The Routine That Earns Its Place in a Week Full of Deals
A Question I Ask About My Own Calendar
Every few months I go through my calendar and ask a simple question: what would I cut first if the week got tighter? Most things survive that test because they are tied to a deal, a client, or a deadline. But there is one line item that never gets cut, and it has nothing to do with a transaction. It is a walk, most days, usually without my phone in my hand.
I do not treat this as wellness advice. I treat it as a working habit, the same way I treat a pipeline review or a call with a portfolio company. It earns its place because of what it does for the thinking that comes before and after it, not because it feels good in the moment.
Why Walking Works When Spreadsheets Do Not
Deal work rewards focus. You need hours at a desk to build a model, mark up a term sheet, or prep for a board conversation. But the best ideas I have had about a deal rarely showed up while I was staring at a screen. They showed up afterward, when I was away from the numbers and just moving.
There is a reason for that. Sitting with a problem too long narrows your view of it. You start optimizing inside the frame you already built instead of asking whether it is the right frame. Walking removes the frame for a while. I have restructured how I thought about a client’s positioning, or noticed a gap in an argument I was about to make to a management team, almost entirely on a walk rather than at my desk.
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I do not go looking for insight when I walk. That is the point. The moment you turn a walk into a working session, you have lost the thing that made it useful.
What Fills the Time Instead
I usually have a business or finance podcast running. Not because I am chasing a specific answer, but because listening to other people reason through markets, deals, and decisions keeps my own thinking sharp between the moments I am actively working a transaction. Over twenty-five years in this business, the people who stayed useful to clients were the ones who kept learning after they stopped being the newest person in the room. A podcast on a walk is a small, low-effort way to keep doing that.
It also does something else. Hearing how someone else frames a problem, in a completely different sector than industrials or services, sometimes hands me language or a structure I can use in my own client conversations. Good ideas travel across industries more easily than people expect.
The Discipline Part
None of this works if the habit is optional. The weeks I most want to skip the walk are exactly the weeks I need it most, the ones packed with calls, closings, and travel. Those are also the weeks where my thinking gets sloppiest if I let the routine slide.
So I treat it the way I would treat a client commitment. It goes on the calendar. It does not move because something else came up, unless something genuinely urgent did. That discipline is the actual habit. The walking is just the form it takes for me. For someone else it might be an hour with no phone, or a swim, or something else entirely that clears the same kind of space.
Why This Belongs in a Business Post
I bring this up because I think people in finance undervalue routines that do not look like work. We measure our days in calls made, models built, and terms negotiated. A walk with a podcast does not show up on that list. But if it changes how I show up in the next call or how clearly I see the next problem, it was part of the work the whole time.
If you are building your own version of this, the test I would offer is the same one I use on my calendar. Ask what you would cut first when the week gets tight. If the honest answer is a routine that has nothing to do with the deal in front of you, look closer before you cut it. It might be doing more of the work than you think.
