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I got yelled at during my CrossFit class today.
We were resting between sets two and three of our hang power cleans, when I asked the guy next to me what he did for a living. Specifically, I asked him what he did for a living that allowed him to be sweating next to me at 10:24am on a Monday. Like me, he was an entrepreneur, and we immediately lost track of time as we compared notes, until the class instructor came over and suggested more lifting, less yapping.
See, here’s the thing. There were nine people in the class this morning. When I take the 5pm, there are 22, a full class. But 10am? 9 people. Personalized attention from the instructor! (Probably not a good thing, but still…)
That’s one example of many I could give you on any day. There’s rarely traffic at 2pm. The 24-hour Whole Foods is usually empty at 1am, and what normally takes two hours on Sunday takes 15 minutes.
Plus, you meet the coolest people in the “off hours,” as well as save yourself some money! Did you know that CrossFit costs less between 10am and 4pm than it does outside those times? Why? Because they’re off-peak! They’re not the most packed times!
So… I know I’ve asked you this already, but if you’re not organizing your life in such a way so that you can live “off-peak,” why not?
I know not everyone works for themselves. I get that. But… What if your boss let you take a 2pm workout because she trusted that you’d still get your work done? Or what if you were able to come in later and leave later, or come in earlier and leave earlier?
The rules continue to change, my friends. Technology, social, heck, the simple act of a more trust-based economy, has changed the very fabric that our parents grew up on, and passed down to us. The 9-5 is 95% dead. And in the 5% of cases where it’s still alive, it can be varied. Can you vary it? Can you make yourself more productive by doing something different, simply because it works better for you, as opposed to doing something that doesn’t work because “that’s the way we’ve always done it?” If you can’t, ask yourself why not. As a skydiving friend of mine loves to say, “if you can’t change the people around you, change the people around you.” (Tweet that!)
The time to change is now. And who knows – A 10am workout might even get you a PR on a hang power clean.