Captain's Log, Star Date, 2024.
We're floating somewhere in the cosmos, but we've lost our map.
Yeah, because you refused to ask for directions.
It's Space Gem, there are no roads.
Good point. So where are we headed?
Into the unknown, of course.
Join us on In Our Own World as we uncover hidden truths, navigate the depths of culture, identity, and the human spirit.
With a hint of mischief, one episode at a time.
Buckle up and listen to In Our Own World on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Trust us, it's out of this world.
Bill Farrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just listen, okay? Or Lacey, get to do it.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeart Radio.
Good morning. This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.
You may notice that something is a little bit different about today's episode.
For starters, it's gonna be longer.
And second, it won't just be me talking.
I have decided to switch things up a little, and about once a week, I will be doing a longer episode of Before Breakfast, often featuring a guest.
We'll talk about how lots of different people make the most of their time.
Sharing tips that can hopefully help all of us take our days from great to awesome.
So today I am delighted to welcome a very special first guest, Sarah Hart Unger.
Lots of you may know her as the cohost of my other podcast, Best of Both Worlds, where we've been talking to each other every week for seven years now.
So I figured she might go easy on me with my first foray into hosting guest episodes with Before Breakfast.
And I wanted to launch this new series, getting some tips from her, because as you're going to hear, she has a lot going on and handles her schedule very well.
So we're gonna talk planning and mornings and more.
So Sarah, welcome to Before Breakfast.
Thank you so much for having me.
I did not realize that I was the first guest of this series, so I'm super honored.
And for those of you who also listen to Best of Both Worlds, don't worry, you're not like on the wrong podcast, but super excited to be here.
For those who don't know me, I am a physician.
I'm a pediatric endocrinologist.
I work part time seeing patients three times a week.
And on my off days, I am a podcaster and writer.
I've been blogging at the same kind of 2005 era website for 20 years now.
And I also cohost Best of Both Worlds with Laura and have my own podcast project called Best Laid Plans, which started in 2020, all about things related to planning.
And I have a lot of fun there.
And yeah, lots of stuff going on.
I also have three kids, ages six, 10, and 12.
I am married to another physician, a vascular surgeon named Josh, and we live in South Florida.
That's good. Yeah, a lot of stuff going on.
And she has systems for managing all of it, which we're gonna hear a little bit about.
But since this is called Before Breakfast, I wanted you to start with your morning routine because Sarah is kind of the queen of morning routines.
She has a morning routine that starts early and features a lot of great stuff.
So Sarah, can you tell us about what tends to happen on weekday mornings?
Yeah, well, first of all, I'll just note that my morning routine has shifted a lot in different phases of my life.
And I think this is a common theme about how I like to live and do my planning, which is that things are going to be iterative and not necessarily kind of set it and forget it.
So right now my kids are a little bit older, which opens up some time, given that I'm certainly not up overnight.
And I am training for a marathon, which will be my sixth marathon this December.
So I do get up pretty early.
So most of my clinical days, I get up somewhere in the fours, usually around 4 .15 or 4 .30.
I tend to do some reading during that time briefly, maybe 10 pages of a nonfiction book that I'm working on.
I will do my planning for the day.
So this is when I look at my planner, see what I have going on in terms of what is scheduled.
And I identify what I want to get accomplished in terms of my to -do list.
And then I usually try to squeeze in a 10 minute headspace meditation before I head out running.
I run either by myself or with a group.
I often meet friends a couple of days a week.
So that kind of adds a little bit of fun to that extremely early hour of running.
It makes me feel a little bit less crazy because if I'm meeting other people, then I mean, I'm not the only one out there.
And then I run from around, let's say 5 .30 ish to 6 .45.
Get home. My husband usually at that point is starting to get the kids up and I will do a little bit of contribution to that, but he's taken over a lot of that piece because at around 7 .25, I leave to drive my kids to school.
We have different plans for different days.
So sometimes I drive all of my kids, sometimes I drive just one and sometimes my husband drives.
And all of that is set before the week begins.
So we kind of know what we are up to and what we have on our plates for the morning.
So yeah, it is a lot.
It's pretty quick. I don't really linger in any one task.
I have a very brief getting ready routine on my clinical days.
I almost always wear scrubs because I find it looks reasonably professional and I absolutely don't have to think about my outfit at all.
And I even would go so far as to say like, my hair is very intentional to support my quick routines in that I get it straightened permanently so that I basically don't have to do any hair readiness in the morning as well.
Yeah, so on your clinical days, when are you at your office and then seeing your first patients?
Yes, so the drive takes me from around 7 .30 ish until 8 .30 and then my first patient is usually in the room when I arrive at the office somewhere between 8 .30 and 8 .40.
So I'm just like off to the races.
Well, that is quite a long morning routine.
Why are you choosing to do this?
Well, I love running and that is kind of like the cornerstone of what has to everything else kind of like revolves around that because that's one thing I'm passionate about and I'm just not really willing to give it up despite having a lot of busyness in the rest of my life.
And I have found over the years that if I do not run and put myself first in the morning in that way, it is not going to happen.
No one's going to magically carve out an hour in the evening and say, hey, Sarah, we don't need you for anything at all.
Why don't you just go for a run?
And yet I know that if I'm doing that at 5 .30, everyone's asleep.
So I'm not really bothering anyone.
Although new development, my husband is starting to pivot towards morning.
So that's pretty awesome in that our kids are bigger now and we can both do a little neighborhood run at the same time sometimes.
So he's kind of figured out my secret that this is by far and away the most reliable time slot of the day.
Yeah, there are a lot fewer emergencies, either professionally or personally at 5 .30 AM versus say 5 .30 PM.
You can definitely have a lot of things go wrong that can derail a workout later in the day.
Do the same routine on weekends or is it a little bit different in the morning?
No, not at all. So I have different routines for different days, which is necessary because it's so early and I know I will exhaust myself if I do exactly that every day.
So I've built in like a later start on one of my nonclinical days on Thursdays.
Saturday, I do tend to start pretty early, not quite as early.
I usually get up at five to do my long run at six.
Remember that I do live in South Florida.
So running outside, you really cannot wait and just do that midday or you would be cooked by the sun.
So I'd get that done early, but then on Sunday I don't have any running and I tend to just wake up when the kids wake up.
Need one day to just relax and sleep in a bit.
Excellent. Well, we're gonna take a quick ad break and I will be back with more with Sarah Hart Unger.
How do you feel about biscuits?
Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the rebels into something everyone in the South loves, the biscuits.
I was a lady rebel.
Like what does that even mean?
The Boone County rebels will stay the Boone County rebels with the image.
It's right here in black and white and Prince, a lion.
An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch.
He's a leader. You choose hills that you want to die on.
Why would we want to be the losing team?
No, I just take all the other stuff out of it.
Segregation academies.
When civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from this.
Bigger than a flag or mascot.
You have to be ready for serious backlash.
Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.
Why does your memory drift so much?
Why is it so hard to keep a secret?
When should you not trust your intuition?
Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks and why do they love conspiracy theories?
I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.
Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, we are back. This is Before Breakfast and I am interviewing Sarah Hart Unger who is a physician, a mom of three, a marathon runner, and my co -host on the podcast Best of Both Worlds.
If you are just joining this podcast, wondering what is going on before breakfast is adding one longer episode each week where we interview someone awesome about how they take their days from great to awesome.
So Sarah has shared a lot about her morning routine and how she makes space for marathon training in the middle of her very, very busy life.
So Sarah, what would you say your biggest time management challenge is right now?
Yeah, that's easy. My kids are older now and because of that, they have started to get into some passions of their own that have hours that are more involved than what I was used to when they were smaller.
We have soccer and gymnastics that often end at like 8 .45 at night.
And you heard what time I get up.
So I was very much stressed about how we would make that work this year, but also allow for enough sleep because I need at least seven hours.
I know this number can vary from person to person and some people need more than that, but I tend to feel okay with seven, but I do not do well with significantly less than seven on any kind of a regular basis.
And I was having trouble kind of figuring out how the pieces were going to fit.
And we'll talk about kind of some of the things I did, but one of the saving things has been discovering carpools and figuring out how we can make some of these evenings not quite so late, even if a kid is arriving on the later side, that takes the heat off of me and I can be putting my younger kids
to bed who also can't really be staying up that late every single night and make sure that some nights include an earlier bedtime, even if my kids are out doing things close to nine o 'clock.
Yeah, well getting enough sleep is a challenge for many people.
And I remember that one of the ways you sort of organized your schedule to make this happen, you recently created a realistic ideal week template where Sarah printed up a sheet of paper that had all 168 hours of the week on it, I believe in 30 minute cells.
Was it 30 minute cells or was it 15 minutes cells?
30 minutes cells. The template is based on planners that I know and love.
I can talk about planners all day and I won't, but I have certain weekly layouts that seem to serve me really, really well.
And the concept of putting all the 168 hours on the week, I feel it comes from both your work and then also some from Michael Hyatt, who has this embedded in his own line of planners, the full focus planner.
I don't like his layout as much as mine, so I actually worked with a designer to create my own ideal week based on the planners that I love.
And it's a vertical weekly, so you can basically see all the hours laid out kind of like electronic calendars are as well from when I wake up to when I go to sleep.
And I absolutely needed to do that for this season.
I actually tell people to do that every single season.
I think it's very helpful, but this was like, I mean, I felt a dire need to put things on paper because my brain was just sort of circling and trying to figure out how to fit things and it just didn't seem to want to add up.
And it was not until I actually started writing things down and actually had my husband do the same exercise so we could kind of talk about how we could work together and share different responsibilities so that both of us could fit in the things that mattered.
I think doing it in this dual way this time around was even more helpful.
But yeah, I absolutely needed to do that.
Then I showed it to Laura because I am lucky enough to have her as my friend and she is very used to looking at people's 168 hours and she had a couple of tweaks such as maybe a more flexible working night on Thursday and just making sure that the carpool loads were shared in a way that made sense for everyone.
And you actually put in the times that you plan to sleep on this template, right?
So that you could make sure every single night was seven hours in your bed.
Yes, I think there's one night that might be slightly less than that but I wanted the average to be well over seven and I can't imagine not including sleep.
I mean, to be honest, that was what I was most anxious about because I know that I am not going to function well if I'm chronically sleep deprived, making everything else unpleasant and harder.
So it's like kind of one of those anchor things that you have to get right before you even move on to any of the details.
And so just to do the math for people, if you are waking up some morning at 4 .15, you probably need to be in bed by about 9 .15 the night before that's counting seven hours back from that.
So again, if we have a kids practice going till 8 .45, maybe that's a night that your husband or somebody else is bringing the kids home.
You put your little one to bed and then you can be drifting into bed at nine o 'clock or so and making sure that that's not in your purview for that particular evening.
Correct, and also working with the kids to kind of get that turnaround pretty quick from arriving home to getting ready for bed so that it doesn't need a lot of poking and prodding because honestly they need the sleep as well.
So yeah, combination of both of those things but making sure that I'm not involved in that late piece every single night and same with my husband.
Like if we each take some and then I have some later mornings then we can kind of make the puzzle pieces fit together without anyone getting too, too tired.
Because if you could drive a kid a little later if you weren't doing both drop -offs on one morning you could start the whole routine a little bit later as well, correct?
Correct, and then I have a day I'm not driving at all.
For example, that takes the heat off and that happens to be a day that I've decided to run a little bit later but then also work a little bit later in the night to make up for those hours lost.
So yeah, it's like a balancing act and I don't think I would have seen the pictures so clearly without actually putting it onto paper.
Electronically would have worked as well, by the way.
And I will say the one advantage to an electronic calendar like this is that I could have then made an edit without having to draw it all over again.
So that is another option that works really, really well.
And just one more thing about this ideal week.
You said we're gonna take one night to do something a little bit more, either work or something else you wanted to do.
Can you talk a little bit about how you arranged for that?
Yeah, I noticed that there was a night when there was a later pickup that we would probably be doing and also a drop -off but that's a long, long practice, like more than three hours.
And it's a day that often I wanted to have a later start and I just feel like often gets kind of derailed by kid related things in the late afternoon.
Like if there was an appointment for a kid, it needs to go there and I need time to work.
I'm working on multiple podcasts, various projects, et cetera.
And so I realized that I could take that slot and I could be useful.
I could do that late night pickup but in doing that, I could also get time to myself from around five o 'clock until 8 45, whether I wanted to attend a workout class, do some extra work.
I mean, in more than three hours, there's actually room for kind of a lot of stuff.
So I'm excited to see how those possibilities open up.
We do have a childcare provider.
So I don't even necessarily know that my husband can always kind of fill in the gaps through that whole period every Thursday.
So if he can't, she is like well aware that she's okay with staying late some of those days.
And we've opened those possibilities up because she doesn't come in early in the morning because we did the driving.
So see, it's all like the puzzle pieces have to fit.
The puzzle pieces have to fit the entire mosaic of the 168 hours in Sarah Hart Unger's life.
So I'm your planning friend.
So Sarah is an expert in planning.
She has another podcast called Best Laid Plans which you should totally go check out.
She teaches courses also called Best Laid Plans and various iterations of that that help people learn to plan their lives.
You mentioned that you do your daily planning in the morning, right?
And then that sort of four 15 or four 30 to five window before you leave to go for your run.
What does that tend to look like?
What are you actually doing for the day in that moment?
Yeah, I wish I had my planner next to me.
I would show it to you although I guess that's visual.
Well this is only audio.
So we're gonna have to describe it for our listeners.
So I take my actual calendar.
I look to see what I have scheduled and I also look at the list of tasks that I have for my week that we can talk about it but I put together a plan for my week in terms of my priorities and what I want to get done for that week and integrating those two things together along with kind of how I'm feeling
that day, I will make a choice as to what I decide to put on my to -do list.
Sometimes I will also kind of assign some of those jobs a specific time.
Other times I will just kind of assign them for the day and then let things carry me how they will.
I often have enough things scheduled that it's pretty clear what I need to get done within the cracks.
But I don't feel rested and like peaceful and even ready to run until I've kind of done that and I put it in writing on a physical piece of paper so that I can see it just so I kind of know what my plans are for the day.
I do want to mention that I do not always check off every item on my list.
Things are going to come up as much as I want to fight against living a reactive life.
Sometimes there are things that just require me to change my plans.
That said, I still think that making them is incredibly valuable.
I've said that like even if you get done 50 % or 60 % of the things on your list every single day, that is a lot of forward motion if you've selected those things you wanted to do well.
And so I'm not aiming for perfection in my execution but I still think the process is incredibly valuable.
Absolutely. Well, we're gonna take one more quick ad break and we'll be back to hear with more of what Sarah Hart Unger has to say about mornings planning and more.
How do you feel about this skits?
Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes and I'm so excited about my new podcast Rebel Spirit where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the rebels, into something everyone in the south loves, the biscuits.
I was a lady rebel.
Like what does that even mean?
The Boone County rebels will stay the Boone County rebels but the image of the biscuits.
It's right here in black and white in Prince, a lion.
An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch is a leader who choose hills that you want to die on.
Why would we want to be the losing team?
I just take all the other stuff out of home.
Segregation academies, when civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from it.
Bigger than a flag or mascot.
You have to be ready for serious backlash.
Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.
Why does your memory drift so much?
Why is it so hard to keep a secret?
When should you not trust your intuition?
Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks?
And why do they love conspiracy theories?
I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.
Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, we are back. This is Before Breakfast doing an interview with Sarah Hart Unger, people just joining us.
We are doing one longer Before Breakfast every week, starting this as a new series where I'll be talking with people about how they take their days from great to awesome and how they make the most of their time.
So Sarah has been sharing her various habits and routines with us.
So Sarah, maybe you can tell our listeners one thing that you did this week that helped take one of your days from great to awesome, a little treat in the life of Sarah Hart Unger.
Yeah, well, this is gonna be really highbrow.
But I think sometimes that we don't give ourselves enough credit for really appreciating some of these little things in life.
And I have to say when our family sat down altogether to watch the finale of the reboot of Dance Moms on Sunday night, it absolutely was an awesome, awesome end to the weekend.
And it actually ended up being one of our more seamless kind of Sunday nights that we've had in a while.
Cause the kids were all excited to watch it.
And we had set the expectation really significantly that right afterwards was going to be bedtime.
And it was just such a bright spot of fun.
So I don't know, just kind of like savoring and intentionally choosing our leisure activities is really, really big for me.
Even though, you know, just watching a TV show, you could certainly just zone out and like scroll your phone and watch what is served to you.
But if you're instead saying, Oh, I have an hour, like how can we make this into something that I will remember and get to think about and truly enjoy?
Then that can be enough.
You turn screen time into a party.
That sounds like a great way to end the weekend.
Well, I wonder if you have any kind of life hacks you can share with us.
I asked Sarah beforehand to think of a couple of little tips like this and strategies that she swears by.
So maybe you can share a few with us.
Yeah, I'm going to give you two.
I'm going to give you one that's like really specific and one that is more of a mindset.
So my specific one has to do with tracking your media consumption.
This is something I started to do at the beginning of this year.
And I feel like we just spent a lot of times with content being served at us and it can consume a great deal of our attention and our hours.
And yet there's sometimes just not a lot of thought into what we choose to do, whether we're even paying attention to the things we're looking at, et cetera.
So I have just started to jot down like the podcasts that I listened to, a TV show that I watch, anything that I intense and pages that I read, like anything that I intentionally sit down to consume.
And I have found it to be really, really eye -opening and tends to make me more aware of that time I'm spending as well.
So it doesn't just seem like extra time.
It's like actual time that I'm involved in like enjoying something.
So try it, you might not love it, but you might even think of it as a valuable exercise to do for a few days because it may be eye -opening.
So that's my more specific tip.
My more like, I don't know, abstract tip is just the idea of a spirit of iteration.
I think we're always looking for like the one perfect way and I'm gonna have my routine down and my planning systems set up and my career in this way or that and it's just gonna be perfect.
But the one thing that I have, guess I've learned in my 40 some years now is that things are going to always change and it's better to have a spirit of exploration and like what works for this season and what works for this season.
And even if we wanna celebrate that some routine was awesome, that doesn't mean that we don't wanna revisit it later on to see if it still makes sense to continue.
So just generally treating your life with a spirit of iteration and exploration rather than thinking you're gonna just end up setting your ways and continue it until the end of time.
That is so true. And I've written a lot about morning routines over the years and people share their morning routines with me and I always say this is a snapshot in time because something is going to change.
I mean the person is going to change jobs or move or their kids will get older and start a school at a different time or they don't have children, they're gonna have children and then their entire morning routine is going to change as a result of that or even if they're gonna adopt a puppy and like
the puppy is gonna need to be walked in the morning and it's gonna change everything about it and sometimes people even find this frustrating like well I had this great routine and now my great routine doesn't work anymore like they get upset that life has dished this up to them.
It's like well no, it's the nature of life to change and it's totally fine to embrace temporary habits and something can work for you for a while and then it doesn't work or it's not working as well as it did before for whatever reason which can be totally legitimate and then you change and you do something
else. So I love that spirit of iterative processes, wonderful.
So Sarah, what are you looking forward to right now in your life?
Yeah, I'll give you a short term and a long term.
My short term is that I'm excited to see what I do with this Thursday night and my kind of little bit of freedom and longer amount of time to work is usually I have an appointment to deal with in the afternoon with a kid but I'm super excited to have some uninterrupted hours in the evening time to do
with what feels right.
So I'll report back on that and I'm excited about it and my long -term excitement is that I am seeing my college friends in the middle of September.
It's gonna be awesome and just really looking forward to that time spent with people, I always feel like that is one of the best things we can do.
Yeah, people are a good use of time, we always say.
And your idea of taking one night off, I mean, this is another tip in general we can share with people.
Like people who are busy like Sarah who have jobs, who have families, you can wind up spending a lot of your time dealing with the job stuff and dealing with family care and household responsibilities.
But even just taking one night a week where you get to determine what you do and you go to something like a strength class or I sing with a choir.
These are things that make you feel more like, well, there's more to life than just work and family.
Awesome as those things may be.
There's something for me too.
So you think you're gonna go to strength class Sarah?
Is that what it's gonna be?
I think I'm gonna be doing a lot of work for myself on that day, but I am still looking forward to it because you know, I enjoy my various projects.
Yeah. And it's a different kind of work.
Like you can have that creative work, that sense of space in the evening where you're not, you know, locked in by certain hours, right?
Exactly. I'll be able to come up with some really deep and cool thoughts to put in my next newsletter.
Awesome, deep and cool thoughts.
We're all about that.
So Sarah, maybe you could just tell our listeners where they can find you.
Yeah, so I have that 20 year old blog, which is at theshoebox .com, which is my initials, S -H -U -T -H -E -S -H -U -B -O -X .com.
That's where you can find links to all my podcast episodes and pretty much everything I do, as well as blog posts going back many, many years.
And then of course you can find both podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts.
It's best of both worlds with Laura Mandercam and then Best Lead Plans.
Awesome. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today for this first interview of my series of interviews with people about how they spend their time, how they make the most of their time, how they take their days from great to awesome.
For the Before Breakfast listeners who are joining us for this first one, thank you so much for sticking with me in this new format.
You can let me know what you think.
As always, you can reach me at laura .lauravandercam .com.
And in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura .lauravandercam .com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives.
Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I am Lacey Lamar.
And I'm also Lacey Lamar.
Just kidding, I'm Amber Ruffin.
Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share.
We're back with season two of the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber show on Will Farrell's Big Money Players Network.
This season, we make new friends, deep dive into my steamy DMs, answer your listener questions, and more.
The more is punch each other.
Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber show on Will Farrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Just listen, okay? Or Lacey gets to do it.
