I’m not a New Year’s Resolution kind of guy. I used to make stupid ones as a little kid like cutting back on my swearing or knocking out those gambling debts, but I never really saw them through. Instead, I used my birthday as a day of reflection. Every Feb. 28th, I take a look at the year. Did I get where I wanted? What did I ignore? What direction do I need to go in? I’m still planning on doing that this year, but more severe problems popped up this year.
The fall was a little rough for me. I gained weight back, I stopped writing, gamed less, stopped reading, and was overall unhappy about most things. But I was working a lot so I had that going for me. Which was nice. I made goals, started them on the first, and now we are a month in. So let’s talk about it.
Scheduling
The Problem:
During the fall, I had a lot of work on my plate. Well, in the beginning anyway. I’d taken on a full time gig at a studio, as well as many side contracts. So I was working during the day and the evenings. This got a little hectic and I had a lot of trouble keeping things organized. I didn’t know when I was working on things, only that I couldn’t stop working.
Then, in November, everything flipped. I was done with my FT contract and my side contracts. The work I had lined up fell through, and I ended up with very little to do. This left me open to work on personal projects including writing, streaming, and building my own site. But now that I had “nothing to do” I did just that: nothing. I stayed up late, slept in, and watched a lot of Netflix.
The Goal:
I needed to start scheduling everything. And I mean everything (almost). I needed to lock in the work time as well as the play time. I needed to get to bed on time, and I needed to get up early. I needed to construct my days so that I was constantly moving towards my goals.
So I took out my Google Calendar, and I scheduled every hour of the day. I put in the work stuff (web projects) and even broke them down so I knew exactly what project I was working on and for how long. Something like, 5 hours of dev time, 2 hours on Project A and 2 hours on Project B. I put in the fun stuff: 2 hours of writing, an hour of gaming, an hour of Fitness Theory study. I even put in the necessities: Breakfast, Lunch, workout. I added alarms to each of them including a bedtime and a wakeup time (11pm, 7am).
The Result:
I did this perfectly the first day. Then fell off after. It’s hard to schedule everything when you don’t know everything. An spontaneous trip to the store, with a long line, and crappy traffic, can completely throw your schedule off. I got my bedtime a few times, but not often enough. I was very productive in the beginning, and some things stayed consistent. I wrote more this month than I did all of last year, I got some good gaming time in, I got a lot of study done. But my work suffered. It was easy to skip those alarms for work and instead focus on the fun ones and say “Hey it’s in the schedule.”
Adjustments:
So what now? I want to try this again. If I can stick with it, it’ll be very powerful. I’m going to focus more on sticking with my schedule and the key is getting up on time. If I sleep until 10, my day is fucked. So maybe I’ll schedule the important stuff for later in the day.
Fitness & Nutrition
The Problem:
This got a little bad starting in the fall. It was kind of surprising as I’ve always been very good at getting my workouts in “no matter what.” For the first time, I was letting workouts slide and not always because of a good reason. Many weeks went by where I got just the base number (4 days a week) of workouts in (sometimes less), and many of those were quick 15 minute ones just to get my heart rate up. My nutrition dropped off big time. When I was working in-house at the studio, I purchased a lot of lunches from places I shouldn’t have been eating from. I rarely brought my lunch and when I did, it was a sandwich or something not so nice. During the fall I gained back 10 pounds, and then the holiday hit and things got worse. When the students went home for the Christmas break, we took advantage of it and ate out a lot. I also ignored everything the naturopath told me about my allergies and ate whatever I wanted. It was rough on my body and I probably gained 20 lbs from October to the end of the year.
The Goal:
I started a new workout program: Hammer and Chisel. My workout goal was to simply stay on schedule. I didn’t want to miss any workouts and I wanted to really get back into the swing of things. The nutrition goal was two-fold for now. Eat out less and avoid my allergies. We needed to limit eating out to once a week, on a weekend, and both Janine and I wanted to go the full month without eating anything we were allergic to.
The Result:
This actually went really well. I had two incidences where I ate dairy, both were in the beginning and it was because of habit – ordering a coffee and forgetting to ask for soy or coconut milk. “No mayo” has become a part of my vocabulary, I’ve dropped cheese completely, and even had a tofu scramble today instead of eggs. It hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be. I learned to appreciate food in different ways. Pizza? Have no cheese and focus on delicious toppings. I’m able to appreciate the combination of meats and spices instead of cheese and cream.
I stayed on track with my workouts. I missed one or two but I’m OK with that for now. I’ve dropped the weight I gained in the fall and I’m back on track for my goals. I will be doing a follow up post this week about Hammer and Chisel and how I feel about the program.
As a side note: I’m finally on track to getting my Fitness Theory certification and moving towards personal training.
Adjustments:
Now that I’m feeling better about myself (getting my muscle definition back and just overall more energetic) I’ll be taking the nutrition a step further. Getting those healthier options in, get back into my hydration habits, and veggies veggies veggies.
Enjoying Life
The Problem:
I stopped doing things I loved. Plain and simple. This applies mostly to writing but wasn’t limited to that. I hadn’t finished a single story all of 2015 and I don’t think I wrote more than a few thousand words the entire time. This was embarrassing and disheartening.
The Goal:
Write more. I needed to add it to my day and make it as important as everything else. I set myself weekly deadlines and just wrote. I also wanted to enjoy more gaming. Not just playing but everything gaming related.
The Result:
My D&D series played a huge role in this. Knowing what I was writing every week made it easier. Also, I had that deadline of finishing before the next session. In the end, I have written over 30k words in January alone. I am unbelievably happy of this accomplishment. I also started The Arcade: a facebook group for gamers. If you are interested in joining, let me know. I didn’t stream as much as I wanted to but I’ve been getting better at it lately: getting a few sessions in a week.
Adjustments:
Going forward I will be keeping with my new schedule. But I want to spread it out a little. Instead of sprinting through 8k words in a single day, I want to write it over multiple days. This will allow me to focus on the quality of the writing as well as meeting the deadlines. I also want to start new projects. We have a new NPC party member (Spoiler alert) and I will be running her along side of Malice when we need her. I’m thinking about writing very short diary entries from her PoV. I also want to write my own D&D campaign and get it ready for when we finish the first chapter of Princes of the Apocalypse (the current Malice campaign). We will run mine in between chapters. Our DM will also be having a baby in a few months so having my campaign ready will take some of the pressure off of him.
I’m going to try and stream more as well. I’d like to get 5 days a week in. We’ll see how that goes. I’m also working on getting content together for a youtube channel and more game-related articles to post here.
Conclusion
So that’s my first month of my New Year’s Resolution. Did you make one this year? Are you sticking with it? Remember, the majority of people fail their resolutions after six weeks. Don’t be one of them.