Tailwind

A cycling selfie of me in a red and black helmet and yellow-tinted glasses, wearing a Trek team jersey, beside my orange and black Merida road bike against a blue garage door.

My bike might be my best productivity tool.

I've had this hunch for years: on days when I exercise, I feel more productive.

The ideas flow a little easier. I feel more creative. The work feels less stuck.

But on the days when I feel overwhelmed, stressed, or buried in too much work, biking is usually one of the first things I skip. The logic in my head is always the same: "I don't have time for it today."

Lately I've started to wonder if that logic is backwards. Maybe the days when I feel like I don't have time to exercise are actually the days I need it most.

I wondered if the data would back up my hunch. I used to have a Garmin on my bike, but that data disappeared when an old computer died. I've been using my Apple Watch consistently for the last few years, though. And while coding isn't the only thing I do, GitHub commits have been a relatively consistent part of my work for years and years.

So I got curious.

I compared my Apple Watch cycling data against my GitHub commits from April 2023 to June 2026.

An "exercise day" was any day with 20+ minutes of cycling.

The result: on exercise days, I averaged 4.75 commits a day. On non-exercise days, it was 2.25. That's a 2.11x difference.

A spreadsheet titled Cycling vs. Commits Analysis covering 2023-04-10 to 2026-06-29. Across all 234 exercise days I averaged 4.75 commits a day with a commit on 82.5% of days; across all 943 non-exercise days I averaged 2.25 commits a day with a commit on 52.1% of days, a 2.11x difference.
Apple Watch cycling vs. GitHub commits, April 2023 to June 2026.

Of course, this isn't a perfect productivity measure.

A commit isn't the same thing as a great idea. Commits come in all shapes and sizes, and more of them isn't necessarily a good thing. And correlation isn't causation.

But the data does seem to back up what I've felt for a long time: exercise doesn't take time away from my work.

Even if I "lose" 30 or 40 minutes on the bike, I probably gain it back through clarity, energy, and better focus.

Sometimes the most productive thing I can do is stop working for a little while.