How I Undid My Covid Bad Habits

It’s been almost 3 years since the world locked down in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. For those of us privileged to be in careers where work-from-home was a possibility, the shift was equal parts easy and overwhelming. And despite all of the talk of a “new normal,” many people (myself included) struggled to undue some of the bad habits that Covid-19 brought.

Like many people I know, my response to the pandemic was rooted in a simple thought: “if I’m stuck at home, I might as well be productive.” After only a few weeks, my day-to-day schedule was dominated by work. I would wake up at 5:30am and work. Have breakfast with the family, then work. After dinner and bedtime routines, I went back into my home office and worked even more — often well past midnight.

Of course, those long hours weren’t all equally productive. I was easily distracted and, like everyone else, spent too many hours doom scrolling. I found myself exercising less, drinking more and generally struggling to separate work and life. It’s taken me almost a year after things “opened up” to undo a lot of those bad habits.

Here are 5 ways I undid my Covid bad habits:

1. Exercise When Your Kids Exercise

If you’re a parent, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “sleep when your kids sleep.” The same concept works for exercise.

For example, it’s my responsibility to drive our kids to Saturday morning swim lessons. Every week for the first year after things opened up, I would drive to the pool, drop them off and then sit on the bleachers with the rest of the parents sucking down coffee and wasting time on my phone checking email.

Then one day it dawned on me: there are perfectly good swim lanes next to where the lessons take place. 🤯

Now, every Saturday morning I drop the kids off for their lessons and walk across the pool to swim for an hour. After that, we all sit in the hot tub for a few minutes before heading home for breakfast.

2. Exercise Before Your Kids Exercise

With gyms closed during the pandemic, I tried my best to work out at home, but could never get into a steady rhythm. Some days I would work out in the morning. Other days around noon. Most days I just didn’t.

Eventually, I realized that the only way I could get in a consistent workout was to do it before my kids woke up. It’s not a huge workout - 30 minutes each morning - and waking up that early suuuuuuuuucks, but now that I’m in the habit of it, there’s no going back.

3. Stop Doom Scrolling

We all do it. Even if we say we don’t. And we all did it a lot during the pandemic.

Even after things opened back up, I found myself staying up way too late surfing the internet when I could have been getting a good night’s sleep.

My solution? Apple Screen Time.

If you have an iPhone, then you’ve undoubtedly clicked away a weekly popup that tells you how many hours you spent on your phone (and if you’re like me, you long ago stopped looking at the numbers). But did you know that it can place limits on when you use apps?

The feature is called Downtime and it’s a game changer. Downtime lets you set a time window when you can’t access any app other than those you specify as “Always Allowed”:

My phone is now setup so that virtually no apps are available between 9pm and 5:30am. If you try to access a restricted app, you get a popup that looks like this:

You can override your self-imposed limits with the click of a button, but I’ve found that 9/10 times, I click okay and go do something else.

This simple trick has helped me dramatically cut down the amount of time I spend on my phone, particularly on low-value activities. Since activating Downtime, I’m reading more, going to bed earlier and have way more energy each day.

4. Separate Work and Life

For many of us, the pandemic replaced a lengthy commute to and from work with a 10 second walk up a flight of stairs. While this was an amazing development in terms of giving us extra time in our days, the lack of a mental (and physical) separation between work and life has its own challenges.

I found that it was particularly hard for me to “context switch” from my work brain to my home brain. If I was preoccupied or stressed about something at work, that often carried into the first 30 minutes or more of time with my family.

My solution? Go for a walk.

It doesn’t even have to be a long one. For me, the simple act of walking out the back door (where my office is), around the block and coming in the front door to my house has had an incredible impact. As performative as it sounds, I now have a clear separation between my work and home life. On days where I find myself preoccupied with something from work, I walk an extra block or two.

Talk about a great commute!

5. Cut Down on Drinking

I’m not going to dive into the debate of whether or not you should drink alcohol. It’s a personal choice and there’s way too much virtue signalling going on right now (particularly in tech circles).

Personally, I enjoy good wine and an occasional cocktail. I’ll also be the first to admit that I consumed more alcohol on a weekly basis during and shortly after the pandemic than I did before. Often without a particular reason to.

So like many people, I wanted to dial it back.

How did I do it? Simple: no wine or beer in the house.

If we’re hosting people or want to have a bottle of wine with dinner, we’ll buy what we need for that day. Otherwise, it’s only non-alcoholic beverages in the house (other than the liquor cabinet, which we rarely touch).

Do I still have wine or a cocktail when I’m out for dinner? Absolutely. But at home, it’s virtually zero.