Tag Archives: habits

Hitting my targets

In the summer of 2016 I took up archery. It was a goal of mine for many years, but it took going through 6 months of chronic fatigue to convince myself to actually follow through. Before getting a diagnosis and path back to being healthy I had many, “Is this the rest of my life?” depressing thoughts, on exhausted days of constant tiredness. Recovering from this, I realized that if I didn’t start archery then, I probably wouldn’t ever start.

Fast forward to 2018 when my job intensified and I dropped archery, but at the start of 2019, started myself on a health kick. Now, for 2021, part of my healthy living goals includes 100 days of archery, (that’s an average of 1.9 days/week over the year). And today I shot my 11th day in the first 24 days of the year, so I’m well on my way.

Also today, I shot my personal best of 270, a goal I first made 2 weeks ago.

A 300, or ten rounds of 3 arrows with a maximum score of 10 per arrow, would would be a perfect score. So now I have set a new goal of 275, with no score of 7 or lower on any arrow. Next after that will be a 280 with no score of 8 or lower. At that point I’m looking at only hitting the yellow circle of a Vegas target every time. (For scale, the yellow 9-ring is about 3 inches or less than 7¾cm diameter, and the tiny X-ring inside the 10 is about the size of a penny.)

The challenge now is that each goal is incrementally decreasing the range of error, while also being exponentially harder to do! Today was the first day that I scored 2 rounds in one day, and my first score was a lousy 250, with three 7’s and one complete miss (outside the blue 6-ring). I’m not consistent yet at 270 and while I might hit a lucky 275 soon, it could be weeks or months before I’m consistently hitting all shots inside the 8-ring.

As I get better, individual improvements will take longer and longer. Three things are helping me right now.

  1. Improvements are still coming quickly, so I’m seeing rewarding results.
  2. I have some good coaching from someone significantly better than me.
  3. I’m exceeding my expectations around how often I’m practicing.

So, being keenly aware that things will get harder; that it will be more and more challenging to hit my targets, I am going to take the time and celebrate when I hit my goals.

Today I shot a 270!

Work-Life Balance

I chatted with a friend recently and he said, “Imagine having a job that you just arrived at on time, left on time at the end of the day, and you didn’t have to think about work while you weren’t at work.”

I have to say that while I might romanticize that work/life balance, I also don’t know too many of those jobs that would appeal to me. Even if I had some kind of existential crisis and quit my job, I don’t think I’d find a new job like that anyway. So my focus for work/life balance is about finding the time to do things that fill my bucket… things that make me appreciate my home and work life; My family and friends; My health and mental well-being.

This isn’t an easy journey to do well. Living through a pandemic doesn’t make it any easier. So, find reasons to be joyful, do activities that are enjoyable, spend time (physically and digitally) with those you love.

I don’t think solitude helps, unless you are somehow enlightened. I don’t think sloth, laziness, or a bag of potato chips helps. Connections do help. Making time for others you care about is something that helps to balance you. Who can you connect with right now?

What are you waiting for?

Keeping Promises

Here is a wonderful and inspiring post by Dwight Carter, A Promise to Myself, For Myself.

Dwight decided on January 18, 2020 that he would do a workout every day for the next year, and he has now followed through on that commitment! In his post, Dwight says,

“I listened to a TEDx Talk called Winning the Mental Battle of Physical Fitness and Obesityby Dr. Ogie Shaw, and it changed my perspective on working out. One statement he made that resonated with me is, “It’s easier to work out every day than it is three days a week. Three days a week gives you too many decisions… If you are negotiating about which days to work out, it’s over.” That made sense to me. So, it was at the point that I promised myself that I was going to work out every day.”

I’ll be listening to Dr. Shaw’s TedTalk this morning on my exercise bike. Dwight goes on to share some tips that remind me a bit of ‘My healthy living goals year-end reflection, with 5 key tips‘. Those tips have allowed me to maintain my healthy living goals for another year, and I’m on track again this year.

Still, while I’ve blogged every day, and did 288 workouts last year, Dwight worked out every single day for a year. That’s impressive! Reading his post has inspired me. I realize that I’ve been slacking a bit. I’ve been waking up at inconsistent times, sometimes having to push my workout or daily meditation into the evening because the morning is too rushed. I’ve been less disciplined with my schedule.

While my goal is at least 288 workouts again this year, I’m realizing that I can do better by recommitting to my daily routine. I’m not changing my goal to daily, I already commit to daily meditation and blogging, but I’m committing to keeping my routine ‘tight’. I’m also going to stretch on my non workout days.

It’s absolutely inspiring to watch others meet their healthy living goals. I feel that Dwight has provided me with a boost at a time when, although I haven’t slacked off physically, I was beginning to slack off mentally. He has reminded me that a dedicated daily routine is what got me to meet my healthy living goals. This morning I woke up early, and I’m about to start my meditation at the time when I have been just starting to blog. Today I’ve rekindled the excitement about my routine. Thank you Dwight!

Covid daily routine

Early on in the pandemic, I read that ventilation and fresh air circulation was very good in helping to reduce spread of the virus. At that time my morning custodian was not consistent and so I had different custodians coming to the school, so I decided that I would go to each of our 5 classrooms at Inquiry Hub and open windows to start the school day. We have early morning principal meetings on Thursdays, and on that day I didn’t get around to opening the windows until just before classes started.

On this day I was able to see and chat with a lot of students on my route. So, that time slot has become my daily routine. In a couple of the classes I will end up asking students to open the windows if they are already seated nearby and I can’t access them and be socially distanced, while the other 3 room windows are always easy to access. But more than that, it puts me in every room, each morning, to say greetings and chat with students.

I know that I’m lucky to only have 5 rooms to do this in, with my other school being the online school with no physical classrooms to visit, and for some principals this would be a massive undertaking. But for me this is a wonderful way to start my day. Sometimes I just say quick good mornings, other times I get into full conversations with students.

Yesterday I spent time hearing about the progress of one of our grade 12’s who has been working on a massive project since grade 10. Monday was just a catch-up on the winter break. This routine can take me about 5 minutes or it can take over 15. No matter how long I spend, it has become a wonderful routine that starts my day off right.

Students are so confined in their movements now compared to pre-covid. Even in our small school they use 3 different entrances and have no common hallways. With things being so isolated between groups of students, this little covid inspired daily routine has really helped me connect to students in a way that I would have otherwise missed.

A step in the right direction

I used to hate the idea of new year’s resolutions. So much hype built into large and often unrealistic goals. But my healthy living goals have changed that. Today, I hit all my targets (literally with my archery goal as well as figuratively). And so I added my stickers to my chart, and am heading into my hot tub after writing this.

What matters though, as I have learned, is that I maintain my weekly goals when I’m busy at work. It’s easy to take a step in the right direction on the first day of the year, while on holiday. But this doesn’t prepare me for the year ahead like the first week back at school.

That doesn’t take anything away from my day, from the first day of 2021… it does remind me that habits are made when it’s hard to maintain habits, rather than when it’s easy. It reminds me that every step in the right direction is a good step to take.

I’ve made some great strides in meeting my healthy living goals in the past two years, and I believe I’ll do the same this year. It’s easier when I create goals that are actually attainable, and that make me feel better about myself. It’s also easier because I’ve created the time and space in my home schedule to meet my targets. The challenge isn’t doing what needs to be done, the challenge is consistently making time, and getting started. Consistently.

Healthy living goals, past and future

I shared my health living goals and results, and some helpful tips last year. And I think they are worth sharing again:

My healthy living goals year-end reflection, with 5 key tips.

Here is my calendar chart for 2020:

The one stat worth noting: Workouts

Last year: 63% (57% would have been an average of 4-days a week. I only did less than 4 days a week 3 times during the year.)

This year: 78.7% (288/366days or an average of 5.5 days a week. I only did less the 4 days twice and one of those was the week after I broke my patella.)

I barely missed mediation or a day of reading/writing. A difference of note to last year, I listened to 33 books in 2020. That’s up from 26 last year and included a lot more fiction than in previous years.

I was also consistent with intermittent fasting until I stopped doing this in October. I was dropping weight that I didn’t want to lose at that point. While at some point I might return to this form of time restricted eating, I think I’ve ingrained the habit of not snacking after dinner, but my early morning workouts leave me too hungry to do this when my last meal is usually done by 6:30pm. I’m over 25lbs lighter than I was 3 years ago and actually want to add some muscle mass this year.

Overall, I have to say that this has been a healthy year. Besides my accident, breaking my knee, I had a shoulder injury that was slow to recover, and my (chronic) back issues flared up only once for about a week. Besides that, I’d easily say that I’m the fittest I’ve been in 25+ years.

So where to now? Here’s my plan with my calendar and stickers for 2021:

Red: Exercise (continued) I know the visual of gaps in workouts pushes me. I will try to match this year’s average.

Blue: Meditation (continued +) I plan to continue to give myself a sticker for doing a guided meditation in the morning. But I also plan to give myself a second sticker if I can do a minimum of 10 minutes of unguided meditation sometime later in the day. I think for me to progress in my meditation I have to dedicate more time to staying focussed on my breath and commit to putting more hours into this.

Yellow: Writing. I don’t need to track reading anymore. I read (listen) during cardio and squeeze in more reading whenever I am doing menial tasks or driving alone. But I want to continue to advance my writing. So, one sticker for my Daily Ink blog post, and a second sticker when I do any writing beyond that. Let’s see if my sticker chart can inspire me to do more than just a daily post. At least to start, much of what I write beyond these posts may not be immediately public – so tracking with a 2nd sticker will keep me honest about how much of this I actually do).

Green: Archery. Goodbye intermittent fasting, hello hobby! After a year-and-a-half hiatus, I started shooting again and I’m loving it. It helps that I have a (socially distanced) friend coaching me a bit, and I’m seeing great results. To me this is a form of meditation. It’s also something that I started then watched get pushed asides due to being busy and not prioritizing. If I can get 100 days of shooting in next year, that would be amazing!

So while there are many reasons to throw 2020 the middle finger, I think that my healthy living sticker chart is not one of them. I know that without keeping myself honest with this system, 2020 could have been an abysmal year for my physical and mental well-being… but this charting and commitment to myself was a shining light in what was otherwise a very dark year. I hope to see equal success in 2021!

Habit tracking – what’s next?

I’ve been reevaluating my healthy living goals over this holiday break. I’ve realized that I don’t need to track a few things that I was tracking on my healthy living chart.

The yellow sticker was originally for 20 minutes minimum reading (listening to books, not podcasts), and/or writing, which I didn’t do much of until the middle of 2019, when I started writing here daily. I don’t think I’ve missed a day of writing since, and I listed to 33 books this year. So, mission accomplished… and such a regular part of my day now that I really don’t need a sticker to track this behaviour.

Also, I started tracking intermittent fasting in 2019, and continued this year. I needed at least a 14 hour gap to earn a sticker. My original goal was 5 days a week with breaks on Friday and Saturday nights when I might have snacks or drinks after dinner. I think this is really healthy but I’ve been pushing myself on my morning workouts and actually struggling to keep weight on, after years of having too much weight on me. I am now my university weight and fitter than I’ve been in about 25 years. But I struggled once we hit September to go 14 hours on most days, and while I’d get close, tracking it seems moot, because I often felt self care was not the objective of holding off on getting some food in me and feeling strong.

My other stickers are exercise and meditation. I usually worked out 5 days a week, and I know that many weeks this year, when I missed 2 workouts early on, the lack of stickers that week really motivated me to exercise daily and keep going. So this sticker reward and tracking is really working for me.

For meditation, I have been doing 10 min. guided daily, and almost have a perfect record. There are some days when I would take too long writing and do a rushed workout and forget to meditate later, having skipped my morning routine. On this break, where I’m not getting up between 5 and 5:30am, I’ve remembered to meditate after 11pm on 3 different days. I think next year I’m going to try to meditate twice daily, once guided in the morning and once silently later in the day (at least 4 days a week). Then I’ll give myself a sticker for each, so I can contrast the amount of times I meditated twice, while also tracking if I skip both on a given day.

So where am I right now with my 2021 healthy living motivation chart?

Red: Workouts (continued)

Blue: Meditation (1 or 2 stickers)

Yellow: A writing goal that I haven’t figured out yet?

Green: I don’t know yet?

Starting this chart 2 years ago has been significant in me being able to create a healthy lifestyle that I’ve been able to monitor and maintain. It’s not a light choice to make, it’s a year of dedication with significant rewards to my personal health and mental well-being. So, over the next few days, I’ll have to solidify my last two targets… and there you have it, writing this has given me something new to track… archery. Now I just need to make my writing and archery goals specific and I’ll be all set for the new year!

Trade offs

I don’t know too many people that have truly found balance in their lives. Time always seems to be in short supply, and there has always been more to do. Sometimes we need to make trade-offs, we need to prioritize what we really want to do, and be willing to give up on other things we don’t value as much.

I’m now approaching 2 years of keeping track of my fitness, reading and writing, meditation, and intermittent fasting tracking. It was another great year of meeting my healthy living goals… but it didn’t come without trade offs.

I got into archery a few years ago, but I haven’t shot an arrow in a year and a half, other than one visit to a friend up north, and we shot recurve, rather than my compound bow. I am pulling my bow out in a couple days, and while I’m excited to shoot again, I don’t have set plans to keep shooting after the holidays, because I’m not sure I can fit regular archery time into my schedule.

I have barely written on my Pair-A-Dimes blog, and did not start podcasting regularly as I hoped I would. But I’ve written here on my Daily-Ink every day since July, 2019. I’m wondering if I can give up some weekend time to podcast, because I really enjoy the learning conversations that I have.

Over the coming days, I’m going to reevaluate my healthy living goals and do another year-end reflection. However, I find myself wanting to add new goals and not take any old goals away. I find myself wanting to do more rather than making trade offs: Keeping all my previous goals AND write more, AND podcast, AND do archery, AND…

The reality is that I can’t do it all. There needs to be trade offs, there needs to be sacrifices, or my goals will be nothing more than wishful thinking… And I’ve made too much progress in reaching my goals the past two years to undermine the next year with too much on my plate.

What becomes routine

I have been writing, mediating, and exercising regularly for quite some time now. Writing and meditation are daily, while the workout is usually 5 days a week. I set my alarm for somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30 and I get up, peek at social media, then start writing.

I used to meditate first, then I realized that I wasn’t mediating as much as I was planning what I wanted to write. So I switched to writing first. Some week days I end up writing a bit more than planned and those days sometimes end up as my skipped workout days, or my workout becomes my 20 minute cardio and nothing else. I don’t ever let this happen 2 days in a row.

Recently though, it has been a bit of a scramble. I seem to be stuck going to bed later and waking up at the later end of my window. I then start my morning by checking out news and social media longer than I should before I begin writing. Today I realized that this has become part of my routine. It’s no longer a quick check to see what’s going on, it’s the first of four steps:

Procrastinate on social media, write, meditate, then workout.

This added step has made me more rushed in the morning. I’ve even skipped shaving a bit more regularly (easy to do when the only place you don’t wear a mask is inside your own office). The social media procrastination does, sometimes, inspire my writing. But more often it is just a waste of time. It’s interesting how a routine of focus and discipline can be slowly undermined by a bad habit. It’s easy to make distraction, procrastination, and entertainment part of a routine, without realizing how easily this can distract from the reason you developed that routine.

With just two more mornings of this routine before I start my two week holiday (when I won’t be getting up so early), I think I’m going to have to stick to a strict schedule to keep myself from wasting a large part of my days on a routine I usually keep to under two hours. And when I return in the new year I will need to be more disciplined about what my routine really entails.

Lazy habits form much easier than disciplined habits, and it becomes easy to make distraction part of a regular routine.

The act of writing

Twitter inspired my to write this morning. The first tweet is by Marcus Blair, but let me share some tweets by him before I get to the one that originally inspired me.

Marcus has become one of my favourite educators on Twitter. He shares tweets about what he does in the classroom and he reflects on his teaching and his interactions with his class. In a time when there is so much stress and anxiety, he shares tweets that I find uplifting, and that remind me why I wanted to get into education.

Here are 3 recent tweets by him:

The tweet that inspired me to write now was this one where Marcus reflected on his own writing:


I responded:


Then almost a couple hours later I read James Clear’s 3-2-1 weekly email and wrote this about one of the 3 quotes he shared:

The act of writing makes me a better writer. The commitment to this act every  single day is itself a reward, making me feel like I’ve accomplished something before I even start my work day.

Yes, some mornings it is really hard to get started. There have been days that I’ve spent more time thinking than writing. Yes, there have been days when I’ve had to rush or even postpone my morning workout because I was too slow to get my writing started, or too long winded to finish what I was writing in a timely manner. Yes, some things I’ve written should have been left unwritten. But sometimes… sometimes my writing speaks to me. Sometimes it is metaphorically a song I had to sing. Sometimes the act of writing is a form of expression that leaves me feeling like I’ve added something worth sharing with the world.

For those moments I write. Not for the actual contribution I’ve shared, but for the feeling I get sharing it. Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.