The Art and Science of Starting

Day 10 of 60

It’s the little things that are vital. Little things make big things happen

10 days ago, I created a list of what I wanted to focus on over the next 60 days. Like I said, inconsistencies were bound to be there and if along the way my goals changed I was/still am flexible enough to shift focus.

So here’s how my first 10 days have been:

a. Physical Health

1. Sit ups and push ups: 40 push ups and 40 sit ups done, an average of 4 of each a day
2. Laps: 4 laps done. Quit laps for a minute because I was advised it would cause drastic weight loss. I’m looking to pack kilos not loose
3. Eating one planned meal each day: Really been lazy on this front and it’s probably something I need to focus on. I’d say I was consistent on this for 3 days then I lost track. Need to do better here
4. Glass of water: Been drinking at least one glass of water consistently for the last 10 days

b. Spiritual and mental

1. Meditation: 50 minutes of meditation over the last 10 days. I use the head space app to keep track (reach out if you’d want to become a partner). That’s about 5 minutes daily
2. Audio verse: Honestly, I am yet to listen to any audio verse or even read a verse for that matter.

Career and skill

1. Watch one tutorial everyday: I honestly feel this is not a feasible goal. It puts too much strain on me especially because of how my days are structured. And because I am super goal driven, I push myself to do it and often end up not doing it. Makes me feel like crap. So instead, I should redefine this goal. The objective is for me to go deeper in any subject matter/field. I should instead make this weekly and push majority of the learning over to the weekend. I’ll see how to best structure this. But on the flip side, I did refresh my android skills and ended up building two apps including trying to build a clone of the YouTube application.
2. Learn one new thing everyday: This is a very ambiguous goal and is difficult to keep track of. Should do away with it.

Personal growth

1. Practice sign language: Done with the ASL alphabet but need more practice to get competent at it.
2. Write one paragraph a day: Again, yet another goal that is a bit too demanding, especially because I don’t have a clear “why” for it. I love writing, but I do not intent to pursue it beyond a hobby. So yeah, this one will probably go to the trash bin as well. Gives me more time to focus on less.
3. Do one random act of kindness a day: Struggled keeping track of this as well. So instead of such an open and ambiguous goal like this one, I have decided to redesign it to donating 3 hours of my time a week to a children’s home near where I live.

Business and finance

1. Idea generation: 23 ideas generated so far, half of which don’t make sense but the whole point was always to flex my problem solving ability
2. Call up one client everyday: I can do better here and I will
3. Identify one area of growth in the company: I think core to this is asking the right questions and being open to criticisms. So, recently I was made aware of a particular habit I had that wasn’t entirely health. Thank you David for bringing it up. I think it’s to work on that. Also made a list of ways I think we could go forward and grow and so this is good.

Challenges

I can’t stress how important sleeping is and yet somehow I never seem to get enough of it. I go to bed early but struggle really hard to get to a point of sleeping. So over the course of the next 10 days, this is very important to me. To ensure I get 8 hours of sleep everyday. Critical to this would be coming up with a proper routine of utilizing my time.

Which brings me to the second thing, decisions. I feel I make tiny crappy decisions all day that leave me mentally exhausted and hardly do anything that is really worth doing. So I guess the focus here would be on first figuring out the things I “decide” on and then trying to reduce those.

I’m thinking of splitting my days in chunks. The first productive half will be spent on 3 quality decisions/activities. I’ll block this first part of the day — no emails, phone calls, or any interruptions whatsoever. Then the rest of the day can be spend doing other things — emails, reading, digging deeper into code. The goal is to get to a point of hyper-focus especially on the productive chunk.

Until the next update, peace