Tag Archives: habits

Summer mode

There are still a few things I need to do before I go full into summer mode. Most I’ll get done this week, but a few items will drag into next week. But I’m already feeling distracted and like I’m slowing down. I don’t feel very efficient right now.

Part of this is the routine woes that I already spoke about. I have tried to keep my routines, but it’s 6:30am and I’m usually done writing and meditating by now. I’ve already pushed my workout later in the day twice and missed a workout this week, and it’s only Thursday.

Part of me knows it has been a long year and I’m partially checked out, which is easy to do going to a building where there are no students or teachers, and even my secretaries have been relocated for summer. Part of me feels like I’m just being lazy. No matter how I look at it, I’m less productive than I should be. Yesterday I checked two things off of my ‘To Do’ list and I added two more. Today I hope to add nothing new and just check off a few more.

One item I’m excited to do will have to wait. It’s a series of lessons I’m developing based on James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. I want to create 10 two-to-three minute lessons to run over 2 weeks, with a goal of students starting a good habit that they decide on. My whiteboard in my office has had most of the concept and plan on it all year, but I really need some uninterrupted planning time to get it from idea to reality, and my ‘to do’ list is too big of a distraction right now. Still, I’m excited to get this ready for September, and I know I’ll be coming into my office to get it done over the break.

But for right now, I need to stay in work mode and get stuff done. Summer holidays won’t feel like holidays until I can put my ‘away from office’ notification on my email. Until then, I need to push summer mode to the side.

Routine woes

It’s the last day of school for teachers, and although I will be in next week I’ve already started to alter my early morning schedule. No workout this morning and the latest I’ve written for this blog on a school day since I started writing daily in the summer of 2019.

This is a bit of a wake up call for me. My pattern for workouts and meditation start to fall apart in the summer when I break my work routine. I don’t want that to happen (again) this summer so I’m going to need to build in a regular routine that works. I used to think routines were boring, now I realize they help me get stuff done.

One routine I broke this year is archery. I haven’t shot arrows in a couple months. I haven’t been upset about it, I let it go because everything felt overwhelming and I decided writing, fitness, and meditation were more important. I hope to build archery back into my summer routine… I just need to figure out what that routine will look like.

I’ve got one more week to figure it out.

You build habits on your bad days

I touched on this in my post, Just show up:

We live in a society now where there is so much pressure to do well; to be your best; to shine. It’s not easy. But sometimes the message doesn’t have to be ‘you are awesome’, ‘you have so much potential’, or ‘push yourself’. Sometimes the message of ‘just show up’ is all we need to hear.

  • Don’t plan an hour workout, just show up at the gym.

  • Don’t worry about how much you have to do, just start.

I’d like to expand on this idea a bit. When you ‘really really don’t want to go’ to the gym or start your workout, you still need to go. You don’t need to do anything amazing, you just need to get started and know that you are doing something good.

Not going is a slippery slope to a bad habit. If you decide not to go or get started when you ‘really really don’t want to’, that makes it easier to not go when you ‘really don’t want to’. And that makes it easier not to go when you ‘kinda don’t want to’… and so it becomes easier to break the habit.

It’s easy to maintain a habit when you are having good days, it’s the bad days that are the problem. It’s the bad days that break the pattern, or that solidify your commitment. Doing the hard work on the tough days are what keep good habits going.

Some days you’ve got to play your ‘B’ game rather than your ‘A’ game. An excuse that you are not up to your ‘A’ game is not a good enough reason to not show up. On the contrary, your ‘A’ game gets better when you do the work even on your bad days

If it’s important

I love this quote, “If it’s important, you’ll find  a way.  If not,  you’ll find an excuse.”

It’s similar to this Derek Sivers quote I recently shared,

“I have a concept that says that your actions reveal your values better than your words. So no matter what you say you want to do, your actions show what your values really are.”

Eight years ago I created an image for a presentation I was doing:

Here is the blog post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog about the slide and the presentation. The concept is simple: If something is important to you, you will find your way and if it’s not important enough, you’ll find reasons not to change. The greater the challenge to change, the more important it needs to be to find your way rather than finding an excuse.

A couple days later, I added two more images and shared them in a post: Leading Change – 3 Images

I think I used these three images in every presentation I did for the next few years. I wasn’t thinking about forced changes like the pandemic created, I was thinking about changes we want to create. I was thinking about the potential we envision, and how we fight the systems and habits that make excuses easier than change.

It’s easy to be a cheerleader for change. It’s much harder to spend the time removing barriers and working with the resistors of change to make it as important to them as it is to the rest of your team.

It can’t just be important to you.

Master the art of showing up

The biggest change I’ve made to taking care of myself in the past few years is this:

“When determining the size or complexity of a new habit ask yourself, “What can I stick to—even on my worst day?”

Start there. Master the art of showing up. Then advance.” ~ James Clear

I’m not in the mood to work out today, but I’ll go get on my row machine for 10 minutes. That would be it, but I’m also going to run the weight club this morning and I’ll do a bit of weights. Then one of our students ends the session leading us through 15 minutes of yoga.

I could skip the row machine, I’ve got an excuse, I’m doing weight club. But how hard is it to do 10 minutes on the row machine listening to my audiobook? It’s faster than 20 minutes on the bicycle or treadmill. These are the minimums I allow myself. I know I can do these things even when I don’t want to. I know that I don’t have to go all out, I just have to put in the time. That’s what I can do on my worst day… I can go through the motions for 10 or 20 minutes.

Sometimes that’s all I really do… go through the motions. But more often than not, after planning to do just the minimum, I end up pushing myself just a little harder than expected. The plan is to show up, but I do more. That’s what happens when you master the art of showing up.

So just show up, and maybe you’ll do more. You just need to commit to showing up and doing the minimum, and being ok with when that’s all you do. Be happy with this low bar on your low days… and you’ll be amazed how often you achieve more.

Just do it… just show up!

Sometimes it will suck

I’m going to have to rush my morning routine because I’ve been writing ideas for my blog and each one of them will require more time than I have this morning to write them. So, I give them a title and shove them into my drafts for another day when I will be up earlier. And then I stared at the blank page, stuck.

On days like this I think of Seth Godin, who has written over 7,000 posts in his daily blog. Something that he wrote sticks with me… no matter how much you write, 50% of your work will be the worst 50%. You can’t escape this fact. So don’t worry about what you write, just write… and so today I’ll accept this post as the bottom half, but I am metaphorically putting pen to paper and I’ll hit ‘Publish’ soon. And maybe tomorrow I’ll put something in the top 50%… or at least the top 50% for now… because after another few thousand posts, who knows where it will rank?

Letting go of the worry of how good my writing is allows me to feel freer, and more open to sharing ideas. There is a time and place to think of just the right words, crafting an idea or even a sentence just the right way. And there are times to start writing and letting the words flow with little thought of how good the writing is. Sometimes suck is far better than stuck.

A messy desk

I’m not good with paper. I tend to have a desk filled with not-so-neatly piled papers. The piles accumulate and accumulate, then about 2 months after my last desk clean I look for something on my desk and I can’t find it, and that’s my cue that it’s time to clean it up again. Before that point, someone can ask me for something and I instantly find it, even if I have to go down a few layers. But when I have to start searching, not knowing where something is, that is no longer acceptable.

I also write notes on post-its and tend to have anywhere from 6-12 of them on the go at any time. It’s not efficient, and could be a lot more effective. I’ll find a first name and a phone number on a post-it note and have no memory of who the person is, and what I called them about. But, I didn’t throw the post-it away and it’s on my desk two months later.

I remember taking an organization course online that taught a filling system where everything went into a monthly folder. I failed to use this effectively for about 3 months, but the useless folders stayed on my desk for many more months after that… just a constant reminder of my inability to use them effectively.

Starting this coming week I’m going to try something new. I’m going to set two daily alarms, one in the morning and one in the late afternoon. The morning alarm will be to tidy my post-its so that I have a maximum of two post-its on my desk, with one being my ‘To-Do’ list for the day. My afternoon alarm will be to organize any paper that came my way, and get it in a folder or off my desk.

I’m setting a calendar reminder to look back at this post 2 months from now, that should be long enough to see what my desk looks like after after I do the clean-up on Monday.

Breaking the routine

I forgot to meditate yesterday. Thats fine if it’s just once and I get back to a routine, if I started a nice long streak today. But that’s my 7th time in a month I forgot, which would normally be how many I miss in 4-6 months. This suggests to me that the habit I had is no longer a habit.

A lesson that I used to follow from Atomic Habits was habit stacking. I used to write this post, then immediately meditate, then immediately do my cardio exercise. I actually started the stack with meditation, but I had to switch because I found that if I hadn’t written first, I spent my meditation actually thinking about writing rather than focusing on meditation.

Recently I’ve been writing at different times of the day, like just before bed. And I’ve been waking up later than planned, or spending an hour of my morning shovelling the driveway… My habit stack, my pattern of accomplishing 3 daily healthy living goals in a row, has been broken.

I’m reminded of this motivational quote, though a quick search didn’t lead to an author to give credit to:

“If it is important, you will find a way. If not, you will find excuses.”

I explained the reason(s) I have been missing my meditation a lot, but ultimately those reasons are just excuses. If this goal of meditating every day truly is something I want to do, if it’s really important to me, I will find a way.

If I break my stack, if I don’t meditate as part of my morning routine, I will immediately set an alarm on my phone to remind me to meditate at night. But the best thing I can do is my morning habit stack, and on that note, I’m off to meditate. Because the best day to start a new streak is today!

~~~___~~~___~~~___

Related: I just remembered that I shared that quote before on my post: Leading Change – 3 Images, which is a concept that I’ve used in presentations, and have thought a fair bit about since writing it back in 2014. I’m going to use the first image to go with this post, (which email subscribers to my blog won’t see unless they go to my blog).

Healthy living goals reflection 2021

It’s that time of year again when I look back at my healthy living goals sticker chart, and also plan for next year.

This was the post at the end of 2020. And this was for 2019, the year I started this.

2021 in review:

Workouts: 287days or 78.6%

Writing: Daily blog 100%

Meditation: 346 days or 94.8%

Archery: 129 days or 35.3% (Goal was 100 days so actually 129%.)

This was an awesome year for fitness. I am about 6-8 pounds heavier, with a fair bit of increase in size in my upper body and small but noticeable increases in my quads. I feel fit and strong, and I think I only had a couple minor slow downs from back pain, with minimal recovery time. I still need to stretch more, and I still rely a bit too much on deep massage therapy to keep the pain away, but I know that slow, careful strength progress, and more time using my standing desk at work, has significantly reduced the amount of regular pain I’ve had to deal with in my lower back.

Last year I did one more workout in the year… but it was a leap year so I’m going to call it even. I hope to maintain this next year too. Working out slightly more than 3 out of every 4 days for a full year is an excellent goal.

My daily blog has been going strong since July 2019… and while I could probably stop tracking this, I want to keep it as a goal for next year. The chart is a good motivator, and there is nothing wrong with having one of my goals be something that I commit to every single day.

Meditation: I missed 13 days from January to November, and 6 more in December. It has not been a good month for meditation. My goal this year was supposed to be tracking days when I meditate more than once to increase my time. I did this 6 times in January and didn’t continue. It did not become a habit. This year I want to increase the total time by going longer than 10 minutes on weekends, and doing more self-guided meditations mid week, so that mini lessons on the Calm App are not part of my meditation time. This is a more realistic way to take my daily meditation to the next level.

Archery was a new goal this year and I hoped to shoot a total of 100 days. I’m thrilled that I hit 129 days, and my goal next year will be 120.

So, no new goals next year, just a couple adjustments on my current goals. I do plan to write more, but I’m going to calendar that, rather than chart it. So 2022 will be about keeping the good habits going… if you have a few goals you’d like to track, buy yourself a year long calendar and make it happen! (Here are my tips.)

May your 2022 be amazing!

The 65 percent that makes it happen

I’ve been up for almost an hour and a half. On a regular work day, I would have written this post, meditated, and would be at least half-finished my workout. I’m still lying down with my phone in my hand. I barely have time to write this before heading out to archery (which is good because this is another healthy living goal that I have), But dang, this messes my day up. I’ll need to set a timer for tonight or I’ll forget to meditate. And I don’t know if I’ll have time to work out.

Before imbedding these habits into my work days, I used to only work out regularly during the holidays and would always stop my good routines during my ‘busy times’… and I seemed to get busy a lot! Now I know that my morning routine prepares me for a good day, and sets me up for success during my busiest of times. Then a get on holidays and my routines all fall apart.

This no longer works for me. I need to update my thinking and my habits and routines on my breaks. Saying this ‘out loud’ is a first step, but follow through is important. If I’m occasionally going to skip a workout, that’s ok. If I’m going to miss a morning workout and think about trying to make it up all day, that’s annoying and not very restful. I’m not on holidays from my healthy living goals, and I don’t want to be.

Knowing this isn’t half the battle, it’s the first 10% of the battle. Committing to a routine is the next 65% of the battle… that’s the real work. And the last 25%? That’s the effort put into the routine, and that’s allowed to fluctuate. Committing the time and getting there, that’s the work that brings the rewards… and lets me start my day in a positive way, whether I’m working or on holidays.