My Hypothesis

So to begin with, I will admit that I haven’t been entirely faithful to my plans in the past, and there’s no indication for the you, the outsider, to believe anything I promise I’ll do or say I’ll do. Really. The number of projects I’ve started and dropped is appalling, a less than 5% completion rate. But this is not a personal bash session. This is a recognition that perfection is not a necessary component for higher success. Failure is.

And right now, I’m in a phase where I’m failing smarter.

My Desk Setup: Water, Laptop, Pen, Pencil, Productivity Journal

Admission: I love it.

Why am I writing now? Because I believe I’ve hit a better system. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been researching habits and lifestyles that are conducive to more productivity and more healthy habits, that when maintained over time, I predict, will have amazing payoffs. That is my hypothesis. I’ll keep the changes short and to the summary:

1. Healthy eating/fasting: I’m starting intermittent fasting, 16/8, where my feeding window for the day starts at 4pm and goes to 10pm, and I then break for the next day. I’m on my third day and I’ve already feeling more focused, more clarity, more joy from taking my first bite, and not to mention, I’m about 2.6 lbs lighter than my heaviest time last week. Cool eh?
2. Mild running/exercising: I ran a total of 10 miles last week, and keep motivated by analyzing stats collected by my new/used Garmin Forerunner 25, one of the cheaper Garmin models out there. I absolutely adore this watch, as it tracks pace, elevation, time, place, and distance through the internal timer and GPS technology. My only wish is to have a few beginner running buddies on Garmin Connect. Anyone want to be my accountability buddy on there? They keep you motivated by giving you badges of completion.
3. My weekly work hours tracker: I’m casting some pretty long hours in my productivity journal, where I front load my work onto Monday, Tuesday, Wednesdays, and into the mornings, and plan on trying to hit a 60+ hour work week in the coming weeks. To be honest, last week was a complete wreck, with give or take 20 hours of actual productive time, but! It has been a week of research (which I don’t count towards learning) and severe changes (fasting and exercise and casting around for inspiration). I will talk more about the 60+ hour week in the future, when I am more successful. But as of right now, I’m tracking hourly focus, activities, and wake/sleep time by pen, pencil, and paper. There’s no guarantee that this schedule will be easy, at all, but it’s definitely something I am currently aspiring to.
4. Reading before an early bedtime: I’m trying to work through a few novels right now, and the best time is either when I wake up or go to sleep. So far, I’ve only tried reading a chapter or so going to sleep and am trying to block in for about an hour of reading per day. Just trying to jostle my neurons a bit as I feel my memory, concentration, and general literary intake is not what it used to be.

So to recap: My past plans have been moonshots to the points of foolishness — maintaining a daily, minimum 4-hour coding streak, blogging on a weekly basis, attending multiple hackathons back to back, overcommitting to countless project ideas aka starting repos and not committing more than a few lines of code to those repos…etc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to stop a lot of these habits — they actually keep life exciting and fun, but I could definitely do less with the incompleteness of projects. The acts that defeat confidence and waste time.

What My Productivity Journal Looks Like

In the future, I’d like to incorporate short and easy 5–10 minute meditations into my waking and falling asleep hours. I think that it will help my concentration, gratitude, and finding my center.

Thanks for your interest and patience as I navigate through my personal growth journey!