Our first question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks, should I exercise before or after deep work? He elaborates, I am a new father and an assistant professor. My deep work entails research and writing, which I almost always conduct from my home office. I am also highly committed to physical health and lift weights in my home gym, which happens to be in the same space as my office in the basement.

My most productive work hours are in the morning, but morning is also the best time to exercise from a behavioral perspective. How should I structure these two crucial activities? Well, it's not like there's a one right answer, Aaron. In general, I do like when possible to get concentrated exercise done during the day.

I think it breaks things up nicely. It helps you avoid falling into this highly unnatural state, which is quite common in knowledge work of just sitting and looking at screens all day. I let it float. It really is part of my planning. I actually do this typically at the weekly scale, not the daily scale.

When I look at my week, I want to get in there and figure out when I want to do daytime exercise. And now I can't always do it. Some days I'm on campus all day, it's just not going to happen. But I want to know where it is. I do not want the decision of when do I exercise to be the last thing I figure out that day.

Because then it's just all going to get pushed into the evening. But that's hard, especially when you have kids and other things are going on. So I like exercise being done in the day. I like planning this ahead of time. You can let it move. For your particular situation, though, I'm going to get more specific.

I'm going to say work a little bit, a real session, exercise, back to work. You have a six-month-old son. So I assume you're not sleeping in till 9 AM and finally rolling into your work at 10 AM. You're probably up. You're probably up. If you're doing the handoff right with a child care, and I'm sure you have that figured out.

I have a session, you have a session before whatever happens with daycare or preschool or whatever, nannies or whatever. I'm sure you have the morning figured out, some sort of back and forth. Get a deep work session in, exercise session, then back to deep work. OK, that's what I would say for you.

The other thing I would suggest is maybe interleave more activity throughout your work hours. Not, OK, I'm going to disappear for 45 minutes again. But every 50 minutes, I am going to do 15 pull-ups. Or I'm going to do whatever, jump on the erg for five minutes. Someone who does this well is my friend Brian Johnson from Optimize.

You've heard Optimize be discussed on the show because they're a longtime sponsor of the show. But Brian does this pretty well. He does not like to sit for more than-- I don't know the exact amount of time, but it's a little less than an hour. So he works exercises like five minutes, intense, works five minutes, intense.

He does this all day. He swears that it really helps sharpen his focus. So Aaron, I'm going to suggest that too. All right, so I'll just put these two things together. If you're working from home anyways a lot of days, put your exercise during the day. Plan it out and protect it in advance like you would other things.

And then my specific advice for Aaron is take little intense activity breaks throughout the day. The weights are right there next to you anyways. You're working in a gym. So you might as well take advantage of that. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)