Month: August 2022

After a few months of focused effort on improving systems, I wanted to take a step back and relax for a few days. A minor injury while lifting weights made for good timing to take that time. I fear I fell a bit too far into the bad habits, but coming out of the other side, I’m feeling ready to get back to the grind.

A Little Like Junk Food

The way I look at small breaks like this is that they are a little bit like a cheat day in diets. The important part is to follow the diet a large majority of the time. Cheat days help to push off bad choices to a future date and to mitigate guilt with intentional breaking of the rules. The occasional departure isn’t going to ruin things. I can’t recall where I heard this quote but I like to follow the advice, “One salad doesn’t make you healthy, and one bowl of ice cream doesn’t make you unhealthy.” All things in moderation I suppose.

This last week, I gave myself some time to play games and watch YouTube. Even though I feel like I didn’t do much, I spent plenty of time with family who were in town. Outside of time with them, most free time I had to myself I spent with controller in hand. Video games have an interesting way of scratching the itch for accomplishment. Level ups, achievements, and rewards are like some ice cream after grinding away for weeks for a little bit of accomplishment salad.

On to the Next One

With this brief break coming to a close, it’s time to get back to the projects I’ve been working through. I’ve longed teased a DnD adventure that I plan to publish, and I’m hoping to have that ready by the time some friends visit in a few weeks, though my original plan was the end of this month.

One of the primary reasons I opted for this break was not having a new trial in mind. With the conclusion of The Four Pillar Plan, I needed some time to think about where I wanted to experiment. An area I’ve been increasingly focusing has been fitness, especially lifting weights. A long standing habit I’ve heard in the fitness community is to keep a workout log, something I’ve never really done. With my last lifting session ending early due to a muscle tug in between sets, I think it is a great option to plan, record, and review my workouts.

I began working on what was to be the final post of the “Four Pillar Plan Trial” summarizing my thoughts. In the end, I felt like all I did was repeat points from prior posts that explored some of the “pillars” more directly. With this result, I thought I’d take some more time to think about how I feel about these areas and more.

A Midyear Check Up

The annual theme of foundation is one I’m very happy I chose. It hasn’t always been easy, but looking into the elements of my life that I build on has been an incredible practice this year. I’ve been able to think about the critical practices, people, and routines in my life and take time to expand or mend them.

During this week, I looked over what notes I had in mind for foundation. I’m happy to say that I’ve largely stuck to what I had in mind regarding the theme. I’ve been taking steps to improve the base of my life from my health to my habits to my key relationships. The long standing weekly reviews have been a good way to get a high level view of how I see the year going, and overall, it’s been promising.

One element I’ve neglected since the early months is a loose schedule I had for how I spent each day and how I spent each week. The exception being climbing which has stuck to the schedule since basically the beginning of the year.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about some ideas from the PARA system that have been sitting in my head a few weeks. One of the key ideas there was expression, the last step of the process as a whole. It serves as the answer to the question of why bother with capturing and organizing information into a system if it will simply collect metaphorical dust. Trying to set up my week in a way where certain days are focused on different parts of the CODE system is something I’m pondering.

The year isn’t going perfect by any means, but I know I’m slowly progressing in the major areas I care about.

The Role of the Pillars

To address many of those major areas, I turned to The Four Pillar Plan. This trial felt largely to be a process of rebuilding a variety of shoddy habits. Walking and sleeping being two critical ones of the past.

An area I haven’t thought on much is the way I spend my time relaxing. I often use platforms like YouTube or Twitch as ways to decompress and wind down. Watching a video or stream is an easy way to turn off my brain for a few minutes and then pick myself up afterwards. The problem is there’s this feeling of finding “the right” video. I’ll spend minutes scrolling through, checking multiple apps and sites for the one. Often I’ll find myself more tired after a brief search that led to not watching anything.

I feel like the “Netflix scroll” is a common issue nowadays. A stupid issue to be certain, but a common one. There’s just so many things vying for our attention that it becomes exhausting to pick one.

Trying to actively relax is a seemingly oxymoronic concept, but it’s been paying off with a better sustained mood. Incorporating walks as a break is an easy way to get more movement in while getting my mind off active problems to solve. I’ll still watch videos and streams, but don’t let myself get caught in the endless scroll problem. If I find I’m spending too much time looking for something, I just stop and look for engagement elsewhere.

Going forward, I think keeping these four elements in mind will help to set a floor for what constitutes good habits. If I’m maintaining these four areas, I can feel content with where I’m at.

On the subject of the future, I’ll be taking one more week to settle some ideas as I consider what to do for a trial next. Another post should be on it’s way, but I haven’t come to a trial that I am happy with at this time. For now, I’ll use this as an excuse to complete some of the ideas I drafted up last year before my unplanned hiatus.