Time to do a quick update, here at the end of week 7.
For my astronomy, considering that I haven’t actually dug the telescope out and got it set up yet, mostly because I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I’m a fair-weather (i.e. warm-weather) astronomer only, I’m doing okay. I’ve played around with a few things, even managed to get a photo of the Mars / Venus / Moon conjunction on the weekend. While I had hoped to be doing something astronomy-related at least once a week, I’m at a combined total of 3 so far.
For the kitchen reno, we got going a few weeks ago with our first meeting with the designer, but haven’t heard anything in the last two weeks (contractor needs to come talk to us about moving a wall, see what the options are). I’m going to follow up this week and see about booking them for a specific 2 weeks in the summer.
I managed to sort some of my photos a few weeks back, but then stalled, which is same for my backup schedule. I’ve taken a couple of photos and managed to get a bunch of work done on a photobook, but nothing in the last couple of weeks. I also started on the origami in mid-January, although I originally planned that for later in the year.
Other than that, it’s been a pretty light 7 weeks on blue — nothing on my active use of the tracker, “honey do” list, scanning, ripping, knitting, learning to juggle, or planning for a meteor shower.
Overall, I’d have to rate my progress at a very weak yellow, bordering on red.
Let’s check in on how I’m doing on my goals…Spoiler alert — the big news is under the yellow goals!
Starting with the Blue / Mind goals, I’ve done a bit on both of my two big goals: re-engaged with astronomy (Mercury and Venus observing with the naked eye, collimated my scope, charged batteries, and sorted out my astro gear) and exchanged emails with the contractor for the kitchen renovation –> green for the past two weeks. On day-to-day stuff, I’ve started using the tracker, organized a photo book, did a partial backup, and enrolled in a Coursera course, but nothing official on the Honey-Do list, photo scanning, or ripping –> yellow for the past two weeks. On my bucket list, I started doing some origami, but nothing on photography, knitting, juggling or the meteor shower –> yellow for the past two weeks. Overall, I’d rate my mind goals at YELLOW for my early progress.
For the Green / Heart goals, my first big one has been re-engaging with Jacob. I have had two Boys Nights with him, although the project one was a bust. I had hoped to make snowflakes with him (construction paper with hole cut out for a picture, trimmed edges, wool on top) but I described the project to him on the weekend, and he did it without me, so he had no interest when it came to Boys Night to do it again. He liked the idea apparently, and couldn’t wait. This past week though we had an impromptu games night while Andrea was at NAC, and when we were done, we talked about what he likes in various games and what he wants in the game we’re going to design together in February. It’s a decent start. But I’m not stepping up for the night-time routine as much as I had intended, so overall of yellow. For the random acts of romance, my second big goal, I have to grade myself a Red so far…Andrea and I have done a few more things together, but it all came to a screeching halt on Saturday night when I was sick, and had to bail on our NAC date. Fortunately, a friend was able to go at the last-minute. Between the two, I’ll give myself an overall yellow so far. For the day-to-day activities, I’ve organized a wings outing for this coming week, updated the AstroPontiac site for the WP software, did a bit of work on my social campaign for November, and researched a bit of my charity plan. Nothing on siblings, corn roast planning –> Overall yellow. Which gives me an overall yellow for the category.
For the Red / Body goals, I pretty much suck. I’m way behind on my exercises and I’ve done almost nothing on organizing my physical journey — overall flaming red. On the day-to-day stuff, I haven’t got myself organized for french nor found a new dentist or doctor, but I did do my sleep test when my squirrels were knocking at the door, so I’m giving myself a yellow. However, I did nothing on organizing myself to give blood, use a rappel/zipline, or for a polar plunge, so again RED. Which leaves me with an overall red for the category.
Despite my “failures” above, I’m not really surprised. My priority for this month so far has been my goals in the Yellow / Soul category. I’ll go in reverse order, as I want to save my writing challenge to the end. I hit the ground running on my creativity challenge in the day-to-day stuff, working on clip art, two goals memes, finding a Daddy and Jacob project, posting photos from December, doing a photobook, and designing trackers for goals and the Creativity Challenge itself. On blogging, my goal was 10 new blogs; I did 32. In 18 days. For reviews of TV episodes, my goal was 10 for the yearly average but my Creativity Challenge boosted that temporarily to 25 for two weeks –> I did 35. With more pending. I’ve only done 4 memes so far, out of my 200 for the year, but I didn’t really expect to start this soon. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the first book (Monogram Murders), I’ve completed 11 entries in my Gratitude Journal with an impressive 8 entries in a row, and I’ve tried out 2 recipes with Andrea. And as mentioned, Jacob and I are working on the game design I wasn’t planning on starting until February. On the other side, nothing on movie reviews or book reviews, or the photography / movie weekend / HR guide. Nor have I done anything on my Spiritual questions quest for the year. Nevertheless, if this was my only progress for the month, I’d still give myself an overall Green. That list alone is enough to give me a sense of accomplishment.
But all of this has been a side-show to the main attraction, which is my ultra-scary, how-the-heck-am-I-going-to-reach “500,000 words” goal. Working it backwards, that’s 10,000 words a week x 50 weeks. So I have to put up about 10K words a week to stay on track.
Week 1 launched with a vengeance — 2 memes, 8 gratitude entries, 9 reviews of TV episodes, 26 posts, 35 e-mails, and innumerable numbers of Facebook posts and some other projects combined to give me, wait for it, 24,620 words, with 19,500 coming just from the blog. Week 2 was a bit slower, and I confess I didn’t meet my writing target — I only accumulated 7054 words, with 5500 coming from the blog and the rest coming from Facebook, emails, TV episode reviews and memes. But overall? My grand total for the two weeks is 31,674. Not including a few reviews and things that will post in the next few days already. That’s two-thirds of my previous total on the blog over the last few years, and way above my yearly average alone. That’s a big GREEN for the category by itself, although the others were already green.
So, summing up, Yellow / Yellow / Red / Green. Since my green is as impressive as my red is sucky, I’m going to call it a very promising yellow so far. I have to admit, I’m surprised. I lost momentum after the first 11 days, as I started week 2. And this week I’ve mailed in my performance in a few places. Yet, overall, it’s already looking promising for my month-end report, with two more weeks of progress to come!
I like this new PolyWogg 4.0. He’s a productive little tadpole. I feel almost giddy! 🙂
The fourth on my vaguebooking list “Four related names (Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George) where only one is important”. Obviously, the four have one thing in common — the Seinfeld show! What do my 2015 goals have to do with the show? Absolutely nothing.
But the goals do have something to do with Seinfeld the person. If you do anything on goal-setting, lessons to improve habit-forming, time management, etc., it doesn’t take long before you trip over references to the “Seinfeld method”. And it does refer correctly to Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld adapted a simple monitoring technique and turned it into habit-forming gold.
Basically, you take a calendar and some goal that you want to do daily. Maybe it’s writing, maybe it’s to practice juggling, maybe it’s working out, maybe it’s eating healthy, whatever. But it has to be something that can be worked on “daily” (more or less). Then, with the calendar, every day you do your task, you get to put an X on the square. Sounds simple enough, and most gurus would stop there. But that isn’t the gold.
The gold is that Seinfeld used gamification (before there was such a word) to challenge himself — how many Xs could he do in a row without breaking the chain? How long a chain could he build? The sub-goal then is reinforced by a second goal — keep the chain growing.
Eventually, you’ll miss a day. Maybe you’ll be sick. Maybe you’ll be doing something else. Maybe you’ll forget. Again, whatever the reason, you don’t get an X. But that in and of itself isn’t a big deal because that just ended a “turn” so to speak, and now, the next day, you get to start the chain again. How many Xs will you get this time? Can you beat your last one?
So I have a large list of goals, of which I’ve revealed about 2.5. I’ve tried monitoring them before but never using the Seinfeld method. This year, it’s fully in play. I’m also going to adapt it a bit for things that I track weekly.
How many days/weeks/months in a row can I keep growing the chains?
I’m still tracking progress on each goal by month, trying out the new tracking mechanism for the year. And it is helping me visualize my goals better this year…only time will tell if it improves performance though. March should have been a good month for me, as work quieted down a bit and my goals were firmly established, and I did make progress — active on more items in total, upped my “green” rating overall. Mostly though, I’m happy about initial progress on a HUGE “soul” element…see why below!
Progress on Mind: My planning guide is done, printed, and I’ve got my trackers up and running, definitely “green” and I expect it will hover around green for the year (might dip to yellow occasionally). We did get most of our powder room done, although that is more a gift from Andrea’s parents than my own effort. A few things left to do to tick the box. I had hoped to have the ETFs done by now, along with taxes, and more done on sorting books, but didn’t do much on those this month.
Progress on Heart: I continued my support to Andrea on her M.Ed., although that is mostly just making sure she has her night free for her class. I should be doing more somehow, but not sure what that is yet…we usually divide up our chores, and there are certain jobs that are “blue” jobs, like shoveling snow and cutting grass, and some that are “pink” jobs like washing dishes, because I hate washing … and then others that are up for grabs, like laundry. And while I have been trying to do the dishes a bit more (since Andrea has been doing more laundry, a blu-ish job), I don’t think “dishes” counts as career support. I helped out a bit more at the start of the month on Jacob’s nighttime routine, but not so much near the end of the month when a cold and some blood pressure spikes just wiped me out. Equally, I fell off the wagon near the end of the month for making my lunch rather than buying it every day. And I’m annoyed that I haven’t finished the Pontiac website yet. No progress yet on a Remembrance Day party, but then again, it’s MARCH! hehehe I did kick in some cash for one of my universities as a charitable donation, and successfully earmarked it for a specific program to support.
Progress on Soul: My big “success” this month was on a specific goal. I’ve got a mixed history for spiritualism and religion, and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what I believe anymore. Or, from another perspective, my beliefs are not entirely coherent. So I came up with a unique idea — defining my core beliefs by coming up with 12 questions and asking myself them throughout the year. I’ve started work on coming up with the 12 questions first, which in and of itself is no easy matter. And while this might take awhile, I’ve also enlisted the aid of an expert — my friend Hope is a Catholic military chaplain, and I’m going to grill her like a fish about better questions. Heck, she’s got professional training in this, I might as well bribe her with food and cut my learning curve. As I said when I asked her, I’m not looking for her to give me answers, just help me come up with some better questions. I’m pretty happy with my approach so far, and I’ve got the first few questions starting to shape up pretty well. Look for more blogs on this when I go to answer them. I’ve even recruited friends on FB to help me come up with better questions.
Separate from that, I’ve done a little more work on my business model for writing, and organized myself a bit better for my HR guide (including for the actual cover), but not much tangible to show for it yet. Most of the rest are “reds” as I haven’t done anything on them yet, but I also gave myself a “red” for having a regular “new recipe” cooking night as Andrea and I have defaulted a LOT in recent weeks to not planning our dinners, just mostly doing responsive “day of” cooking that is really unexciting. Need to get back into a better groove for that, as well as ensuring the “new recipe” nights.
Progress on Body: As with January and February, most of March was a washout. And I had a bad experience with my blood pressure spiking near the end of the month — cold and flu remedies can elevate blood pressure, but Tylenol-based ones tend to cause less impact. So, I bopped along taking my Tylenol Cold/Flu stuff for three days and started to feel better, only to have my blood pressure spike and give me really really bad headaches at night. Not fun, and a little scary until I realized what was causing it. In the end, not super problematic, easy to adjust (stop taking the damn cold pills!), but the rest of the first quarter is a wash. Definitely need to be more active, and happy that the warmer weather is starting to appear.
Overall Results
January: 32 inactive; 0 RED; 0 YELLOW; 2 GREEN = 5.8% for month, 5.8% for year
February: 25 inactive; 0 RED; 6 YELLOW; 3 GREEN = 8.8% for month, 8.8% for year
March: 17 inactive; 7 RED; 6 YELLOW; 4 GREEN = 11.8% for month, 8.8 % for year
