Happy New Month!

So last month my resolution was to try to form a better morning routine. Well, for anyone reading this in the future, last month the world also ended.

I mean it didn’t really, but to say that there’s been some upheaval would be a pretty major understatement.

So my sleep schedule hasn’t gotten much better. There’s a lot of noise in a house with three kids, especially if those kids generally can’t leave and are crawling up the walls. But that’s okay – we roll with those punches. Life won’t always stay neatly packaged, and that’s the beauty of the “New Month’s Resolution” paradigm instead of “New Year’s.” You only lose 1/12th of the time & momentum when you need to make a pivot.

So here’s my resolution for April – survive. Keep my kids’ lives as normal as possible given the disruption, finding things to do with them despite the challenges. Get outside with them as much as possible while still being safe and dry (oh yeah, on top of everything else, this is major rainy season where I live). Things will return to baseline, as long as we stay sane. So that’s what I’m planning to do.

Stay safe, everyone.

Happy New Month!

I got my biggest goal of February accomplished – a camping trip with my oldest daughter. I made it her birthday present, along with spending far more money than I’d intended setting her up with her own set of camping gear. It was outstanding; I love the outdoors when I can really go experience it and enjoy it, and I did.

This month I’m resolving to get a better morning routine. My sleep schedule is consistently borked, and that often results in me having disorganized mornings where I focus on getting tasks started but do nothing to get myself started, if that makes sense. I’m going to try to put a more conscious effort into that first hour upon waking, change up what I’m doing with it, and try to make it both healthier and more efficient.

Any tips are appreciated!

Happy New Month!

Okay, January was mostly successful! I’m back to both working out and reading on a regular schedule, which is nice. The blog remains consistent. Work is intense and getting more so, but it feels like in a healthy way and I’m certainly enjoying it. And I’ve actually managed to get some social time in – a whole night of getting together with some old friends!

My book is not done. I’m off-track, no denying it. I work with an amazing writing mentor, and I’ve got meetings scheduled with her to help me get back on track. Sometimes you have to outsource!

Otherwise though, I’m more or less back to baseline, which means I can put a real goal on the books for February. I’d like to get back out into nature at least once this month for another backpacking excursion. I enjoyed my last one so much, and this is still the kind of weather I really enjoy (I don’t like doing anything outside when it’s hot, but I love being outside in the cold). So that’s the resolution – one overnight trip.

Maybe I’ll pack a bag and bring my oldest this time. Depends on her interest, but I think she’ll enjoy it. Wish me (or us!) luck!

I stand by my assertion that new year’s resolutions are bunk.

But I still like my new month’s resolutions, and January is a month, so here we are.

December was ridiculous, for a wide variety of reasons. I made several miscalculations, but also a number of successes. I’m going to talk about them!

1. I didn’t completely finish my book, though I’m super close. Honestly, I just didn’t realize how much people demand your time during the holidays. I took a reasonable amount of time off from work, but it ended up being like trying to empty a glass while you’re underwater – something else just immediately rushes in to fill it. This won’t really come up again until next year, but next December I want to be a lot more assertive about asking the people around me to respect the time I’m trying to devote to things. I know I’m a huge Scrooge McGrinch, but I just dislike how “the holidays” are basically just a bunch of days in a row whose only purpose is to disrupt my careful routines.
2. While I didn’t wrap up 100% of my other projects, I did wrap 95% of them, and I think that I’ll have the rest done by the time I go back to work on the 6th. I’ll take it.
3. I’m happy to say I’ve obtained some better equipment for my workout routine, and once I’m back in my own home I’ll have my new routine started! (I’m out of town until the 4th, but I’ll accept that too.)

So, what are my resolutions for January?

1. First, tie all those little loose ends from December’s resolutions.
2. A ramp-up resolution: By the end of the month, I want to be back to reading 30 minutes every day and working out every day. Since I happen to be starting the month on vacation and then wrapping up these other projects, I don’t want to set a standard that I’ll immediately fail to meet. My schedule for these is as follows: as soon as I’m home from vacation I’ll start back into the workouts, and as soon as I’m not devoting time every day to writing a book I’ll immediately transition that time over to reading them again. In addition to new exercise equipment, I’ve also obtained quite a backlog of books I’m super excited to dive into!
3. I want to spend more time doing organized social activities with people outside my normal circles. I’m terrible at casual hangouts, but I could do like a board game night or something, and I intend to.

My goals for January, taken together, look a lot like “return to baseline.” That’s pretty accurate, and that’s okay. A wise man once told me that sometimes you have zero days, but too many people try to counteract those with “hero days,” where they pile stuff onto their plate in order to try to scramble and make up for lost time. But that’s a recipe for disaster; the better thing to do is just focus on having “non-zero days,” where you make forward progress. If January has to be dedicated to that mindset, then I’ll be happy to do it.

November was a fast-paced month with many changes. I believe I accomplished my goal of “hitting the ground running” in my new role at work, which has been incredibly rewarding. I work on an absolutely amazing and supportive team, and it’s a great environment in which to do good work.

That being said, there were definitely a few setbacks overall, some of which were expected and some of which weren’t, and that’s making me re-evaluate my plan for the last 31 days of the year.

1. I did get a lot of reading done, but the pattern changed significantly. Most of the time I don’t read one book at a time; when I had physical books there used to be a dozen with bookmarks in them on various end tables throughout my house at any given time. Thank goodness for my Kindle. So if I read 4 books in a month, it’s not because I read one per week. Rather, I’d read one for 30 minutes, another for an hour, 4 chapters of a different one, back to the second one for a few pages, etc. Because of this, I’ve come to notice certain patterns in my reading – the more books I have “open” at any given time, the more deeply (ironically!) I’m diving into a specific topic. If I only have a few, I’m reading casually, but many means I’m trying to absorb everything about a topic. That’s what this month has been like. Still, I’m scaling down my reading requirements for December, because I have so many projects on my plate – some days it was very hard to get 30 minutes to myself to read.
2. The schedule I’d tried to set for myself with work isn’t going exactly according to plan. Without going into too much detail, I essentially now wear two different hats at my job – I still do my old job, but have also taken on the responsibilities of the new role. I tried to segment the two into different days of the week, but the two sets of responsibilities just don’t want to be organized that way, so I’m going to re-evaluate that. Dividing up the day into segmented hour blocks will probably work better than dividing up the week.
3. The holidays! I never seem to remember just how disruptive they’ll be, but I lose lots of time during them. Maybe it’s because for the last several years, my growing family has meant that each year’s holiday season has actually been significantly more hectic than the prior year’s, so I’m caught off-guard each time. I don’t really have a good solution to this one, other than to remember that there are actually only like 4 working days in December, apparently.

So here are my resolutions for December:

1. Finish the rough draft for my book. Extremely doable based on my pace, but I have to be aware of which days actually allow for writing.
2. Wrap up all my other projects so that going into January I have a clean slate to take on more. That includes both personal projects and my current work assignment.
3. Research a more intense work-out/exercise regimen for January. I like mine, but I’ve sort of plateaued on it, and I want to have something new to implement right away after this month.

This is a great month for resolutions. It’s too easy to put things off and say you’ll make them New Year’s Resolutions, but my first version of this post was me talking about why that’s bunk. If it’s worth doing, do it today.

I have to say, October was a good month!

On review, I accomplished quite a lot:

1. I kept up with my reading goal, and finished three books. (All were great, too – Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos; How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe; and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan/Zach Weinersmith.)
2. I’ve now written just over 25,000 words in my book, so my writing goal from last month was successful! A rough estimate for total length is going to be somewhere in the 40-50k range, so I think I’m halfway there or better on the raw writing!
3. In addition, I went on a spontaneous new adventure in the “wilderness” (I mean, a state forest in Pennsylvania counts as wilderness, right?) that was a lot of fun, and I honestly can’t wait to go again.
4. And lastly, I accepted an exciting promotion at my company, which I officially started today!

So generally, things have been going pretty well! November promises to have a lot of action as well, and I’m excited for the challenges.

So my New Month’s Resolution for this month, in addition to maintaining the momentum on my other reading/writing goals, is to make a huge impact in the first 30 days of my new role. I’m headed out of town next week to visit the central office and put a lot of things into motion, and I’m sure that will create a few blog posts.

Here’s to the new month!

Success!

After making some mistakes in setting my August goals (and thus not accomplishing them), I bounced back with a revision for September, and I’m happy to say my goal of reading at least 30 minutes every day was met and exceeded.

The various things I did to help that goal worked – I strategically placed my Kindle away from my work station and in a spot where I was more likely to be relaxing with my kids. Occasionally it made its way to the bedside table, but I try not to read before bed too much – I have enough trouble sleeping as it is without being distracted by books I want to read.

I set a daily reminder on my calendar as well, and I’m pretty hard-wired to respond to that sort of thing after years of training myself.

The end result was just what I’d hoped – not only did I read at least 30 minutes each day, but several days I read a lot more. Once you get started, it’s easy to keep going, which is why setting small, incremental goals is so helpful.

I ended up finishing 5 books total this month. I’m not going to make this any kind of review of the books, save to say I gained something valuable from all of them, and thoroughly enjoyed reading them. In case you’re curious what they were:

1. Can You Outsmart An Economist? by Steven Landsburg
2. The Science of Self-Learning by Peter Hollins
3. The Hole by Aaron Ross Powell
4. Understanding Statistics by Antony Davies
5. Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart & Randy Street

I read primarily as a consumption good; it’s entertainment and personal enrichment for me. That being said, I also definitely feel like I gain something beyond enjoyment; whether I use any particular piece of knowledge I obtain, it’s definitely a workout for my brain. And just like my regular workout, the key is balancing the enjoyment I get from it in the moment with the benefits I get in the longer term.

I could almost assuredly see better results from a more intense workout, but then I’d enjoy it less and not only does that hurt my chances of sticking with it, it also hurts the scales of the bargain. I’m willing to defer my gratification to some extent, but I don’t want to be miserable today in order to be happy tomorrow.

The same is true for books. I don’t necessarily choose carefully what I’m reading based on a targeted learning path. I read what I enjoy. Along the way, it works out the mental muscles. Dialing it back to 30 minutes instead of an hour each day resulted in me reading more, and that’s the power of enjoyable goals.

So, onto October’s resolution! Well, in addition to reading, I’ve started writing a more serious book as well. I’m committing to 30 minutes of uninterrupted writing each day; no editing or revision yet, just getting down raw words. If I do that every day for all of October, I’ll have quite a chunk written by the end. I’m also keeping the reading levels up – as they say, “if you want to write, read!”

Disaster!

Okay, maybe not “disaster.” But definitely failure, and now I’ve got to process that and bounce back. Come along for the ride with me!

For my August Edition of NMR, I resolved to read for an uninterrupted hour every day. In the interest of full disclosure and honesty, that definitely didn’t happen. Time for a really honest assessment of why. Here are my thoughts:

1. I didn’t make it enough of a priority. At the core, that’s the secret recipe for failure. It was something I wanted to do, and believe is important in a long-term sense, but in the short term there was always something “more important.” That’s not all idle excuse – I have a family with 3 young kids and I work a lot to support that family. But still, Big Rock theory is correct.
2. I think the goal was poorly framed. An hour of uninterrupted anything isn’t often on the table for me. These blog entries usually take between 15 and 30 minutes for me to write, my workout routine is several 20-minute bursts throughout the day, etc.
3. I didn’t lower the relative opportunity cost of reading enough. Choice Architecture is a real thing (and also really fascinating – have fun with that rabbit hole!). Even Apu knows it! I didn’t do enough to put reading in the forefront.
4. I didn’t make room for it. I have some smaller distractions that I definitely need to remove in order to free up more time and mental space for reading things of value.

Okay, so I’ve written a ton about bouncing back from failure (so frequently, in fact, that I couldn’t pick just one specific link to embed here – so here are three). Time to tackle this one! I’m going to make September’s resolution an upgrade of August’s. I want to read more. What do I plan to do to learn from August’s setbacks and recover?

1. More commitment. I’ve added an actual daily reminder on my calendar with an alarm to poke me. I’m informing my family that they should kick me in the shins if I don’t.
2. Re-frame the goal. An hour was too ambitious, and I can be honest about that. I’m changing it to 30 minutes. My prediction is that once I overcome the static friction and get a little momentum, the time will increase on its own. But I can handle a 30-minute commitment easier than a 60-minute one.
3. It’s a small move, but right now my Kindle is in my office, but that’s where I’m least likely to read. I work there. Instead, I’m putting it in the living room next to the kids’ bookshelf. That will give me more ability to overlap my reading time with other things and make me more likely to just see my Kindle and pick it up when I’m not super focused on some other work-related task.
4. I’ve moved the social media app icons off the home screen of my phone, and put them in a folder called “Read Instead.” It’s a small move, but I think an impactful one.

And lastly, I’m all ears for reader suggestions as to how to carve out more reading time! But I guarantee September’s resolution will be more successful than August’s – how could it not be?

I wrote last month about a new thing I want to try, called a “New Month’s Resolution.” I liked it, so I’m sticking with it!

Last month I resolved to build something new. I did! It didn’t at all take the form I expected – I intended to try to build a swing set, and instead I built an indoor play area. It involved a lot of heavy lifting, figuring out how to assemble things without instructions or even all of the correct parts, and at least one stupid injury. But the end result is a cool playpen for my little ones and a new crafting desk in the same room, so I can control the chaos a little better. I’m happy with it. It’s not what I intended, but that’s totally okay.

That’s what I like about these New Month’s Resolutions. They’re flexible. They’re short-term and it’s okay to mess around with them. They’re low-pressure, but still moving me in the right direction.

So, what do I want to do for August?

I’ve been very busy lately, so I’ve let something slip that I actually consider very important – dedicated reading time. (That’s not an excuse, by the way! It’s my own fault for not putting the big rocks in first.) So I’m committing to that this month.

I don’t want to say “I’ll read X books,” because that’s not the point. It’s about the satisfaction in my life that I get from reading. So I’m putting myself back on the requirement of one hour of uninterrupted reading per day, and we’ll see what I learn from it. Tune in next month to see how it goes!

What’s your New Month’s Resolution?

New Year’s Resolutions are mostly bunk.

But I don’t think they’re entirely bunk. I think there’s at least some merit to attaching our motivations to certain rituals, because it can give us the subconscious impression that they’re more important, more serious. It can add some gravitas to them.

However, rituals and traditions draw a lot of their power from how well they seem to work over time. Let’s say one day you found a cool-looking stone, so you picked it up and kept it. Later that day, you accomplished a major goal. Your brain might leap to a certain connection, making you say “Oh, this must be a lucky rock! I’ll keep it forever!” The next time you attempt something major, you succeed. Now you’ve got two whole data points supporting the “lucky rock” theory, so it naturally cements itself in your brain forever.

Every time you attempt something major, you rub your lucky rock for good luck. I absolutely, 100% support this superstition and wouldn’t discourage anyone from it. Why? Because even though it’s obviously hogwash, it’s probably helpful hogwash. You thinking you have a lucky rock doesn’t cause any harm, and it actually might be helping by giving you boosts of confidence that in turn result in actual performance improvements. It’s just a superstitious ritual, but it can be a good one.

The problem with New Year’s Resolutions is that they aren’t like the lucky rock. Your impression of them in your mind is probably not a positive one. You probably roll your eyes when you hear about them, associating them in your mind with three weeks of overcrowding at the gym in early January followed by an immediate drop-off. It’s so common to abandon New Year’s Resolutions quickly that it’s become a meme, a running in-joke. Which is why they don’t work. In order for a ritual or superstition to have any ability to help you, it has to be something your illogical brain can latch onto as maybe actually working.

Your logical brain (hopefully) will always know it’s just superstition. Your logical brain (hopefully) recognizes that there’s no better day than today to start a new goal or begin achieving something you want to achieve. But you can get a lot of extra motivation by harnessing the power of that subconscious, illogical, lizard-brained System 1.

(Why do you think sales offices so often have actual bells or gongs they ring when people make big sales? It’s to associate that noise with success, and then when you hear it all day long you’re more motivated. Did you think Pavlov only applied to dogs?)

Now, here’s my other problem with New Year’s Resolutions, besides the fact that they’ve been ruined culturally. My other problem is that once a year is a terrible frequency to set big new goals for yourself.

So let’s start a new tradition, you and me. New Month’s Resolutions! A month is a much better frequency to try things. Long enough to give you room to grow and make mistakes, but short enough for you to set attainable goals and reach them. And that’s at least 12 major accomplishments per year! You can do a lot in a month. You can start a blog. You can write a song; you can probably write a book. You can lose 5 pounds. You can get a new job, or a promotion. Or launch your own product. You can try five new foods, see a new city. Many things!

Let’s go for it! My New Month’s Resolution this month is to build something. Physically construct something that I don’t already know how to build. I’m thinking a swingset/playset for my kids in the back yard, but it could turn into something else. I’m flexible!

What’s yours?