That doesn’t seem like much of a choice, does it? I mean, how hard is it to blog? Or why is it significant?
For me, it was an actual choice today. Well, almost last night really. I was thinking, “It’s the weekend…and although I’ve started the “Today I Choose” self-challenge, did I want to perhaps adjust it so it was only a Monday-Friday thing?” Could I do the Seinfeld method of the longest chain if it was 5d on and 2d off?
So I debated whether I would blog today, Saturday. Things are a bit odd already with the “choice” challenge I gave myself. I spend the day doing my choices, I write up the posts at night of the choice I made that day, but then I write in the “present tense” even though I already chose. I’ve been playing with it in my mind, honestly, whether I should go back and change all of them to the past tense grammar to be “Today I chose”.
Except that isn’t quite the right nuance. I am not writing about a choice I *made* today, I am writing about the future-orientation of the choice, that today and everyday I am choosing to go beyond the minimum in some area of my life, actively and consciously choosing to do something that I want to do.
And I won’t lie, it’s hard to know what to write about each night. I could have written about making whole wheat bread today, or a trivia game we played tonight online as a family team (alas, we came 4th, but we’re blaming it on technical glitches). Or a few other choices.
But the one that felt like the biggest choice to me today was whether to blog about choice at all. I already blogged about an article I liked (https://polywogg.ca/articles-i-like-10-small-habits-that-have-a-huge-return-on-life/), so it’s not a question about blogging in general, I have no issues with doing that any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Literally, in some cases.
It was a question if I would keep the TIC series going or wait until Monday. I decided that I wasn’t satisfied with the idea that Monday to Friday I would work at making conscious choices and on Saturday and Sunday I would slack off, or turn my brain off, or whatever. It doesn’t count as keeping the chain going if I drop a couple of links on weekends.
So, today I choose to keep the chain going and to blog about my choices.
Given my interest in goal-setting and self-improvement, I am a sucker for anyone with articles that sound like they are easily digestible and might trigger some other personal thoughts. Since I use Firefox, and the opening page has popular articles on it that are being shared on Pocket, I frequently find one or two here and there to click on. If they’re about goals, I almost always click.
Today’s feed from Pocket included a reprint/repost of an article from Darius Foroux from September 2018 about which habits you can adopt which will have the highest rate of return for you (10 Small Habits That Have A Huge Return On Life – Darius Foroux). Note that we’re not talking about setting a goal, and deciding which method will get you there, this is about various habits that will get you to ten separate targets where the method is part of the journey itself.
Foroux has a much stronger preference on focusing on the “what” than the “how” and I like his newsletter enough to subscribe to it, although I’m a more recent convert, so I never saw his original article back in 2018. I quite like his list. His list is mostly obvious stuff…work-out regularly (although he is more specific about full-body strength training workout 3x a week), get enough sleep (he argues for a full 7-8h a night), read more (60m a day), walking regularly (30m a day), intermittent fasting, being present, practicing kindness and love, journal/write more often (30m a day), and save regularly (10-30% so it is constant). Overall, it’s a pretty good list, and I don’t disagree that those who do them benefit significantly. Holding yourself to them all is hard, but not impossible, and adding them one at a time is doable.
But for me, the “magic” is in his second habit of how he manages his daily habits:
2. Set 3-4 daily priorities
This is one of the best productivity strategies there is. We all know that focus is what brings us results.
No focus? No results. So how do you focus? By limiting your options and tasks. Elimination is the key.
Be very clear about what you want to achieve every single day, week, and year. Form the habit of focusing on what matters regularly.
Every day, work on 3-4 essential (and small) tasks that will bring you closer to your weekly and yearly goals.
As I said, it’s a great list. Personally I think it should be a mix of 1-2 small goals that are complete by themselves, a step or 2 of a medium-sized goal, and a step towards a large goal. If you’re only focusing on the small goals, it’s easy to let the big stuff get away from you. Crowding out the “important” with the “urgent”, instead of properly prioritizing what big things you’re working towards…which is not to say he’s suggesting that, just that it isn’t as clear in such a short article that there are pitfalls to just saying set 3-4 goals for the day.
We are fairly fortunate individuals, with a roof over our heads and good jobs with the ability to work from home, our son is safe with us, we have working internet, and our fridge and freezer are reasonably well-stocked. Once a week, I make a grocery run and we can make outings to vegetable/fruit stands to get some fresher food than the grocery store too.
We also know how to cook, with my wife doing the vast majority of the meal planning and cooking, with decently healthy choices, particularly with her Epicure options. In a non-pandemic world, Andrea and Jacob would have breakfast together, and I may or may not grab something in passing. I rarely sit down for a full meal with them in the morning. Dinners, as I said, are usually in Andrea’s domain and my job is to fetch the groceries she needs in order to cook. Lunches were more of a hybrid option. I would make something the night before, almost always some form of sandwich for Jacob, different ingredients, and we would often order him something from the school programs like pizza one day or subs another. Andrea would handle the fruits and vegetables to be added.
But I frequently crave more spontaneous choices than what’s on tap in our fridge. I am not a huge fan of leftovers, but even I get tired of sandwiches all the time too. At work, I would just pop down to a restaurant or the food court. At home in the pandemic? Fuhgeddaboutit.
We still do take-out at least once a week, maybe twice in ten days on average, and we’ve gotten pretty good at giving everyone a chance to choose WHERE we are going. Harvey’s is acceptable to all, McDonald’s for me and Jacob only if Andrea is doing something else, we can all eat at Wendy’s. Subway is popular with all three of us but we’ve been a bit leery of the openness of their food prep during the pandemic, so we only recently returned to eating there. We used to go once a week after piano, we’ve now gone twice in five months. Swiss Chalet is popular with me, not so much with Andrea and Jacob. I’ve enjoyed more Tim Horton’s in the last few weeks than in my entire life, I usually avoid them for slowness but I’m not hating the drive-through. We’ve also done Lone Star, Local Heroes, Baan Thai, Edo Japan, Montanas. Pizza is popular for all three of us, particularly Pizza Hut for Jacob, but Colonnade more for myself. We’re planning to expand to a few others too.
So why do I mention all those? Because they are almost ALL dinner options. We did do Edo Japan and Tim Horton’s for lunch, but only on weekends. Everything else is generally a nighttime option when we don’t feel like making anything, or just not what we had planned when we did the planning three days before. I like to BBQ, but not so much when it’s raining or when lava is melting in the shade. We need a bit more variety and the flexibility to change from time to time.
Today, we made two outings to help with that variety. First, very simple, I ordered Pizza Hut for lunch. Andrea wasn’t interested, but I’ve told Jacob that at least once a week, for something different at lunch, I’ll make a run out for something of his choosing. Not surprisingly, he went for pizza immediately. But not something like Pizza Pizza, he wanted real pizza at Pizza Hut. Personal pan pizza, thick crust, Hawaiian, ham, and I even added chicken. I opted for wings and a Caeser salad, two things I rarely have at home on our own. It was a nice change of pace.
For our second outing, Andrea and I went to Supperworks. For those of you not familiar with it, it is one of those places where normally you make an appointment, you go in, they have a number of work stations set up around the storefront, and you assemble a series of meals. For example, if they have lime chicken kebabs, you go to the station, put two kebabs with chicken on them in a bag, then add all the sauce ingredients, a bunch of spices, etc., and mix it all up, before sealing the bag. All the food prep is basically done — everything is chopped, diced, sorted, and good to go. You have to measure ingredients for sauces and spices, but they have all the spoons ready to use. When you’re done, your food goes in the fridge while the spoons and bowls go in a dishwashing bin. Then on to the next station. They usually have about 10 different meals of the month going, and you can choose all of them, or some of them. A default meal package serves about 4-6. We do a “split” option that is enough food for three of us, but just enough usually with no leftovers. It’s good for a meal, and that’s it.
Obviously, in a pandemic world, you can’t do this. While normally you save money assembling everything yourself, it’s not cheap, you’re basically paying for them to chop everything for you, buy all the ingredients, wash your bowls, etc. But we go home with 5-6 dishes usually and double options for each, so 12 meals. And they’re complete meals with rice, noodles, buns, etc.
Their current options are a bit more expensive, as they assemble everything for you into the bags, and they’ll even deliver it all to you for a fee (like lots of the companies that deliver assembled meals ready to cook or others that deliver the ingredients but you still have to prep everything). But you can go and pick it up, which we did today. We’ve done it once before during the pandemic, but we don’t often eat it up fast enough to do it every month. If you repeat month after month, you can get discounts for the subsequent months. We tend to want it maybe every six weeks or so. It IS 12 meals and it is usually way more complex than we would normally do for choice of meal.
Today we went for some lime chicken kebabs, tarragon chicken burgers, bacon pineapple wrap burgers…those are all for the BBQ and sure, we could do it all ourselves if we felt like doing all the prep too. Often it isn’t very economical though, as some of the spices or sauces they use are things we would use once every six months and the recipe only calls for a tablespoon or two. We also got a creamy Thai coconut chicken, a beef stew-like mixture with noodles, and a big bag of chicken wings as an extra one. Oh, and a Mexican shrimp skillet option. Three of those are likely ones we would never make on our own, we’re venturing out of our weekly grind.
Don’t get me wrong, we have some fantastic dinners on our own. Andrea is a great cook, and we try to do meal planning regularly to give us some variety without increasing the workload too much. And if I can BBQ, all the better. But our Supperworks meals tend to be as much about variety as it is about avoiding eating out, while still giving us something “different’ that feels like a treat since we only have to cook it, not prep it too.
But it is often easy to forget about the choices available, and it’s not like you pop over to Supperworks and pick up those meals, or swing by Pizza Hut today at lunch. It’s good to remind ourselves that there are still options that are light, fun and a treat in a Covid world.
Today I choose more flexibility in our meal options, even when it requires some advanced planning and booking.
Whenever someone is doing some fund-raising, I’m usually fine to support their efforts. I don’t often care too much what the organization is, as long as the person doing the fund-raising isn’t a whackjob that makes me suspect the outcome, I’m happy that they are engaging with some organization and want to support it. I don’t necessarily support the organization, or even care about it, to be honest, I’m doing it to support my friend.
$20 here, $50 there, whatever. It’s a social decision. Recently, our local astronomy group was wondering about membership fees for a number of members who might be struggling with their finances right now, so an option was created to allow others to give a bit of money to help cover those fees, since most of them are not waivable but go to cover per unit costs for magazines, books, etc. So I slipped them a couple of bills to help out.
But as an introvert, I am a bit leery when it comes to personal commitments of time. I have been the star party coordinator for RASC Ottawa for the last two and a half years, although this year is basically a bust. I suspect it will be my last as I have other areas to devote my time and interest. This past week, I started to canvas RASC members looking for people with scopes like mine who need help getting going. A bunch of people stuck up their hands who need other help than I can provide, but I was fine to do the survey. For those with scopes like mine, I’m going to set up a socially distanced night where we can all go to a parking lot somewhere and set up all our scopes, to see what we are all doing right / wrong and get everyone going. Someone else can help those with other types of scopes. One woman wants help with her husband’s scope out in Merrickville, and I’ll do that as a one-on-two type training. Happy to help.
Why did I do it? Because I choose to engage. I could ignore it, I could ignore the need, but a few years ago, I was in the SAME situation and drowning. I finally had to wave my hands big and high to get the equivalence of a lifeguard’s attention to help me, and I want to both pay it back, and help them pay it forward by engaging them now to help others in the future.
I also run a small book club for friends and family. It’s not extensive, we don’t discuss all the books in detail, it’s really just a FB group with about 10 active members and another 10 followers. I choose some themes each month, there’s always a reader’s choice option, and I track everyone’s progress at the end of the month and award simple little badges for their efforts.
Why do I do it? Because I choose to engage. I don’t “have” to do it, and even over the last few months as I have been overwhelmed or busy, I have let some stuff slide. Not keeping up with tracking, not awarding the badges. Basically, just noting what the goals are for a month and that’s about it. Remembering to like people’s posts when they post an update of a book they read. Yet I like the club, I like seeing people who don’t know each other except through Andrea and I interacting and finding common books they like or have read. Or others to read in the future. It’s fun. Work goes with it, but it’s fun. So last night I went through and did all the updates for May and June to catch up.
I am a member of the AstroPontiac board, mainly because I want to support my friend Stephan’s dream of building an active astroparc in Luskville, and because I have some computer skills to offer to run the website. Could someone else do it? Sure. But it’s easy to include on my website and host an active site for nominal cost. It’s not the fanciest design, but it’s functional, it meets the need. In English AND French.
Why do I do it? Because I choose to engage. I choose to help my friend, I choose to help build an astro community.
And then something showed up in my inbox yesterday. One of the big huge astronomy sites on the internet for amateurs and hobbyists is called Cloudy Nights. In other words, if you can’t do astro tonight because it’s cloudy, you can go to this site (on Cloudy Nights). If the people on the site can’t help you, the info you are looking for probably isn’t available anywhere. There are tons of sub-forums for outreach, technical discussions, photography, classifieds, reviews, etc. It has a formal sponsor from an astro equipment sales company, but it is pretty commercial-free. It looks a lot like an old-time bulletin board forum. Very much a 1980s, DOS-style design to everything. Millions of posts on there. Literally, an astronomical site for discussion. And sometimes? The friendly voice in the dark who tells you what you missed when your gear doesn’t work the way you thought it should.
The inbox visitor was a message from one of the big admins to all the members noting they were looking for new moderators to help run the site. One of my FB groups is also looking, but the CN one intrigues me. Most of the site is pretty well-defined, people know what is where, and you don’t often see an admin playing a heavy hand except perhaps to move a discussion from one forum to another when someone goes too far off-topic with a question. So CN interests/intrigues me in ways that the FB chaos does not. I set it aside for a day, and then today, I looked at it again.
They want people who have been members for more than a year; check, I’ve been there for about 7-8, the same length of time as I have had my scope, and even a bit before when I was choosing a scope. They would like people who are involved in several forum sub-groups, which I am, including Celestron mainly, but also some astrophotography, some other gear elements, etc. Computer expertise doesn’t hurt, although it wasn’t explicitly required, and they have training. But the only kicker was they would like an active member who has over 500 posts. I have around 100 topics that I’ve started and about 300 posts in total. I’m a bit shy of their desired total, but it’s not a mathematical eligibility requirement.
So I said, “Sure, here’s my specs for consideration.” Don’t get me wrong, they didn’t single me out and say, “Hey PolyWogg, we’ve seen your posts and you’re amazing, how would you like to be saddled with a bunch of behind the scenes admin/grunt work?”. They’re just doing a cattle call to see if they can help spread the workload. And maybe they’ll take me, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll put me on a list for later.
Did I have to volunteer? Nope. So why did I?
Because today I choose to engage in a number of social communities and see if I can help.
I’m not saving the world, I’m just offering a helping hand. What choices are you making today?
I wrote about one of my dreams recently, having an observatory in my backyard, and the decision + my reaction to the decision that I had to let the dream go. But I found myself bargaining my way back into trying to consider another option, even thinking I might just impose an option that was perfect for me if not awesome for Andrea and Jacob because it was important to me and I had hoped relatively minimal disruption on them. Until I did the formal measurements tonight and realized, sure, it works for me, but it is not “minimal” for them. The only option that works for them isn’t worth it for me. So I need to kill the idea completely, I just can’t make it work.
Going off on a tangent for a moment, I talk to a social worker every couple of weeks for some much-needed talk therapy/counselling, and this past week was almost entirely about my reaction to the first “realization” that it likely wouldn’t work just two weeks ago. That realization/decision really threw me into a tailspin, as I blogged about earlier. Much of this week’s conversation was about not really have anyone to talk to about it or the emotions that go with it, and most of my diversionary options to distract myself are not available right now, so the social isolation is hitting me doubly hard. The irony is not lost on me that the introvert who frequently likes being alone was feeling lonely.
But one of the key principles I believe in most strongly is to expect people to be the people they are, not the people you wish them to be. A fundamental belief in self-determination, self-control, self-management, simply the concept of the “self” that is yours to define. It was hard with my mom, for example, seeing some stuff she did that I found less than ideal, as well as having to remind myself that she was being who she was, not the person I wished her to be. Sometimes I forget that with family and friends, but I try really hard not to impose my desires on them as expectations.
This is not a pity party, by the way, it’s just recognizing the limitations of the life I’ve chosen to lead. Certain things that I wish I had in my life are not there, and when I find them missing, it’s only natural to think it is someone’s fault, that person x, family member y, or friend z didn’t provide it. Except that wasn’t who they were, so it’s hardly fair of me to expect them to behave that way. And that’s mostly what I talked about with the therapist. She’s paid to listen to me on these types of issues, one of the reasons I see her in the first place. A professional muse to help me work through sticky emotional/logical intersections. And to give me some much needed perspective if I’m chasing my inner nuts like a mad squirrel.
Which brings me back to letting go of a dream
I know what I’m doing “instead of” that dream, I know how to adapt or divert my energies, I know how to confront the dream to see which parts of it are dreams, which parts are actual goals, which parts are merely scripts. But in the end, as I said, I’ve still been holding on to part of it, bargaining with myself that maybe one of those alternatives could be made larger and fulfill the original goal. Except it can’t. The measurements I took tonight confirm it. I simply cannot put a slab or pier or shed in the backyard in a way that will work for anyone but me. Maybe when Jacob is at university or something, but by then I’ll be retired and it won’t really be relevant. By then, I’ll be able to go out any night that is clear to a darker sky site to set up. Time won’t be the limitation it is now.
Two weeks ago, I did a bunch of research to see what I could find available about letting go of a dream, but I didn’t really try to curate any of it into any sort of practical “strategy” for myself. I just let it wash over me, saved the links, and set it aside. Going back now, I can see ten general trends in options:
Focus on the belief that a goal or dream doesn’t define you, you’ll be fine either way;
Meditate on the negative feelings that go with the loss of the dream;
Let go too of the “sunk-cost” mentality that you’ve worked hard for it already, or done the planning, etc.;
Recognize that letting go of something is neither failure or cowardice;
Recognize why you are letting go — unrealistic, unachievable by you, inappropriate for the current you, timing, it’s blocking you from enjoying what you have, etc;
Let go by actually letting go and not revisiting your old stomping grounds…move on by actually moving on;
Take a break from it to give yourself some physical and emotional distance;
Identify what that dream gave you in the present so you can celebrate the victory of what it gave you on the journey up until now, even though you are letting go of the final result;
Be the friend to yourself that you think you need…what do you say to yourself about the change?;
Consider whether there are other equally-rewarding dreams that you ignored because you were focused on the one that you now need to jettison;
Not surprisingly, there are no magic bullets in there. I suspect I most gravitate towards #4 as a stumbling block, as there is some sense of failure in the loss. Some personal choice that I’m not willing to pay a certain price to achieve it, even if I’m okay with that choice. Plus I did let myself get excited about it, personally invested, so #3 also resonates — a sunk-cost mentality of not wanting to give up and reduce the previous work to meaningless. #1, 2, 5, and 10 don’t resonate at all. #6-9 are interesting, but not compelling.
I guess if I had to narrow it down to an actual strategy I would say it will be:
Analyse (#2 the negativity, #3 sunk cost, #5 why)
Adjust my thinking (#4 failure, #8 partial success)
Adapt to reality (#10 alternative goals)
Adjust priorities (separate)
I don’t know if it will help me self-manage better, but it’s worth a try. I’ve got most of the first one done and I am working on the second. The third is partially done, but I don’t feel like the fourth has been touched at all. The depression side of letting go is dampening down my enthusiasm for much else right now, so it’s hard to get excited about other projects. I’ll get there, just not yet.
