harder. As someone who is self-employed and has a modicum of freedom over his schedule, its a self-imposed myth that I don’t have time. I do have time, I just have to be more efficient about using it.

So I’ve decided I am going to start making small improvements in my daily routine in order to optimize my life. Often I find myself still sitting at my desk after 10-12 hours of work, and realize I’ve only accomplished maybe 3-4 hours of productivity. So clearly continuous stretches of working don’t work well for me. Here are my ideas for optimizing my days to be more efficient. Now my plan isn’t to maintain these schedules obsessively, but hopefully the idea is if I stick to some of these new things, my mind, body, and general quality of life will all improve.

1. Daily jolt of energy: start each day with exercise.
By running a modest 2 miles each morning with my dog TJ in tow, I can knock out a quick sub-30 minute exercise regimen and jumpstart my daily metabolism. Also will help when I tackle the ING 2014 Miami marathon again. I’ll end up doing 8-10 miles during the week + another 8-10miler on saturdays or sundays.

2. Find inspiration every morning
Most mornings I make myself a simple breakfast consisting of eggs, protein, and veggies. So from now on I’m going to also watch something mind-opening every morning. Be it a new TED talk every day, or some documentary on netflix while I cook and eat my breakfast. Hopefully this will get my creative juices flowing and translate to my work-day.

3. Diversify my mental activity
Every morning, and afternoon, take 30 minutes each time to read. 30 uninterrupted minutes of reading in the morning and afternoon will hopefully help me plow through this pile of books in record time. Perhaps even adding 15-30 minutes of reading before going to bed, however that might be replaced with a cool-down activity.

The idea behind this being that if I can set a regular pattern, it becomes second nature, and thus easier to maintain.

Do you have any simple life hacks you do to optimize your day?

So it has been a while since I publicly issued any challenges to myself. This time the entire Miami branch of the Breslin clan is taking on a collective challenge to lose weight and improve our physical fitness. We have given ourselves (both my parents and my sister too) our own individual target goals for weight loss, and we have each put our money where our mouth is. So the general overview is, everyone puts in 12,500 frequent flyer miles into the pool, and we all have from April 1 until October 1 to get to our target goals. Winner (he/she who gets closest to their target goal or surpasses it) gets the 50k frequent flyer miles on American Airlines (we just tend to fly them more, they aren’t involved in this wager at all).

So my starting weight on April 1, 2013 was 168lbs, my BMI is somewhere around 15-16%. My target weight for October 1, 2013 is going to be 155lbs and hopefully in the 10-12% BMI range.

So what am I going to do to achieve this goal and how can you join me in this quest?

I’ll be adopting a strict hybrid Slow-Carb diet/Paleo/”Clean” eating schedule. So I’m reducing my cheat days to just half a cheat day on saturdays. So no breads/pastas/rice/simple-carbs most days.

From an exercise standpoint I’ll be continuing cross-training at EliteU fitness (3x-4x a week 1hr), but targeting a slightly modified regimen of lifting and high intensity interval training. In addition to that I’m going to start running regularly again (10-12 miles per week max, probably 400 miles by year end), adding in some more regular biking (15-25miles per week max, likely 1x saturdays), and weekly swim (25x50meter 1-2x a week).  So the goal of this regimen is also not to wear down too much, but to effectively hit the “minimum effective dose” of each exercise type.

I’ll do my best to post updates on or near the first of each month.

All of this is part of my plan to run another marathon in 2014, and beat my last time by at least 30 minutes.

So I am curious. What can I do to make 2013 better for you?

Add your response in the comments section. If the answer is reasonable (I determine this), I will do my best to make it happen.

Over the years I’ve noticed my priorities shift, and I can only assume they will continue to shift as I get older and eventually have a family. At the same time I see friends and acquaintances whose priorities haven’t changed much over the years. This is undoubtedly a common story, repeating itself all over on a day to day basis. I also find myself at the same time filling my “free time” with work because my priority is my company; despite knowing what my priority is, I’ve been complaining of being burnt out for months. The reason I bring it up is because I’m fascinated with motivation and balance.

Why we do what we do, and how we go about getting things done varies immensely from person to person. I see many of my friends who are intensely driven and focused seemingly working themselves to the bone. I often ask myself, is that sustainable, dont they need balance? Many of these people I don’t think they can slow down, but that’s when I realize that balance is different for everyone. I might not be able to be productive 40 hours a week, but maybe my 25 hrs a week of work is more productive than someone else’s 60? Maybe those 15extra hours I am expected to work on a normal schedule make my first 25 less effective and thus reducing my overall productivity?

So how am I going to figure out this balance? I’m going to measure and track everything and run experiments. My first experiment is going to be not working Fridays starting January 1. By compressing my “work” to 9-5 Monday-Thursday maybe the procrastinator in me will be driven to produce more high quality work (excluding emergencies I’ll prevent myself from working outside this window). What am I going to do with my extra day? Menial stuff that otherwise would have distracted me during the week or interfered with my workflow. Come the end of January ill let you know if my 4 day week was worth it.

How do you find balance? Perhaps work-life harmony is a better description?

High school, at Coral Gables Senior High, was probably when I really became an entrepreneur. Thing is, I never consciously set out to be an entrepreneur, it just came naturally.

In the beginning of 9th grade I’d been playing around with developing websites for myself, nothing exciting, simple stuff, hosting it on tripod or geocities or angelfire. I got a few friends together and we decided to make websites for other people, we called ourselves Internet Page Makers, or IPM for short, our website was pagemakers.net. We ended up building 1 or 2 websites before the team got bored and disbanded. That’s when I started Infinimedia, inc (the same company I’m running today, just different biz model).

I kept building sites here and there, and was into Apple computers around this time. This was when it was decidedly uncool to be into Macs. Apple was in a state of turmoil, I think there were Apple clones out, Steve Jobs wasn’t back at Apple yet. I found myself reading a handful of Apple news sites, and thought it would be fun to run my own (I wasn’t solving any problem, or really reacting to any clear market indicators, 100% because I felt like it. I was only 14 though.). So I built and launched Mac Mania (mac-mania.com – still have the domain). Mac Mania was one of the earlier mac sites, I ran news articles on it that I initially wrote myself, most of which were re-written press releases or sourced from other mac sites. We also reviewed products which companies sent me (I kept most of them, had no idea journalists weren’t supposed to do this). To make money off of it, we sold ads to various Mac oriented e-commerce stores. I eventually hired a group of writers, mostly teenagers, and paid them a few hundred bucks a month to write my articles. We had a network of sites (MacGamez.com, iMacOnline, iBookOnline, etc)

For the first two years of Mac Mania, it was very much a figure it all out as I go enterprise. I knew nothing about the online ad market, but most of the other people at the time didn’t know much either. At its peak we were doing 15,000 pageviews a day in 1999 on Mac-Mania.

Eventually I partnered with other sites and started selling ads for them on their sites, effectively creating a mac oriented ad network. I’m pretty sure this was ahead of its time too. At its peak in 1999 I was pulling in around 40k/year in revenue, paying out around 20k. So our margins were close to 50%, not shabby for a 17 year old’s business I was building in 10 hours a week after school and soccer practice.

After a few years, and the implosion of the dot com market, we folded up Mac Mania, which had rebranded to macinstart.com (bad move, lost lots of traffic).

So what did I learn during the lifespan of Infinimedia v1? I learned about building a product around something you were passionate about. I learned that if someone threatens to sue you, chances are you’re doing something right, and are at the very least getting lots of attention. I also learned that if you are forced to build the tools you need yourself to solve your own problems, chances are others have the same problem (we were very early in the display ad network business, but didn’t realize we were building tools we could resell).

So I’ve been roped into the super-hipstery fundraiser Movember this year. The general premise is that I will grow a mustache this month (November), and you will donate money to support the cause. Prostate and other men’s health issues don’t get as much attention as they should in this country, so I figure this small effort is the least I can do to help. So please contribute any amount you feel comfortable with and I’ll be posting pictures of my mustache (which is a beard right now) along the way.

So click here to give to my Movember campaign.

For 2012 I’ve decided to change the goal for my annual Charity Water campaign. This year I want to remove the barriers to your donations. As I’ve done in the past, I’m trying to raise a multiple of my age for charity. Over the past 4 years you all have helped raise $3,686 for clean water projects across the globe, those $3,686 mean 180+ people will now have clean water for the next 20 years.

So this year we’re trying something different. Instead of me asking you to donate $30, I want you to donate $3. I still want to raise $3000 this year, just get 1000 of your involved. $3000 will help 150+ people get clean water for decades.

I firmly believe that infrastructure is a key component in advancement, and by providing the poor and less fortunate of our planet with access to even basic amenities, they will be able to provide for themselves and pull themselves out of poverty faster. So please help those less fortunate than you this year and donate $3. That’s less than a frappuccino at starbucks.

Learn more about my 30th birthday campaign here.

Last July I started with the slow carb diet as described in the 4 Hour Body book by Tim Ferriss. You may recall I blogged about it at the beginning, then forgot to update you all periodically on my progress. This was part of a bigger plan to become a physically fit 20-something year old. Now with my thirtieth birthday approaching I figured I should give you guys and update on what I’ve been able to accomplish.

Where I started. In July 2011 I was weighing in at an unhealthy 191 lbs, had high cholesterol, extremely high triglyceride levels, and was nowhere near as healthy as I THOUGHT I was. As Tim suggests, it is important to do blood tests along the way and track things to make sure you’re making progress even when not visibly apparent. So my metrics are a combination of actual doctor assisted measurements, combined with superficial things (such as clothes I wore, etc).

Comparison points:
July 2011 July 2012
Weight 191lbs -162lbs (15% weight loss)
Triglyceride level 488 - 105
Cholesterol (overall) 260 - 225
Waist size (pants) 33 - 30
Neck size 17.5” - 15.75”
Biceps size 13” – 14”
Waist at belly 36” – 32.5”
Chest 42” – 40”
Forearms 11” – 11.5”

Performance changes
July 2011 July 2012
1 Mile Run 9:30 - 8:05
5k Run 32:20  - 28:30
10k Run 1:10:30  - 1:01:30
Deadlift 250lbs – 335lbs
20 Tire Flips (300lb tire) 2:40 – 1:15

I haven’t been 100% strict on the diet as laid out in the book. I took plenty of cheat days, weeks even sprinkled throughout the year. I consumed dairy in moderate amounts, and peanut butter, things not recommended on the diet. I also exercised more than the book recommends by going 4x a week to cross train at EliteU and running. Had I exercised less, say 15-20min a day tops, I probably would have hit the 150s already.

So in the last year I’ve run my first half marathon, and first FULL marathon (26.2 grueling miles), which would mean my quest to become an endurance athlete hit a pretty significant new level.

If you want to see what I looked like before and after. Here is a before pic in May 2011, and then in May 2012