February 2024 reflections
Week notes are common among many bloggers. To share and reflect on what you did throughout the week.
I don't really do that many interesting things throughout a given week, so a weekly cadence would be a bit much for me personally. But I still want to force myself to reflect on what I am doing, whether doing it makes sense and is in line with what I want to be doing.
These posts will be deeply personal and, quite frankly, probably not of interest to anyone else but me. Still, I want to put them out there. For posterity and accountability. To begin I will test out a monthly cadence. Over summer I will evaluate whether that's too often and if these posts make any sense at all.
The formating is straightforward: A reflection on how I did and how I can improve in the coming month for every point of focus in my personal life.
Writing
It was a good month for writing. I sat down to write in a focused manner every single day throughout February. I try to make these sessions at least 30 minutes long. They usually end up being closer to an hour.
Every single one of my writing sessions were in the early AM, except one. My two year old woke up early, so I had to spend the morning next to her trying to get her a few extra minutes of shut eye before the day started in earnest.
I don't really track how much I write. (Note to self: A Python script that counts files and words and compiles some cool stats from my text files would be nice.) But in terms of what I published on this blog, I ended up with 11 new posts in the past month.
My main takeaway from this month as it relates to writing, is that I now believe my approach to establishing a daily writing habit is sustainable. Sure, there were some challenging days. But overall, I'm enjoying the challenge and the process.
I'm still entirely unfocused in my approach, in that I don't impose any directions on what I should write about. I just sit down and start writing. To the extent that I should start thinking about being more focused on output, it's not something I am anywhere near ready to do. As of now, the act of writing itself is the goal. And even though I have some ideas about things I want to write, I believe that if I just keep honing my writing, the day will come when I'm ready to start tackling those. Or not. And that's fine, too.
For the next month, I want to try to keep doing exactly what I did in February when it comes to writing.
Reading
Kimberly pointed out that problems of output are often problems of input. If you want to write well, you need to read. I want to spend an hour a day reading a book. Unsurprisingly, I failed miserably in February.
The excitement of working on this website became too tempting a distraction. Instead of reading, I spent many nights in front of my computer, improving the site. In addition to editing and publishing posts (which, to my detriment, I don't really consider writing) I spent much time tweaking the site’s design and functionality. Like setting up conditional blocks and creating custom feeds, modifying font sizes for accessibility.
Oh, and putting together and setting up a dark mode. I need to write a post on that.
Reading took a hit as a result of this excitement around web development. And it did make me think: I thoroughly enjoy making and maintaining websites. How can I carve out more time for doing it?
Answering that question is for another time. I remain adamant in commitment to reading an hour every evening. It is good for my body and mind in more ways than one. Not least because it helps me sleep well. For March, I need to recalibrate and ensure that I get back to reading again.
Health
To keep my mind functional, I must exercise. From trial and error I've learned that being active is the single most important thing for keeping the restlessness at bay. And restlessness, through a cocktail of negativity comprising inability to focus, dissatisfaction and anxiety and more besides, ultimately leads to depression. So exercise I must.
All in all, I logged 25 hours of exercise across 31 sessions this month. It was a healthy mix of running, cross country skiing and strength training. I even did 30 minutes on the elliptical. Perhaps my proudest achievement of the month.
This is a fair bit less than when I tried to run as fast as I could. A standard week back then was around 9-10 hours of running. Still, I think this is right at my maximum capacity at the moment. If I want to add more things to the mix, I will need to reduce this further.
One of my goals for the year is to increase my weight. As a scrawny marathon runner, my body composition was not ideal. I've been working steadily to increase my muscle mass for a while now, through strength training and meticulously tracking what I eat. The latter has resulted in a few a-ha moments around how poor my diet has been — and why I didn't really progress in the last three years of running, despite putting in the work.
Even after several months of tracking my diet, I still fall back into my old, unhealthy defaults as soon as I stop tracking. Skipping meals and/or eating too little during them. Instead I end up placating my hunger with snacks. I need to find a way to get away from these defaults, because tracking everything I eat is not sustainable in the long run.
But, given my goal of increasing my weight, I think that's something that will have to weight (hah, couldn't resist). I think the process has to be:
- Keep tracking what I eat and adjust as necessary until I reach target weight, however long that might be.
- Ease off tracking my intake and work on readjusting my default eating habits. Continue until I know that I can sustain my average activity levels without losing weight again.
- Profit.
All that to say that the goal for March will be to keep doing what I'm doing in the health category.
Family
I wish I could spend even more time with my family. But life being what it is, our time together is in (some) the mornings, evenings and weekends. My goal is to be as present as I possibly can when I’m with them. I fail more often than not, but I will not stop trying.
My most important measure for improving in this aspect is reducing my phone dependency. The more my phone occupies my conscious and unconscious mind, the more I struggle to be present in these moments. My ultimate goal is to never touch the phone for any other reason than pure utility while I'm with my children. From experience, I know that this means cutting my screen down to the absolute bare minimum. The less I use my phone, the less I experience the impulse to reach for it. Unfortunately, with more than 90 minutes of average screen time per day recently, I have a long way to go.
I have deleted all social apps from the phone. It was an important step. But I still reach for the phone to feed my news addiction, to take quick notes, to register all the details of my weight training sessions and to log the food I eat. Three of these can be remedied fairly quickly: Scale down on news consumption and start carrying around a pen and a notebook.
For March I will try to do better. I will do it by reducing the screen time on my phone, and, hopefully, be even more present when being together with my children as a result.
And with that, I bid February 2024 goodbye. Onwards and upwards.