Month: May 2018

Last week, I wrote a post about how it took me almost 32 years to start setting goals.

I mentioned that I would eventually share my goals for the year once I had them written out on paper.

Well, it turns out I had already completed this task at the beginning of the year to present to the mastermind group I’m in.

In said mastermind, we usually share our weekly wins and challenges when we meet every week. But at the beginning of every new year, we review the previous year and share our goals for the year to come.

I separated my goals into business goals and personal goals, and today I’ll be sharing my personal goals, as well as my progress so far.

Personal Goals

• Waking up at 6am 5 times per week
• Journal every day
• More trips than I went on in 2016
• Guitar for 15 minutes a day, 3 times per week
• Meditation 5 times per week
• Read one new book a month, no business books in consecutive months
• Find an office or dedicated video production space
• Pick up a new sport or hobby

As you can see, I’ve been able to consistently meet about half of my personal goals for 2018.

While I haven’t been able to consistently wake up at 6am (it comes in waves), I think I will be able to accomplish this in the latter half of the year.

My system has been to leave my phone (aka alarm clock) in the bathroom so that I’m forced to not only get out of bed, but also go to the room where I can quickly splash water on my face and take a shower.

The number of trips I take is still TBD, since a lot of them aren’t planned out too far in advance.

As far as reading goes, I’ve really dropped the ball.

For one, I’m still only reading non-fiction.

Secondly (and the bigger issue), I’m simply not making the time to read.

My hunch is that screens are to blame here.

I read on my phone. I read on my computer. I read on my Kindle.

I can’t escape the damn screens, which makes me think I just need to force myself to start reading physical books again.

Yes, I love the convenience of being able to download any book instantly, not having to carry around any extra weight, highlighting and saving notes in one unified place, and not taking up the finite space in my Shoebox apartment, but this is really where the benefits of eBooks end for me.

I’m not getting away from the screens.

I’m not able to flip to random pages.

I have to worry about battery life.

Why make reading harder than it already is?

/tangent

The last personal goal of mine is to find a dedicated office space that I can work on both of my businesses.

I’ve considered WeWork in the past, but considering I already have an insane amount of expenses in this high cost-of-living city, it’s been really hard to justify paying at least $400/month for a shared workspace.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind sharing at all.

The main issue is that I would like to have a workspace that could double as a small video production studio.

I currently shoot many of my videos for Coffee Concierge in my horribly lit kitchen, which already has less space than my bathroom.

This just doesn’t work, especially if I’m going to scale and improve my content creation.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find this dream space where I currently live, but if I’m ever going to be able to find it, I will need to work with what I have so I can hopefully budget for it in the future.

I’ll check in on my business goals tomorrow. Hint: so far it has been a much bigger struggle.

I made it to 18 consecutive days of meditation before the streak finally ended on Sunday.

It’s ironic that I couldn’t find the time for it on such a leisurely day, picnicking at Lake Merritt.

I guess socializing demands just as much attention as a typical work day.

Memorial Day was my second consecutive day of not meditating, so I officially have a streak in a negative direction.

A negative streak, if you will.

How’s that for a pessimistic approach?

Still, I think it’s good to be as aware of our bad streaks as we are of our good streaks. This way, we have a growing count of the things we probably shouldn’t be doing.

From here, we can use these negative streaks as an incentive to “get back on the horse” and start a new streak in a positive direction.

For me, I have a two-day negative streak for both my writing and meditation habits. I also have about a 4-5 day negative streak for journaling before bed (last night’s excuse was not being able to find a pen, lame).

The good news is that it only takes one day of practice to start a streak back in the positive direction.

I’m a few hundred words away from getting my writing habit back on track, and by the end of the day I expect to start a new journaling and meditation streak.

It was definitely deflating ending an 18-day streak, but missing two consecutive days is far better than never meditating again.

A friend of mine told me that she had a 367-day meditation streak. However, since the streak ended, she hasn’t gotten back on the horse.

She says that there was something so psychologically deflating about it, that she feels she can’t get started again.

But I think starting over is the most important thing one can do.

Starting again is what really proves you’ve developed a habit. Otherwise, you’re only doing what you’re doing for the streak itself, right?

We should probably start measuring our progress more in terms of the percentage of days we’ve completed a task rather than the number of consecutive days.

Sure, 18 consecutive days of meditation sounds like a big accomplishment, but how good does it sound when you find out that it’s only 18 of the last 365 days?

So if you’re feeling bummed about a positive streak coming to an end, try:

1. Counting your negative streaks
2. Calculating your habit as a percentage (# of days completed/# of days not completed)

I’m going to keep these things in mind as I move forward this week.

Either way, I’m gonna keep getting back on that horse.

I’ve always kind of internally rolled my eyes at the concept of goal-setting.

I’m not exactly sure why this was the case, but my guess is that I’ve just always assumed that a rough idea of where I want to go is good enough, as long as I’m taking steps toward that abstract “place”.

The problem with this is that while I may be moving closer to these abstract goals, it’s happening at a slow, meandering pace.

Since I have pretty liberal control over how I spend my time, I should be using this to my advantage as a catalyst to getting where I want to go.

But I haven’t really known where I want to go.

I figured knowing where I didn’t want to go was good enough.

And sure, knowing what you don’t want is arguably just as important (if not more important) than knowing what you do want.

When I was fresh out of college, I spent a lot of time uncovering the things I didn’t want.

I didn’t want to be another depressed sardine on the train, commuting two hours to a job I hated, 5 times a week.

I didn’t want to have someone a year older (and arguably, dumber) than me, treating me like a peon.

I didn’t want to have to answer to entitled parents about disciplining their spoiled children.

I didn’t want to learn esoteric software in the trenches of the slow-moving and often, unrewarding world of academia.

My intolerance to doing things I don’t like has been something that has quickly steered me in the right direction. But the “right direction” has always come by accident, since I’ve never really had a concrete roadmap for where I want to go.

So today I’m putting my lack of goal-setting to rest. And what better way to do that than share my goals publicly to an audience that doesn’t exist.

OK, I lied. I’m not quite ready for that because I don’t want to rush or intermingle this project with my daily writing habit.

However, I will get started on putting these goals together today.

Once I have something I’m satisfied with, I will post it here on the interwebs so I’m held accountable by at least myself, and maybe you?

I’m trying my best to not turn this into personal journal, since this really holds no value to anybody else who stumbles upon this, but the 6am wake-up I’m aiming for was easy today.

This was ironic in a way, because I went to bed with a somewhat negative and deflated feeling.

I left my actual journal downstairs and couldn’t even be bothered to write in it before bed, as I usually do. I feared I would just unleash more negativity, so I really just wanted to put the day to bed (kinda literally).

I guess when my alarm went off this morning, I was simply motivated to not repeat yesterday.

Of course, I can’t predict what will happen throughout the day, nor how I will feel, but I felt pretty certain that getting my day started early would set a good tone for the rest of the day.

So far, I’m feeling good about it.

I’m writing this post at 8:39am as I type these words, exactly one full hour earlier than yesterday! Makes sense, considering I woke up 1 hour later than I did today.

*Pats self on back*

OK, I promise to shift away from personal-journal mode now.

It has been said that we all have different times of the day where we are in our most focused, optimal state.

Some of us function better in the morning, some of us function better at night. This isn’t a new concept.

But how many of us actually know if we’re better morning people or evening people? It’s easy for one to say they’re not a morning person if they haven’t ever bothered getting out of bed before 7am.

And what the hell makes someone a “morning person” anyways?

I don’t think anyone likes being woken up from a deep slumber. Is enjoying this struggle the pre-requisite to being a morning person?

I would think that you can’t draw a conclusion about when you function at your best until you’ve been awake for at least an hour or two, and tried it more than one day.

In other words, we don’t give mornings a fair chance!

Evening people are presumably awake for many hours before they are doing their best work, morning people are not.

Evening people have likely worked more in the evening than they have in the morning.

So here’s what I think would be helpful in determining one’s optimal working hours:

1. Spend two weeks working for 2 hours in the morning*
2. Spend two weeks working for 2 hours in the evening

*give yourself at least an hour to wake up

Since most of us have day jobs, I’m not talking about the kind of work we do every day. I’m talking about “hustle” work. The work we squeeze in during the hours we are tempted to be doing something else (sleeping, netflix and chill, staring at our phones on the couch, etc.).

By giving each time of day its fair share, we can truly prove if we are indeed morning or evening persons.

I’ll do the same and report back.

As I type my first words here, it’s 9:39am.

Considering I was out of bed at 7am this morning, this is pretty insane to me. 2 hours and 39 minutes later, and my work day finally begins.

This basically means that my morning routine took 2 hours and 39 minutes.

Sure, there were some atypical events this morning that are not part of my usual routine, but atypical events are pretty much exactly what life is.

The amount of things I want to do in a given day simply can’t be achieved from a late start.

Personally, I’m defining a late start as waking up after 8am.

When I wake up at 8am, my workday may not start until 10am (at the earliest). And by that point I really only have a 2-hour window before it’s time to eat again and start the latter half of the day.

I like to take my time in the morning.

A 2+ hour morning routine may sound absurd to many people, but what if it made us 2x, 5x, or 10x more productive and/or fulfilled for the rest of the day?

Would it be worth it at that point?

6am has been my on-and-off target for many years now, and if I could just get it to stick I’d be a pretty happy camper.

Resisting the urge to get back in bed or hit the snooze button is a battle every single day, so consider this post as a written plea to myself to get up early every day.

OK, maybe not a plea, but a positive reminder that waking up early is worth it to me.

It reminds me of exercising.

For whatever reason, at times it can be really difficult getting your workout clothes on or making the short commute to the gym. But once you start exercising, you start to feel a lot better.

And then when you’re finished exercising, you feel great about yourself. There are zero regrets.

To me, it’s the exact same thing with waking up early.

The moment your alarm goes off, you feel like death. But after splashing some water on your face, brushing your teeth, getting the coffee brewing…you feel better and better.

Yes, I realize many of us then have to commute to a job we might hate, but if we got up a little bit earlier to simply take the extra time for ourselves, wouldn’t the work day be easier?

The alternative of getting a little bit of extra sleep feels nice in the moment, but what does it really do for us in the long run?

Personally, I’d rather get a bit more out of my waking hours than my sleeping hours.

So let’s see how I do this week. 6am for Tuesday to Friday?

We’ll see how it goes…😳

I’m not really used to life operating at a slow pace.

It seems that the older I get, the faster shit flies from all kinds of different directions.

Thoughts, bills, family, events, etc. I guess this is just part of adulthood.

But as life gets more complicated, do we really get better at managing it?

It seems that most of us are simply concerned with advancing our careers/making more money to somehow combat everything that is coming at us from every direction.

But how much time do we actually spend on developing ourselves outside of work?

And should personal development always come second to professional development?

As a self-employed individual, I’m certainly at an advantage when it comes to making decisions about how much time to allocate to work vs. personal development.

Still, I find that I catch myself being self-critical if I take an hour out of my work day for a walk in the park or a midday Krav Maga class.

But if I really start to think about it, is physical activity ever a bad use of one’s time?

If exercise releases endorphins, doesn’t this carry over to our work when we finally return to it?

Even a simple walk gives us time to think without the incessant distractions that come from the work place.

Work Comes and Goes, But You Are a Constant

As I write this post, I’m technically not “working” on my day job. But my day job is constantly changing, and many of these changes are outside of my control.

I can’t control if a client decides to cut their advertising budget.

I can’t prevent the economy from tanking.

But I can control my personal development, regardless of what’s happening with work. And considering my feelings on a personal level play a big role in my feelings at a professional level, I’m not going to beat myself up if I’m spending a lot of time on myself.

I don’t want to only be remembered for what I did as a professional. It’s more important for me to be remembered for who I was as an individual.

So if you’re taking time to work on yourself at the expense of work, remind yourself that a) the time you spend on yourself is likely helping you more than hurting you at a professional level and b) it’s not worth sacrificing who you are as an individual in order to appease a job or career that can change at any point for reasons outside of your control.

I understand that we all have bills to pay and mouths to feed. I am definitely not exempt from this living in a city with an insane cost of living and in a state where it’s very expensive to be a business owner.

Still, I’m ok with sacrificing income in the short run if I know I will be better off physically and mentally in the long run.

When you’re healthy and in a good state of mind, it’s easier to  solve problems at both a personal and professional level.

What do you think?