03. CEO Days & A Realistic Morning Routine
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I hope you’re enjoying this podcast so far! We’re officially in week two and this has just been really fun and interesting. After having a podcast with someone else, it’s been really weird having to have a whole conversation with myself. Also, if you hear my dog snoring in the background, I’m really sorry! I don’t want to wake her up but I am going to try to move her so that she isn’t in the position she’s currently in. Waking a sleeping pet is the worst thing you can possibly do and Mia is so cute when she sleeps so I kind of just want to smother her at that point and she can’t stand me.
Anyways, this week we are talking about CEO days. Something I’ve noticed lately is this TikTok productive morning routine trend where a person wakes up, makes their bed, does a whole skincare routine, does a workout, has a healthy breakfast, and all this is happening before 8 o’clock in the morning.
How Social Media Impacts Morning Routines
For the longest time, I thought these people were literally living my dream life but when I stopped to think about it more, I was like “okay, what is it about those mornings that are so enticing?” besides the aesthetic of the whole video, the ambient music playing, and traditionally attractive people.
Yes, having a routine is enticing but when I start to think about it, it’s not the routine that’s the appealing part of the video. It’s the idea of creating something that other people want. I feel like it’s human nature to want other people to want what we have. It’s this reverse Keeping Up with the Jones’ thing where you want what other people have but you also want to be the person that has what other people want, if that makes sense.
I can say just from experience that I have absolutely done things for no other reason than wanting to make people go “oooooh I want that” or “oooooh that’s nice,” I’m super guilty of that but I think that so much about TikTok revolves around that feeling so it’s been interesting to watch that trend unfold.
With that being said, I’m going to walk you through a realistic morning routine, and then we’ll talk about CEO days, which is basically a fancy name for admin days that I learned from my friend Ellen.
A Realistic Look at My Mornings
It’s 7 AM, my first and only alarm goes off and I turn it off right away. I don’t click snooze, I just turn it off. I live in San Francisco now, which I’ve mentioned a couple of times and eventually, I’ll shut up about that but I don’t really have any reason to wake up any earlier than that right now, or even at 7 AM. I’m not super busy with shoots right now, I’m not having early morning shoots, so there’s no reason for me to get up at 7. Usually, around this time I go back to sleep or play Wordle, or scroll on TikTok for an hour. It really depends on the morning; sometimes it’s a combination of all three.
By 8 o’clock, my husband’s alarm has probably gone off and he’s probably turned it off as well. He used to wake up between 5:30 and 6 every day to go to the gym but the gyms out here are brutally expensive so we have not really worked that into our budget yet, or figured out what we want to do about fitness and how we want to approach that. For now, we are sleeping in, and usually by 8 o’clock I’m wide awake and I’ll lay in bed until Anthony physically gets out of bed. At that point, I’m like okay I have to get up and take the dog for a walk. Most days I brush my teeth before taking Mia to the park but some days I literally wait until I get back (or until after I eat breakfast). I’m typically a brush teeth before breakfast type of person but it just depends on the day.
I do not have a super glam morning at all. Like, at all.
I set this alarm every day and every day I tell myself I’m going to wake up and do something productive, take the dog out, blah blah blah, but I feel like I can physically not get myself out of bed until Anthony gets out of bed. At this point, the warm is out of the bed so I’m like, okay time to get up.
I take Mia out, we wander around the park for a bit, we get home and I feed her. After this, I do any skincare, brush my teeth, and do any self-care getting-ready tasks. In a perfect world, I’d just eat pastries and muffins for breakfast every day, I’m a big sweets-in-the-morning type of person but it makes me feel so bad. Not guilty bad but physically ill so I’ve finally stopped doing that so much and have been making homemade granola, which sounds super Pinterest but it’s very easy and really good and we’ve been eating that with greek yogurt, and fruit. Sometimes I get so sick of eating the same thing every day that I’ll skip breakfast entirely or just have a piece of toast, some fruit, or whatever.
On the weekends, we’ll get brunch sometimes and there’s a really good breakfast restaurant just a few blocks from our apartment. We get that a lot and that’s usually when I ball out on the sweets for breakfast! I’ll get French toast or pancakes with Nutella, or something like that. During the week, breakfast is basically just fridge-picking.
After breakfast, I usually check my email and have a few things to do in my inbox and once that’s done, I usually just bumble around a little bit. I’ll start stressing about one thing or another and by the time that’s done, it’s lunchtime.
That’s my entire morning. So many times I’ll eat breakfast at the table in my little window corner and so many times, that’ll turn into me staring at the wall for several minutes to half an hour. I just get decision paralysis and think about all the things I have to get done and deciding what to get done. Then the morning is over.
It’s really not a glamorous morning at all; there are some mornings though when I’ll have a TikTok-worthy morning. On the mornings that I have my shit together, I’ll get a workout in and make a really organized to-do list, or crank out a bunch of work. But sometimes it’s this feeling of existential dread and just trying to focus hard enough on one task all the way through. Finishing a task seems like the hardest thing I have to do in a day sometimes and I think it’s a little bit of ADD and figuring out what the priority is. Sometimes, making a list and prioritizing tasks isn’t enough for me to actually get them done. It’s definitely a challenge but both versions of me, the ADD can’t finish a task one and the really productive TikTok creator me, are both great.
Morning Routines & Habits
Having a morning routine does not make you a more worthy human and it’s not fair to compare ourselves to a 30-second clip that someone filmed and edited super intentionally. You know that person woke up and did every single one of those tasks solely for TikTok. Maybe they do those tasks every day, but I bet a million dollars that they probably don’t.
I will say though that habits are a really great way to give our brain a break and that sounds counterintuitive, but once you really solidify a habit, your brain basically goes on autopilot. Think about the way you brush your teeth every morning. It’s such a robotic thing because you’ve been doing it your entire life. We can literally make anything that robotic with enough repetition and when your brain is on autopilot, it uses a lot less energy so you can save more for decision-making later.
If we are constantly deciding on what to do every second of the day, we don’t have a lot of brain capacity left for high-pressure tasks or creative things, or anything else we have to get done. The true decision-making that happens in a day given circumstances.
Habits I’d like to Implement
Here are a few things I’d really like to turn into habits.
Working Out a Few Times a Week
This has come and gone in my life for what feels like forever and it’s definitely in a go phase now. I’ve done a few workouts since I got to San Francisco and have been way more active just walking places so I’m sort of easing my way back into that.
Drinking Enough Water Every Day
This one is really hard for me when I’m home. When I used to work in an office, my day was so structured that at this certain time every day, I would get up and go to lunch whenever everyone else did. I would refill my water bottle then, I would finish another one by the time it was time to leave work. It was really easy to know how to pace myself with drinking water. When I’m home, I lose track of what time it is and I eat lunch at different times, so managing my water intake has been a challenge the more that I’m home.
Prioritizing Journaling
This is something I’ve done on and off my entire life. I actually recently burned a large pile of several journals and notes and stuff from high school, thank god. And thank you to my parents for not reading those. I assume they didn’t read them at least, let’s hope. Those burned in a grill in my parent's backyard last year. I like journaling for no other reason than it’s nice to look back and see how much you’ve grown. I recently read back in a journal that I had from 2019 and was experiencing a lot of anxiety. Just reading that felt like I was reading about someone else’s life. I’ve come so far from that point, it’s really interesting and gives you a minute to just stop and be proud of yourself for how far you’ve come.
I don’t really have a preference on when I do this, morning or evening, it doesn’t really matter. I think it would be really nice to do both if I have time but that’s definitely something I’d like to make a habit.
Reading Every Day
I’ve been on a big reading kick since Christmas and since then, I’ve read about 10 books which is very unlike me. I’ve been enjoying it and reading feels more stimulating than watching TV/movies or scrolling on TikTok. It gives you a chance to expand your vocabulary and works your brain because you’re reading for comprehension.
There are plenty of things that I can incorporate into a day to make the day feel a little bit better, give myself some mental clarity, and just have a healthier lifestyle overall so that’s what’s on my radar for this year.
Let’s Talk CEO Days
This is the mother of all habits. When I started really booking out with branding and lifestyle photography, I was working a lot and that often bled into the weekends or odd hours of the night. For example, I had a lot of weeks I was shooting seven days a week and really let admin stuff fall off my radar. I have since hired a virtual assistant but honestly, she’s more like a marketing manager. Shout out to Rachel of Studio 37.
Before I did that, I pretty much ignored admin stuff. I was really bad about my inbox, I wasn’t great about social media, and I had no real strategy for anything I was doing. Truthfully, I’m still working on this part with the help of Rachel. Because I was shooting so much I didn’t have the ability to get into any kind of flow because my day was constantly being broken up by having to leave to go to shoots. That’s where CEO days come in and help me get it together.
My CEO days before I moved out to San Francisco were on Mondays. In Atlanta, when I was booking out a bunch way in advance, I kept Mondays totally free. The intent here was to give myself a day each week in the office to catch up on editing, content creation, and everything else I wasn’t able to do the week prior.
Here’s a sample of how you can run your CEO day for your small business —
9 AM: Start Your Day with a Fresh To-Do List
I like to use Asana for task management, I find it satisfying to check something off and watch it disappear. It also has bigger project templates so you can have subtasks within projects, and you can assign them to a person/date to help manage tasks amongst larger projects.
9:15 - 10 AM: Tackle Your Inbox
Once your to-do list is done for the day, it’s time to tackle your inbox. I recently read somewhere (I forget where) that the idea for the day is to create one to-do list and have it be your master list. Your inbox should not be another to-do list. Take any tasks you find in your inbox should be added to your master to-do list.
10 AM: Block One
12 PM: Break for lunch
1-3 PM: Block Two
3 - 3:30 PM: Quick break
3:30-5 PM: Block Three
By breaking up your day like this, you’re able to block off a longer period of time for longer tasks. You can make this up however you want! Each block should give you the opportunity to batch your work.
For example, block one can be used to plan social media for the week and you can pull all of the images, write the captions, and pull hashtags to use in the post. From there, you can schedule it in your social media planner (I use Planoly and love it!). Block two could be for blogging and block three can be used for Pinterest. Whatever you do with your blocks is totally up to you, but dedicating tasks and batching content in these blocks will help you be more productive instead of moving from task to task.
The Benefits of CEO Days
If you need more time for a task, you can make it! The beauty of CEO days is using your time however you want while taking a break from client work so you can strategically grow your business.
Whenever possible, I do not edit on CEO days because that is working on client work and unless the editing is for blogs or portfolios, it is not immediately helping to grow my business. This is typically priority one but separating client work from business work is so important.
The other thing about CEO days is that it’s not the end of the world if you fall off the rails a little bit. I have not really dedicated a specific day to CEO days in a while with the move and how my business has changed in California but that’s okay because it’s just an adjustment period. This is also something I talk about in therapy a lot because it’s so easy to be super mean to yourself when you don’t follow a plan the way you want to. I said this already here, but I’m trying to work on being nicer to myself and giving myself a break when I need it but also accepting the fact that I am human and I am way harder on myself than I am on other people in my life. I should be treating myself the same way I treat the people I love.
How My CEO Days Have Changed
I’ll get into batch work and habits in another episode later but in the meantime, there is so much good information and podcasts about habits and I feel like I am one hundred million percent not the person to talk about this right now because I am not an expert and I can honestly say I am not the best with habits right now. I do think that moving did help me sort of get a clean slate.
When I was living in Atlanta, my days bled into each other and I was very much doing the same thing over and over again even though I knew that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing. When I moved out here, I moved into a brand new apartment and life is different. My day-to-day is very different so it has been a good opportunity to be like “this time is a good time to do this.” I’ve been working on it! I have a lot of travel coming up soon and travel makes morning habits especially hard but we’re just going to see how it goes.
Follow me on Instagram at @hannahlozanophoto where you can find everything about me, get to know my photography, ask questions, and send in ideas for episodes. If there’s anyone you’d like to hear on the podcast, let me know, I am all ears!
