A Day In The Life

On today’s show we are answering a question that I receive frequently. The question is how I spend my time. What is an average day?

So today I’m going to do a deep dive on what I did yesterday.

My day started at 6:15. First thing, my wife and I spend about 20 minutes together. We have a meditation practice that we do. We have a couple of different ones that we use. We sometimes use an app called Calm. Today we used another App called Oak. It’s a very simple app to use and the guided meditation is very simple and easy to connect with. We start our day with the meditation practice lying in bed and holding hands.

We both had a quick shower and got dressed for work. In our family we made the decision this year to go from two cars in our family down to one. Some days my wife takes the car to the office and other days I will drive her. In fact many days she will walk because the office is walking distance from our home. But today she had a little too much to carry for that distance. It gave us a few extra minutes together during the drive. On the way to her office we stopped at the fresh vegetable market to buy something for her lunch.

I was back home in time to start organizing my day. I usually reserve my morning with a minimum of meetings. That is when I get my focus work done.

On Monday morning I have two short meetings. At 9:30 I have a call with my partner John in Dallas for a quick update on status. Then at 10 I have a quick daily call with Patrick in my team where we reviewed the negotiations on a project. From there I started drafting the podcast for the next day. Some episodes are recorded well in advance and others are only one or two days ahead.

Every Monday morning at 11:00 I have a brief phone call with a lender to update the status on one of our projects.

My son reported that he had tooth pain and might have cracked a tooth. He would need to get to the dentist and find out what was going on.

Recording the next podcast episode completed my morning. My afternoon was focused on another condo development project in my local market. We had a meeting scheduled at the law offices of the land owner to review a number of details on the file including a number of complex structural problems with the investment. On the drive to the meeting I made a quick stop to grab a salad from the salad bar at the local market. I made good use of the drive time to have a call with an investor.

The owners of the property are a lovely family who are very close knit. We spent nearly two hours at the lawyer’s office discussing various aspects of the project, solutions to the existing problems and estimating the costs associated with the next phase of the project.

After that our team found a Starbucks and we strategized how we would structure the deal. By this time it was deep into rush hour and it was going to take me an hour to get back to the west end of the city.

During the drive, I figured out how to register as a delegate for an upcoming city council committee meeting. I also called a friend who had been struggling in the past year to see how they were doing.

I arrived at my wife’s office just in time to pick her up.

We only had about 20 minutes to have dinner, so we grabbed a sandwich on the go and went together to a community meeting organized by our local city council representative to discuss the proposed development of a golf course that is not far from our home. Several other developers were in attendance and the Mayor came to speak as well at the meeting. There were about 500 people in attendance and the meeting ran late into the evening.

I finally wrapped up my day by reading part of a sailing magazine that I had picked up about 3 weeks ago and had yet to crack the cover open.