In Which I Ramble About Personal Projects and Such

This is a fairly stream-of-consciousness post where I ponder how to fit all the things I want to do into my day.  Enjoy it for what it is.

I spend most of my evenings doing "free-time" activities, mostly consisting of browsing the Internet, playing computer games and watching TV.  On occasion, I have been known to read a book.  Of course, there are times when something needs to be addressed and I take care of it.  But, for the most part, it leads to an evening that, while enjoyable, is devoid of any other benefit than entertainment.

I have things I plan and dream about, but don't take the time to implement.  Special events are good for addressing those times, like when I was able to leverage NaNoWriMo during November last year and wrote 50k words in a month.  But, that rough draft of a novel is in desperate need of editing, and I just cannot seem to find the time to even look at it again.  I have ideas for video games I'd like to write, but am not writing them.

Important things are being neglected: I don't exercise at all.  Really, I should be doing some sort of minimal exercising daily, but just cannot find the time.

I think I need to schedule things a little better.  If I can create a routine that I follow, it might make it easier.  Fortunately, since I have a daughter and have a routine for her, it might be easier to leverage her routine and plug my elements in as needed.

The first thing to address is my neglect of exercise.  While I have time to do this in the evening, it isn't normally considered a good idea to workout so close to bedtime.  So, that leaves me with the options of working out at lunch, or getting up earlier and working out before work.  Lunchtime is pretty limited with regard to how much time I can spend, and I would definitely need a shower if I did a full-fledged workout at lunchtime.  So, that leaves the morning. 

For me, the holy grail of getting more things done seems to be getting up an hour early, in that it is the solution to all my problems, while also being completely unattainable.  We have a fairly decent routine of the whole household waking up at 7am because of a shared alarm.  However, we are all still dragging our feet when it comes to getting up at that time.  If I was, somehow, able to follow through with my mythical "get up early and do x, y or z" plan, I would have every goal I ever set for myself accomplished before I even really began the day.  Whether or not it is attainable, this is really the ideal time for exercise for me.  I think I will have to just keep trying to get up early until it finally "sticks."

The other things I want to take care of are easy to place time wise, at least in theory.  Really, after Katy goes to bed, I should spend x amount of time on editing my book and y amount of time working on my video game development.  Problem with that is, Katy is in bed at 8:15: if I assume a minimum of an hour for each task, it is suddenly 10:15, not leaving much time for other things.  I tend to either give something all or nothing, and I switch between the modes.  When I was writing my novel in November, I really didn't spend time doing anything else.  Now, I am spending no time the novel at all.  Finding a happy medium and maintaining it I think would be a preferable strategy.

I come home for lunch nearly every day.  If I spent my lunch hour editing my novel, that would give about 30-45 minutes a day.  That would free up time after work for also making progress on my video game development.

Something that I have been doing at work is closely tracking my time.  Not only which projects I am spending time on, but also which tasks on those projects.  The very act of recording the time makes me aware of how I am spending it and makes it easier for me to look for other, smaller tasks to fill in gaps.  I am considering trying to log my non-work hours in a similar way, just to see how I am spending my free time.  It might become obvious how I can fit other things more easily into my day, or what I can cut out or reduce.

100 Drop

Boy, it was easy to fall off the 100 Push Ups wagon.  I stalled about week four and never got back into the swing of it.  My interest just never recovered and I'm not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing; push ups are good, but they are a very specific way to exercise and there are probably better, more inclusive ways to work out.

Something that has gotten my attention lately has been Crossfit.  The ideology there is to focus on increasing Power output by working not just focusing on strength.  They post a daily workout that looks like it is rarely the same, which is good because my major hangup about working out is that I get bored and it feels like work too often.  I think that I will try to get some of the minimal equipment I am missing to effectively do this.

I suspect that doing the daily exercise on a regular basis will help me achieve the 100 push up mark indirectly.

One Hundred Pushups

In my ongoing pursuit of self-improvement, I stumbled upon a website, onehundredpushups. The concept is that by following the simple program laid out on the site, after six weeks you should be able to do 100 uninterrupted push ups. Since I have been trying to do push ups in the morning when I wake up, anyways, I figured that this would be a fun way to motivate me to actually continue doing it every morning.

Today, I did the initial test, which is to do as many push ups as you can. I got to 31. I think I might have been able to get a couple more if I pushed myself, but I would like to start the program Monday morning and didn't want to deplete my energy reserves too much. At any rate, it puts me at Level 4.

Monday morning, I am going to begin Week 1. I'll report my progress later.

Morning: My Enemy, My Friend

A number of my resolutions for this year are going well, and some others are suffering a bit: While I now seem to be reading all the time, I have loss some of my interest in maintaining my exercise routine. The cooking plan needs to be revisited, and since we've returned from our ski trip, I'm much less likely to clean dishes in the sink, for whatever reason. I'm pretty aggressive making phone calls, but there is still a backlog of items I need to call someone about. My writing is clearly not meeting the frequency of thrice a week, but I am more likely to engage in parties/events that I would not normally be excited about.

Some of the problem, I think, has to do with the time of day at which I am trying to tackle these activities. Since I work during the day, and have tended to not be an early riser, the obvious time to tackle these activities is the evening. However, by the end of the day, after a full day of work, I am no longer interested in pursuing my goals; I just want to take a break. When I do convince myself to work on getting things done, it is rarely enjoyable and feels like I am stealing from my relaxation time.

Now, obviously, some things still need to happen in the evening, but I should be able to leverage my mornings better than I have been. My normal routine has been to set the alarm for whenever, hit snooze a million times and get up in a rush. Most of the time, Kendra has, thankfully, already gotten Katy ready and dressed and she is eating breakfast. So, the first step was to condition myself to pay attention to my alarm and stop going back to sleep instead of getting up.

What inspired my adventures into early morning rising started here at a great website I found through Google Reader called LifeHacker. Reading through the suggestions, the most prevalent idea seemed to be setting multiple alarms, with at least one placed across the room. The idea being that once you are up to turn off the alarm, you might as well stay up since there is no point of getting back into bed. However, I have tried this and it requires too much reasoning for my early-morning, befuddled mind to comprehend and I would arise from the bed, zombie-march to the alarm, disable it and then return to bed as if nothing had happened.

Something I have had success with in the past has been psyching myself up for getting up at a particular time the next day: expressing the urgency of getting up as soon as the alarm goes off, else I will miss the important event that was scheduled for early morning the next day. If I do this immediately prior to going to sleep, I have never had trouble getting up at the desired time, as long as there really was an urgent event occurring. Trying to psych myself to get up early for something like exercise has always been met with laughable results.

However, mulling over these two ideas helped me think of a new plan: I set my bedside alarm to 7am. I also set another alarm, the one on my wristwatch, to 7:11am and leave that in the master bathroom. After I set the alarms, and am getting into bed, I remind myself that when the bedside alarm goes off, I should turn it off, not press snooze, since a snooze would bring me to 7:09am and then I'd have only two minutes before the other alarm. Additionally, I tell myself that, while I don't necessarily need to get up right when the alarm goes off, I shouldn't go back to sleep so I can get up before the other alarm, the wristwatch, goes off. Thus, I have the multiple alarms, with one out of reach of the bed, combined with a generated sense of urgency: not wanting the other alarm to go off.

While it doesn't seem like much, the previously stated befuddled nature of my mind in the morning accepts the explanations instead of trying to delve into the complexity of the situation without coffee. Starting last week Monday, I have been up by 7:11am at the latest, with needing to rely on the watch alarm to re-wake me only once. So far this week, my body is already conditioned so that I am waking up a few minutes before my alarm and am up and out of bed as soon as it goes off.

As a further precaution, I have added a third alarm, my cellphone, set to 7:30am and left on the counter in the kitchen, downstairs from my bedroom; this third alarm has, thus far, only been used to note the time and mark the beginning of our exit from home in the morning, but it could serve as an emergency "last call" wake up, if need be.

Now, instead of being the last one up, it is a tossup between Katy and me as to who will be the first out of bed. Katy had gotten used to climbing into Mom and Dad's bed in the morning and watching cartoons, but now she is often getting into bed after I am already dressed. I miss the snuggling a bit, but we have a more relaxed, pleasant, wakeful morning together this way.

With this added time, I am now always the first downstairs and can prepare her lunch before she gets dressed. She gets to school on time to eat breakfast with her friends and I get to work earlier and get more accomplished during the day: the early hours always seem the most productive to me.

A couple of days ago, I read another item through Google Reader that was about early morning exercises. The suggestion was that you could be more awake with a little exercise in the morning; specifically, it suggested three sets of as many push ups as you can do. If that gets you going, you can do some scissor kicks for a quick core workout. Starting little, I did the push ups this morning and still got to work earlier than I had these past two weeks. While it isn't a ton of exercise, I should be able to incorporate this into my morning routine and workout five times a week instead of my goal of just two.

Now that I am conditioned to wake up early, my family is also getting accustomed to it. My plan is to get the whole family awake and ready to go early enough so that I can bike to work twice a week, on Thursdays and Fridays, and let Kendra take Katy to school. Kendra normally does things outside of the house on Thursdays and Fridays and it would even give her a head start on them. In addition to the extra exercise I'll get from the bike ride, I'll also be using 2/5ths less gas per week than I normally would have, thus saving money as well.

I don't count the time in the morning before work as anything other than "getting ready for work" time, so incorporating other activities is a easy thing to do that I will not psychologically be opposed to. Next week, the twice weekly bike riding to work is planned to start. After that, I may consider trying to get up a half hour earlier to get some of the things done that I really don't want to spend time on in the evening.

Easier Said Than Done

Despite our best intentions, Kendra and I have not had a chance to get to the YMCA for a workout. And, since we are going to have Kathryn babtised at St. Francis this weekend, we will be spending our evening tonight gathering and packing items for the trip. Hopefully, we will be able to get in a workout on Monday when we get back.

The Apprentice

Sammy got kicked off last night, thank God. He was completely worthless and totally annoying. It seems like everyone on the show agrees with me, too; they elected him to be the leader of the project with the hope that he would fail and be the one to take the blame. I love reality TV. :)

Young Man...

On Monday, we stopped by the local YMCA, took the tour and decided to join. A big factor in joining the Y over some other health club is the three free hours of child care provided during your visit. Now, Kendra and I will be able to enjoy a quality workout together without having to worry about Katy. We are planning our first workout for right after work today; it should prove to be interesting.