Archive of posts with tag 'Habits'

This is a phenomenal extended (3 hour!) interview with Dana Gioia on his background, poetry, his writing process, and the habits he’s curated that make him into a prolific and interesting writer.

Health & Habits

Running

• 17 activities
• Distance: 87 mi
• Total Time: 15:35:31
• Average Pace: 10:43 / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:04 / night
• 8 hr nights: 7

Writing

• Journal entries: 9; 7,009 words
• Blog posts: 7
• Newsletters: 1

Media

Reading

Outlive, Peter Attia ░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 50-100%

Solaris, Stanisław Lem ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 0-100%

Dominion, Tom Holland ░░░░░░░░░░▓░░░░░░░░░ 52-57%

The Wright Brothers, David McCullough ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-36%

How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand ▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-27%

Wool, Hugh Howey ▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-14%

Podcasts

• 23 episodes, 25 hr 52 min

TV

• Jack Ryan, 6 episodes
• Ahsoka, 3 episodes

Film

• Tenet (2020)
• Oppenheimer (2023)

I’m late getting my November update posted. November (and still, in December) was a rollercoaster of a month. Just so much happening with professional and personal, I’ve hardly had a moment to do much at all — neither focusing on any personal progress goals, nor writing or other fun side deals.

My running performance was pitiful. I did 5 runs, but honestly I’m surprised it was even that many. Feels like I’m totally off the wagon on that. I did alright on my sleep, but I swing too much back and forth to be a healthy pattern. I’ll do a string of 5-6 hour sleep nights, punctuated by sleeping 10 hours the next. The see-saw effect isn’t intentional. Something I need to focus more on building a pattern with.

Public writing didn’t do great, only a few blogs before I fell off and didn’t get any more writing done. I did better on the personal journal, though. At least for the first half the month.

Reading also suffered some. I feel like I didn’t spend any time with a book at all.

Health & Habits

Running

• 5 activities (8 vs 5)
• Distance: 12.9 mi (26.44 miles)
• Total Time: 1:54:22 (3:59:24)
• Average Pace: 8:50 (8:56) / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:27 / night (7:32)
• 8 hr nights: 10 (10)

Writing ƒ

• Journal entries: 10; 9,908 words (14; 6428 words)
• Blog posts: 4 (14)
• Newsletters: 0 (1)

Media

Reading

Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg
░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░ 35-60%

Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall
░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░ 32-80%

Podcasts

• 12 episodes — 18 hr, 16 min

  18 episodes — 20 hrs, 41 min

TV

• Andor, 4 episodes
• House of the Dragon, 5 episodes
• The Terminal List, 4 episodes

Film

None

I talk all the time about trial and error. The freedom to let yourself make mistakes, and the skill to make sure they’re not too destructive, are superpowers. With every interesting innovation, company, or product, you’re seeing the late stage of a long chain of missteps and failure. As long as you have the right mindset, mistakes are learning.

We talk about this as a product team — short cycles, iteration, feedback loops — ways to navigate toward broader visions while surviving and building something increasingly useful along the way. I also talk about it with the kids. The more you practice hitting off the tee the better you’ll get at hitting the ball. The more you draw pictures the better you get at it. Practice through the frustration. I try to reinforce with them that everyone that’s great at something got their through an incredible volume of failure and shortcoming before the skill you see today.

If you’ve ever built anything physical, like woodworking, crafting, or DIY stuff around the house, you’ll be familiar with making mistakes, often costly ones. There’s no frustration quite like taking a furniture workpiece you’ve glued up from other parts, honed, mortised, and sanded and making a miter in the wrong place, or cutting it down to length too short. Hours and hours of work can vaporize in a second. I’ve made project mistakes like this so many times, and each time there’s a part of you that wants to put it all down and just go turn on Netflix. But great creators are made by their ability to recover from these mistakes — both in the tactical methods to fix them and the mental drive to “just fix it” and power through.

Mistakes are where most of the learning is in the creative process. It’s not only through the feedback loop of trial and error either. The more mistakes you make and navigate through, the better you get at accommodating and recovering from them.

My grandfather was a hobbyist woodworker for much of his life, cranking out hundreds of heirloom pieces over the years. If you ever asked him about making mistakes, he used to say “making mistakes means you’re doing things.” No person is immune from error. By definition, if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t really doing anything. Or maybe nothing interesting or challenging.

This time I’m including the previous month’s to see month-over-month change, so progress (or lack of) is visible.

Health & Habits

Running

• 8 activities (6)
• Distance: 26.44 mi (17.33 miles)
• Total Time: 3:59:24 (2:32:34)
• Average Pace: 8:56 / mi (9:08 / mi)

Sleep

• Average: 7:32 / night (7:30)
• 8 hr nights: 10 (8)

Slightly better on sleeping more this month. Very slightly. Probably would’ve been even better improvement without a cross-country trip in the mix.

Writing

• Journal entries: 14; 6,428 words (14; 7,292 words)
• Blog posts: 14 (19)
• Newsletters: 1 (2)

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓ 78-100%

The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey & Steven Teles
░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 47-100%

Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 0-100%

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
░░░▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 16-19%

Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-35%

Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall
▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-32%

Podcasts

• 18 episodes, 20 hrs, 41 min (18 episodes, 22 hr 46 min)

TV

• Andor, 4 episodes
• Veep, 3 episodes
• World War II in Color, 2 episodes
• Island of the Sea Wolves, 1 episode

Film

• The Big Short (2015)
• Michael Clayton (2007)
• Too Funny to Fail (2017)
• Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
• Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
• Operation Mincemeat (2021)

Health

Running

• 6 activities
• Distance: 17.33 miles
• Total Time: 2:32:34
• Average Pace: 9:08 / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:21 / night
• 8 hr nights: 10

Writing

• Journal entries: 14 (7292 words)
• Blog posts: 19
• Newsletters: 2

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓░░░░░ 70-78%

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander

░▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 9-16%

The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey & Steven Teles

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-47%

Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will

▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-14%

Podcasts

• 18 episodes, 22 hr 46 min

TV

• Andor, 4 episodes

Film

• Birdman (2014)
• Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
• The Bourne Legacy (2012)
• Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)

Health

Running

• 5 activities
• Distance: 14.55 miles
• Total Time: 2:06:54
• Average Pace: 8:42 / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:22 / night
• 8 hr nights: 9

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓░░░░░░ 68-70%

Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson
░░░▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 17-31%

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander
▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-9%

Scene and Structure, Jack Bickham
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 0-100%

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓ 85-100%

Underland, Robert MacFarlane
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓ 77-100%

Podcasts

• 11 episodes, 16 hr 45 min

TV

• All or Nothing: Arsenal, 8 episodes
• All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur, 3 episodes
• Better Call Saul, 3 episodes
• For All Mankind, 2 episodes
• House of the Dragon, 2 episodes
• The Bear, 3 episodes
• The X-Files, 4 episodes
• Westworld, 3 episodes

Film

• None

Kind of a wild month. I had a good week in the middle with consistent running, but otherwise underwhelming. I did do better with sleep this month.

Health

Running

• 9 activities
• Distance: 23.2 miles
• Total Time: 3:25:28
• Average Pace: 8:51 / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:30 / night
• 8 hr nights: 8

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L.Shirer
░░░░░░░░░░░░▓░░░░░░░ 62-68%

The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓ 73-100%

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░ 40-85%

Underland, Robert MacFarlane
░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓░░░░░ 57-77%

Podcasts

• 18 episodes, 20 hr 19 min

TV

• Better Call Saul, 3 episodes
• Breaking Bad, 11 episodes
• Stranger Things, 18 episodes
• The Old Man, 3 episodes
• The Terminal List, 2 episodes
• Westworld, 5 episodes

Film

• Moonfall (2022)

Health

Running

• 13 activities
• Distance: 28.67 miles
• Total Time: 6:28:54
• Average Page: 9:03 / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:20 / night

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
░░░░░░░░░░▓▓░░░░░░░░ 52-62%

The Law, Frederic Bastiat
░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 17-100%

Underland, Robert Macfarlane
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░ 0-57%

The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░ 0-73%

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-40%

Podcasts

• 21 episodes, 33 hr 17 min

TV

• Obi-Wan Kenobi, 4 episodes
• Prehistoric Planet, 1 episode
• The Old Man, 3 episodes
• Yellowstone, 2 episodes

Film

None for June.

Another month is in the books. I had a couple of trips this month, but did slightly better on running. Still pretty far away from the regular habit I used to have.

Health

Running

• 12 activities
• Distance: 26.7 miles
• Total Time: 3:53:14
• Average Pace: 8:47 / mi

Sleep

• Average: 7:00 / night

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
░░░░░░░░░░▓▓░░░░░░░░ 38-52%

The Future and its Enemies, Virginia Postrel
░░░░░▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 29-100%

Knowledge and Decisions, Thomas Sowell
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓ 92-100%

The Law
▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-17%

Podcasts

• 27 episodes, 30 hr 47 min

TV

• Moon Knight, 1 episode
• Severance, 9 episodes
• Winning Time, 5 episodes
• Better Call Saul, 4 episodes
• Obi-Wan Kenobi, 2 episodes

Film

• Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
• Margin Call (2011)
• Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

This month was a weak one on the health front. I think I only got 2 or 3 runs in, and my sleep has been garbage. Maybe I can do better in May. We have plans to join the gym nearby, so that should coerce at least working out semi-weekly. If I could get to 3 runs per week and 2 workout sessions, I’d be happy to build from that.

I did, however, make inroads on eating better and cooking at home, so that’s a plus.

Media

Reading

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
░░░░░░░▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░ 38-52%

The Future and its Enemies, Virginia Postrel
▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0-29%

Knowledge and Decisions, Thomas Sowell
░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░▓▓░░ 83-92%

Podcasts

• 31 episodes, 32 hr 14 min
• All made up of my usual rotation: The Fifth Column, Commentary, The Remnant, EconTalk, GLoP, Nateland, Stratechery, All-In Podcast, The Realignment

TV

• Moon Knight, 5 episodes
• The Clone Wars, 13 episodes
• Better Call Saul, 13 episodes

Film

• The Thin Red Line (1998)
• The Batman (2022)

I’m a few days late in getting around to reviewing how I did on the goals for 2020, but what’s new there in a year full of challenges? It’s an understatement to say that for anyone that set quantified personal goals at the start of the year had a rude awakening in March. We all encounter setbacks along the progress bar throughout any year, but this one was a doozy, and a protracted one that just kept dragging out.

Luckily here in Florida we’ve been able to have some normal(ish) activities the past few months. Even just taking the kids back to playgrounds again around August was like a weight off the chest. The months of cabin fever dragged down everything for the whole family.

So how’d I do on those goals anyway?

Here are my original notes from the start of the year with some comments on each.

Health

✅ Run 650 miles — When I set 500 as a target for 2019, I thought it’d be all I could do to hit that. I ended up landing on 615. With consistent effort (it requires an average 12.5 miles per week) I can definitely hit 650. Feels incremental, slightly uncomfortable, but attainable.

With a couple of days left I crested the running target just barely, 2 free days to spare. Throughout the entire year I don’t think I got more than a couple of miles ahead of the pace marker. I procrastinated way too frequently

❌ Run 2 half marathons — Did one last year, will shoot for one in the spring and one in the fall or winter.

For obvious reasons this one wasn’t possible unless I did them on my own, which would be a long shot for me. I may try one this year, we’ll see.

❌ Deeper meditation — In my takeaways on this from last year, I mentioned the lack of depth with short, frequent sessions. This year I’m going to try doing 2 sessions of at least 30 minutes per week. I’ve read from multiple sources that anything shorter than about that length doesn’t get you all the way to the “present” state that mindfulness techniques are targeting. Half an hour will feel like a long time, but only twice a week should be fine.

2020 would’ve been a great year for improving meditation practice. For no good reason I just couldn’t get myself back into the routine to do it. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this in 2021. I’d rather not put a goal up on the board with no real plan to try at the moment. Can always start anytime without an official goal.

❌ Begin strength training — Shooting for 3 days per week. My plan is to get a setup in the garage to do workouts pre- or post-evening run.

Another one I just never got around to. We just bought a new house (which I’m due to write about, more on that later), so when we move I’m hoping to get a zone set up in the new garage and work this in sometime in the morning after everyone’s in school. Easing into it and getting consistent will be the key.

Reading, Learning, and Writing

✅ Read 30 books — I’m lowering the number this year, but have no plans to read less. I want to prioritize more long-form, deeper books that I’ve got on the shelf.

I notched just over this without trying too hard. I even had a few spells throughout the year with very little reading.

✅ Continue daily posts — I’d also like to force myself to write posts on 1 book per month.

I started 2020 with an intent to keep this going. As it was I made it to the 2-year streak mark in mid-October and put myself on hiatus. It was a good move since it’s given me a little breathing room, with time to spin up what I’ve been doing with the newsletter: Res Extensa.

❌ Study finance — With a half-decade of being heavily involved in the business end of a SaaS company, I’ve gotten a “crash MBA” in budgets, finance, and tons more. I plan to spend more time learning about markets, investing, and economics to have a broader understanding.

Didn’t spend much time here, but I did get some personal budget stuff in order. Not quite done yet.

Professional

❌ Host Fulcrum Live 2020 — The name of the event is TBD, but we’ll be doing another iteration of our user conference that we last did (with success!) in 2017.

Really want to be able to do this (something) sometime in 2021.

✅ Grow the team — Much of my time this year will be focused on team growth. No hard targets yet, but we have some things in the works that’ll be expanding our team.

We grew quite a bit this year, even with the tumultuousness of shifting to full remote.

Other Things

❌ Share more posts from the blog — When I started the daily posting habit in fall of 2018, I made the intentional decision to just put posts out there and see what would happen organically. No expected plan to drive traffic, just post and leave it be — personal journal out in public. One of my main reasons for doing that was to reduce the friction in getting things out there. The idea that every post was getting tweeted or shared could’ve made me overly attentive to perfection and polishing, something I wanted to avoid not only because it’d take longer on net for each new post, but it could make me hesitant about certain things. This year I’ll plan to share more widely the content for feedback and discussion.

I didn’t do as much of this as I’d planned. Footnote to include this one for 2021 goals.

✅ Take a few local weekend trips with the family — There’s a shortlist of places in driving distance I’d like to take the kids to, like on long weekends.

COVID shut us down here. We did get to drive up to the Georgia mountains for a week in late October. Another one that I hope can be resurrected for an improved 2021. All in all I hit the big primary targets.

We had a hurricane blow up part of a week of productivity around here, but I still limped along with some middling progress on the year’s goals. I’m behind the targets this year late in the game, but I’m still happy with the results. I can still close the gap on the running target, at least.

I’ve been thinking about an idea Patrick O’Shaughnessy wrote about recently on “growth without goals” — setting up systems to be able to pursue and achieve personal growth without having hard numbers on a scoreboard. Using this site as a public accountability tool helps me to keep these top of mind for continued effort. I’ll have to give this some thought as we near the end of 2020 as to how I want to set up my personal growth systems for 2021. I’m thinking an evolution is in order that creates more space for discovery of new interests without interrupting growth in focus areas.

Reading seems like one that’s particularly absurd to quantify as num_books_read. The dimensions of depth and breath of a “book” are so all over the place that the metric approaches uselessness as a measurement. I’ve tried to avoid selecting material I choose to read around “managing to the metric”; the last thing I want is to end up reading 11 garbage quick reads just to hit an arbitrary number. The purpose is defeated if I were to fall into that trap.

One idea that comes to mind as I’m writing this is selecting target study areas to read about — something like choosing 4 or 5 topic areas I want to dive deeper in and measure to how many of those subjects I learn more about. A trackable tool to keep me honest would be useful, but I’m conscious of falling prey to simply managing what’s easily quantified.

With the downramp in the previous daily posting regimen, I’ve used that time mostly to catch up on a bunch of new ideas cooking in (and about) Roam, and put out a couple of newsletters, issues 4 and 5 of Res Extensa. (Subscribe here!)

It’s been fun to do so far. I’ve landed on this idea for the last couple of following a theme topic rather than a simple digest of links or interesting things. That could be interesting, but there are a lot of great “curator” newsletters out there already. Issue 4’s theme was legibility, from James C. Scott’s epic Seeing Like a State, and issue 5 looked at alternate timelines from a couple of different angles.

October is over already?

At this rate, it’ll be New Years in no time flat.

Anyway, let’s check in on the 2020 goals:

I made middling progress in areas, like some better runs in the first couple of weeks. Felt good to have some overachieving progress. But then we did a week out of town up in Georgia last week, and my plan to do some trail running didn’t become reality. Between schoolwork (Elyse was still remote-learning from the Georgia countryside), rain, and a surprise tropical storm, much outdoor activity was a challenge, to say the least. We did get in 1 hike, but 5 and 3 year olds aren’t that compatible with long excursions.

I went a full 7 days without running, the longest gap in probably 2 years. While it wasn’t necessarily intentional, it’s probably good for health to get some air space there every now and then.

On the reading side, I finished Stephen Fry’s Mythos, which is his reimagining of the greek myths. I listened to the audio version which is read by the author himself, and if you know any of Fry’s work, you’ll know this is the proper way to consume this book. An outstanding rendition of the tales, more accessible than Edith Hamilton’s Mythology or something like Ovid or Virgil classics.

Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society was both thought-provoking in its claims, and occasionally frustrating by its pessimism about the state of western culture. I tend to agree with many of Douthat’s views on his “4 horsemen” of decadence: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition. I’m skeptical of, but open-minded to, the theories of technical stagnation that you read about in the works of Peter Thiel and others. There’s a compelling case to be made that something is going wrong, and Douthat has an interesting take on where he thinks the issues lie. My skepticism is less around the presence of decadence, decay, or drift than it is around the severity of the issues. It’s a worthwhile and provocative read. Along the same lines I’d highly recommend Yuval Levin’s takes on institutional decline in his book A Time to Build from earlier this year.

Earlier this month I passed the 2-year mark of writing on this site every day. If on that first day, deciding to embark on this streak, you’d told me that in October 2020 I’d still be going, 2018 me would’ve laughed it off. Doing it even for a few months sounded impossible.

What helped make it reality was converting writing into a continuous background activity, an ever-present filter for thoughts, ideas, and readings to pass through. Every time I read an article or have an idea, I filter it through the writing lens — Would this make a good article? Do I have a unique angle on this idea?

James Clear writes about how your environment is a strong contributor to effective habit-forming. One of the techniques he describes resonates with me and fits my behavior patterns nicely: staging your environment by putting enablers “in the flow”:

You can apply a similar strategy by designing an environment where good habits “get in the flow” of your normal behaviors. For example, if you want to practice a musical instrument, you could place it in the middle of your living room. Similarly, you are more likely to go to the gym if it is literally on the way home from work than if the gym is only five minutes away, but in the opposite direction of your commute. Whenever possible, design your habits so they fit in the flow of your current patterns.

My writing filter above is a version of this. It’s a context that keeps me accreting ideas together as fodder for writing topics. This perpetual context is one version of an environment that happens to work well for me. I have reminders in Roam, various “ideas” tags, tools to dictate quick thoughts to a scratchpad. And the goal commitment itself eventually builds up enough gravitational force to do its own pulling.

If you can create patterns of behavior to support the building of a habit, it’s amazing what kind of change you can engender in your behavior.

After 747 consecutive days of publishing, it’s a good time to reflect on what I want to do with the site outside of regular posting.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on improving my sleep. My running workouts have felt terrible lately, which I think is a combination of dehydration and fatigue, primarily from compounding lack of quality sleep.

With the pretty simple life I’ve got — a steady working-from-home schedule, and a quarantine preventing most interesting things from happening — a solid sleep schedule should be easy to build and maintain. Apparently that hasn’t been the case for me.

It’ll surprise no one to say that kids make sleep a challenge. Ours sleep well, but they don’t nap, don’t really sleep in (but don’t wake too early), and stay up fairly late for their ages (8:30-9pm). This means any personal time has to happen past 9pm, which also has to include time to clean up the whirlwind house mess they create, doing chores in the kitchen, or any late errands that need to happen before the next day.

One of my goals is to get enough quality sleep to be able to wake up earlier than the kids to get some work in, whether that means writing, workouts, or reading. This could shift in personal time to the AM when my brain is ready to go, rather then late when I’m tired. 10:30pm bed should allow for enough unwinding before bed if I’m targeting a solid 8 hrs. Once I’m asleep I tend to stay that way, with the exception of occasional kid wake-ups, which aren’t too bad. Usually it means a brief interruption but back to bed pretty quickly.

The thing that’s been brutal with bad sleep, too, is the morning routine after staying up too late. 6 hrs of sleep segues right into getting blasted out of bed exhausted by kids who are shot out of a cannon already tearing up the place.

Here are a few things I’ve started over the past 2 weeks to increase sleep:

Reducing screen time

The Screen Time app was reporting between 4-5 hours of screen time per day. That seems absurd, but believable if you total up all the random 10 minute periods of social media, email, and general “checking in” throughout a day. In the last week I’ve dropped that by a couple hours with nothing but putting my phone down earlier in the evening.

Using the “Downtime” settings, I have my device cutting off access to apps after 9pm (you can see how it disables access in the above screenshot). You can override this to open something quickly, but I find that barrier enough even as a reminder of what I committed to; the little hourglass icons say “it’s time to be done for the day.” It’s worked so far. I’ve done more reading in the past week than the previous month total.

Blue light glasses

You can get these from Amazon for cheap. They’re transparent lenses that block blue light. The body’s circadian rhythm is evolved to key in on the reduction in blue light that happens naturally when the sun sets. With our ubiquitous screens, we don’t get this natural wind-down period. Glasses like this can help cut down on the blue light in the evening before you turn out the lights.

We’ll see how these modifications help get sleep back to the top of the priority list.

I’m quite conscious of the fact that fiddling with apps and settings and equipment is silly when it comes to a habit as simple as sleeping¹. I still maintain that my biggest sleep hack is (theoretically) the simplest: just go to bed earlier. Easy to say, but I find it harder to do. Hopefully these few tweaks will help nudge my behavior in a better direction.

For the month of September:

Good news is I closed the deficit a bit on the running goal, even though it didn’t feel like a particularly productive month there.

COVID makes time fly and crawl simultaneously, through some sort of perverse time distortion. There were just no notable events this month to break up the monotony of online school, Zoom meetings, and tame weekends around the house. Maybe the holidays and better weather we’re entering soon will help get us outside some more.

Another month down of quarantine life.

Outside of widening our circles a little from shelter to family and one or two friends, we’re still spending most of our time at home or in outdoor activities.

The start of Elyse’s kindergarten over the last couple of weeks really put a dent into anything other than work or supporting her online schoolwork. By the end of the day I’ve been too burned out to do much running or reading at all. It’s also been raining like crazy here over the last week.

I just barely kept it together with the running habit. I just picked up some new running shoes that have me excited to schedule some more longer runs the next couple of weeks.

A quick touch on progress for July. I can’t believe it’s already been 5 months since the beginning of the pandemic.

Nothing that notable this month. Steady upkeep on the running goals, but the summer time in Florida is brutal. Really restricts the scheduling if you can’t do early morning or late evening exercise.

I’ve got a couple of side projects going on that I’ve been pleased with the progress on: a couple of things with the website and some work on personal finances that all feel like good progress.

These updates during the quarantine are weird. In some ways time feels like it’s standing still, in others it feels like it’s flying by. Every day feels mostly the same. Even though some has opened up in our area, we’re still basically in isolation from friends.

It wasn’t that interesting of a month from a goals perspective. I’m continuing to close the mileage gap that I fell into early in the year. I’m hoping in July to bring that one into the green. Other than that, nothing notable this month other than powering on through this quarantine. Seems like it’s going to last a while longer now.

Just a quick update this month. With the pandemic still going, lockdown in a state of unknown non-committal from any authority, and the madness going on around the nation the past week, all of this seems kinda trivial. I’m sure we’ll power through past it, but I’m just doing my best to keep the habits going. I’m still fortunate to get to plow forward mostly unimpacted by it all.

I’ve been reading some great books lately. No particular update this time on that front, but From Dawn to Decadence is fantastic, I just started Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works, and Ra is one of the most interesting fiction works I’ve read.

Meditation hasn’t gotten folded back into the routine yet. I’m going to leave the goal in my updates and plan to get back to it and catch up by year end.

April was the first full calendar month of COVID lockdown. In the beginning of the month I started getting comfortable with the working-from-home setup. I have a decent desk setup and a large master bedroom-slash-office space, which until early March I’d barely used since we moved in. It’s gotten a workout now for 2 months of all-day work. I’ve got one of these adjustable desks that’s nice and wide, with plenty of light in the room, so aside from the zero separation between work and life zones, it’s not too bad.

In this past week though the strain is coming on. Some of it is certainly the 2 months of social separation from anyone (which is especially bad for the kids, which is, in turn, bad for us), but I think working as a distributed company is weird, too. Productivity has still been high, and since we were already about 30% remote anyway, it hasn’t been the huge adjustment for us that it has been for many others.

Let’s look at the goal progress:

So I fell off the schedule completely in the middle of the month on the meditation practice. I went a few days without doing it, and then just fell apart with consistency. There wasn’t a specific reason other than laziness, and not building it into a morning routine as I had planned. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the practice, but I do intend to get back to it. One thing I’ve still got to get figured out is a more solid morning routine to create the transition from personal to work life more smoothly.

I closed the gap pretty well on the running schedule. The weather’s been unpredictably cool out a lot for Florida spring. We typically have the occasional cooler temperature in April, but this year we had a lot of days in the mid- to upper-70s to work with, which was fantastic for workouts. The kids have been along for the ride on many of them, probably most of them. It helps to get them out of the house; we usually go over the neighborhood bridges and go near some of the water and look for any manatees, fish, and whatnot. With that mild weather there have been some beautiful days to get out lately.

I closed out a bunch of books I’d had in progress for a while. I’ve referenced Martin Gurri’s work a few times here recently, and his The Revolt of the Public is one of the most insightful books I’ve read to explain the modern state of affairs with the culture war, political landscape, social media, and more. It was a lot broader than I’d expected, but highly recommended.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a classic I’d had on the list for a long time. Very glad I spent the time with it. A grim work of historical fiction about Stalinist Russia and the Great Purge.

Since the beginning of 2019 I’ve been tracking ongoing goals using a Google Sheet I made, where I can enter each activity day by day and generate a rollup showing how I’m tracking on each goal throughout the course of the year.

Andy Matuschak put it well in this post where he talked about his system for habit-building. A calendar week isn’t great for tracking overall progress because it’s artificially-constrained.

Let’s take my current goal of running 650 miles this year. That averages to doing 12.47 miles per week to hit the number. With something like running, pacing out the progress is critical — you can’t procrastinate and stack progress at the end of the month or quarter to “catch up,” at least not healthily. And you also want the progress report to give you a sense of “how have I been doing?”

If you look at a calendar week (like Monday to Sunday), you could have one week where you overshoot the goal, say a race week or just one where you got in high mileage, followed by one with more rest days. A purely week-oriented method would give the sense that you were off-target during the rest week, and way over during the intense one.

In Andy’s post he puts it well: moving windows help to “make every day doable.” Putting things off doesn’t threaten your progress, as long as you don’t put them off too far.

My method for doing this on my run tracker shows me how much I’ve run in the past 7 days, juxtaposed with the 7-day target if I’m “on plan.” I need to average 1.78 miles per day to stay on track, so this formula tells me how I’m doing over the last 7 days:

Here’s how I calculate this in the spreadsheet. I track each run in a separate row, with a miles attribute for each one. The formula for “Last 7” looks like this:

SUMIFS(miles,date,">"&TODAY()-7)

miles and date are the columns in the data for each of those. I use the whole column in notation like Running!B:B. That’ll take the whole series as input and SUMIFS sums based on the logic in the last argument.

Because I’m currently tracking about 13 miles behind goal pace for the year, I need to make sure I keep this rolling figure just above the 7-day target line in order to close the gap back to level.

This is working better overall to give a picture of the current state for me. It also works well for other things with daily targets like skill practice, book pages for reading, learning a language or instrument, really anything you can quantify with time or scalar goals.

So March has wrapped, probably the longest month we’ve had in many years.

The shake-up in schedule, work-life patterns, and disruptions in everything from kids, to family, to day-to-day activities played absolute hell with my progress on goals.

Let’s start with the “okay” news. On the meditation front I’ve been doing alright, but made a decision to switch from using Headspace to Oak. This was partially to shake up what was feeling like a lack of improvement, but I recognize that the tool is not the problem when it comes to disciplined practice of any sort. After reading Tom’s comments on Oak, I decided to give it a shot. I’ve been preferring unguided modes to help work on concentration myself; the cues can actually be a distraction in that way once you know what you’re supposed to be doing. Will see what happens here over the next month with our new normal.

Running was an unmitigated disaster this month. Way too many days off and missed for no particular reason other than the mental disruption in the daily flow. It’s counterintuitive that more time indoors and at home would make less time for running (it really hasn’t), but not having clear breakpoints in the day, plus the kids being home 100% of the time, has made this a difficult adjustment for things like exercise. I’m going to make a concerted effort to do mid-day runs with the kids in tow, even if that means higher quantity of shorter workouts. I’ve got to figure out a way to get a pattern going again.

Books appear behind, but don’t feel that way. I’ve done exactly what I’d intended all along at the start of the year, which was reading longer, deeper books — quality over quantity. I’ve really enjoyed the thread I’ve been following with the history of tech, and I’ve got a few more in the queue I’m looking forward to.

A quick update for February. No big revelations or movements on goals, just slight progress.

I’ve struggled with building longer meditation sessions into my routine. I think the only way it’s going to happen is if I can get a pattern of sitting down in the morning before the kids are up. At night things are just too unpredictable — kids might stay up late, too tired, have to do runs, unmotivated.

Running was a little better than last month. I stayed a bit ahead of the curve through the month to close the deficit a bit, but still had several multi-day-off periods.

As I’d mentioned in my Goals post at the start of the year, I plan to read some deeper books this year so I reduced the total number. A focus on quality material and better retention is the priority. I also have about 6 or 7 in motion right now, which is abnormally high even for me.

The first month of 2020 is already in the books. 31 days blew by already?

It’s been a rollercoaster of a first few weeks, with some vacation at New Years, shot out of a cannon with a reinvigorated team at work, a trip to Miami, and a trip to Jacksonville.

I already fell behind on the targets with all that’s been going on. Once I can fall into a better rhythm with some normalcy in the schedule (which should be happening over the next couple weeks), I think I’ll be fine to catch up.

My running’s been reasonable, if not frequent enough to stay on track with the increased goal over last year.

Reading I intentionally re-prioritized some longer stuff, and I’ve been working through a couple that are great so far, but one in particular leads down all sorts of Wikipedia side trails while reading it.

Last year was my first serious attempt at setting goals at the outset with structure and plan to hold myself accountable to each one throughout the course of the year. “Goal orientation” is not my native approach to motivation, but being able to quantify results in data-driven terms (for good or ill) is something I’m compelled by. If, for example, I can’t track a run with Strava, I don’t even want to do it. The inanity of this compulsion is not lost on me, but the way I think about it is that if any strategy keeps you going (even a superficial one), it works. It’s all about the result after all.

In the spirit of 2019, here are the goals for this year. The learnings from last year’s results showed me some ways I want to iterate on certain of the areas, not necessarily to perform better against a metric, but to get deeper meaning out of healthy habits.

Health

• Run 650 miles — When I set 500 as a target for 2019, I thought it’d be all I could do to hit that. I ended up landing on 615. With consistent effort (it requires an average 12.5 miles per week) I can definitely hit 650. Feels incremental, slightly uncomfortable, but attainable.
• Run 2 half marathons — Did one last year, will shoot for one in the spring and one in the fall or winter.
• Deeper meditation — In my takeaways on this from last year, I mentioned the lack of depth with short, frequent sessions. This year I’m going to try doing 2 sessions of at least 30 minutes per week. I’ve read from multiple sources that anything shorter than about that length doesn’t get you all the way to the “present” state that mindfulness techniques are targeting. Half an hour will feel like a long time, but only twice a week should be fine.
• Begin strength training — Shooting for 3 days per week. My plan is to get a setup in the garage to do workouts pre- or post-evening run.

Reading, Learning, and Writing

• Read 30 books — I’m lowering the number this year, but have no plans to read less. I want to prioritize more long-form, deeper books that I’ve got on the shelf.
• Continue daily posts — I’d also like to force myself to write posts on 1 book per month.
• Study finance — With a half-decade of being heavily involved in the business end of a SaaS company, I’ve gotten a “crash MBA” in budgets, finance, and tons more. I plan to spend more time learning about markets, investing, and economics to have a broader understanding.

Professional

• Host Fulcrum Live 2020 — The name of the event is TBD, but we’ll be doing another iteration of our user conference that we last did (with success!) in 2017.
• Grow the team — Much of my time this year will be focused on team growth. No hard targets yet, but we have some things in the works that’ll be expanding our team.

Other Things

• Share more posts from the blog — When I started the daily posting habit in fall of 2018, I made the intentional decision to just put posts out there and see what would happen organically. No expected plan to drive traffic, just post and leave it be — personal journal out in public. One of my main reasons for doing that was to reduce the friction in getting things out there. The idea that every post was getting tweeted or shared could’ve made me overly attentive to perfection and polishing, something I wanted to avoid not only because it’d take longer on net for each new post, but it could make me hesitant about certain things. This year I’ll plan to share more widely the content for feedback and discussion.
• Take a few local weekend trips with the family — There’s a shortlist of places in driving distance I’d like to take the kids to, like on long weekends.

I’m updating my tracker to include some other things. I’ll be back on this topic with a post-January check-in on my progress.

Continuing my summaries from a couple weeks ago, this post covers some statistics on running throughout 2019.

I track all of my runs with a Garmin fenix 5 watch synced to Strava, but also have been logging each one to a spreadsheet as I complete them. That way I’ve got an easy dataset to work with for analyzing and charting the results.

Here’s the overall breakdown of stats for the year:

September was my big training month for the October half marathon (August was decent too, at about 70 miles).

2019 was my best running year by a wide margin. I got the fitness up to the point where 5-6 milers are pretty easy (when pacing), and the half proved that I can go even farther with a little preparation.

I’ve got new marks I’ll be aiming for in 2020, but probably won’t have time to post about the plan until into January a bit. Next up will be the map showing the year’s running coverage.

First up on the year in review is the meditation practice. I started out doing short meditation sessions sort of randomly late last year. I’d only remember to do it occasionally, maybe a couple times a week. While that’s better than zero, it never became a habit or a thing that I would think about consistently. Not to mention that meditation itself is a skill you need to hone over time with experience to get the benefits out of it. Committed practice is the only way it feels useful. This year I set a target to do some meditation each day.

Like many healthy habits, I found it challenging to build up a pattern to reliably sit down for the 10 minutes a day I was targeting. It took months before it felt “normal” to do, even just with the short sessions I was doing.

People say it takes a lot of practice before you can focus with intensity and not have mind-wandering and discomfort immediately, which is absolutely true. If you’ve never sat down, say with a guided meditation app, and tried to do 15 minutes of mindfulness, it’s an interesting experience to be conscious of just how much your mind tends to race all over the place continuously.

Even after a full year of every day practice, I’d still say I don’t feel massively “better” at the skill than in January. I don’t get as uncomfortable as quickly now as I did then, which is good since that’s one of the hardest things to get used to. But I still often feel like I’m fighting even trivial things running around in my head.

I’m glad I could power through and stick with it, but I think my relatively light progress in skill overall is mostly attributable to a high quantity of short sessions. My plan for next year will be raising the per-practice length, but possibly going to only 2 or 3 times per week — perhaps a minimum of 30 minutes each. I’ll think some more about that before setting out into 2020.

For the last couple weeks of the year I’m going to post a few wrap-ups to summarize how I did on hitting personal goals from the beginning of the year. At the beginning I laid out a number of attainable but aggressive targets for myself, having never really done this before in any trackable way. I’ve never been an extremely goal-oriented person, so I thought I’d experiment to see what sort of mental impact this could have and how it helps the habit-forming process.

I’ll briefly run through the targets I set up, with a status on my performance. Let’s see how I did…

Health

• ✅ Run 500 miles — I wasn’t sure how this one would go down. It seemed like an aggressive number as I went through the first couple of months trying to stay the course, but I ended up way over the mark.
• 🚫 Eat better — I would say I didn’t do enough here to call it success. Life and other things got in the way of focusing on this very much. It’ll be on the shortlist for the 2020 mission.
• ✅ Meditate 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week — Hit this one, but it took some effort to force it every day (there are a few days left this year, but I should be able to stay the course). Next year I intend to iterate on this a bit and approach it differently.

Reading, Learning, and Writing

• ✅ Read 50 books — On track to finish 52, possibly 53. Wasn’t too challenging, surprisingly (I like reading anyway, a lot). Looking forward to a couple of “best of” posts on my favorites. I’ve learned a ton, not only from the books, but also about the kinds of things I prefer and new subjects I’ve found interest in.
• 🚫 Learn and do some work with R — Didn’t get much time on this one this year. I tinkered around some earlier in the year, but might have more time in the professional context to explore this in 2020.
• 🚫 Get better with SQL — Same as above. We’re working on some things in Fulcrum that could flex this muscle some more.
• ✅ Keep working on cartography and keeping up with open source geo — Spent a good amount of time in the late winter and mid-summer on QGIS stuff. I’m satisfied with the time spent here. I still have a cartography project in progress I’d like to keep pushing on.

Professional

• ✅ Go big with Fulcrum Community — We made a lot of progress here this year. I’m happy with it. We’ve also learned some things that’ll adapt the course going forward to some even more exciting places.
• 🤷🏽‍♂️ Launch two new products — I’ll call this one a wash since we changed course intentionally midway through the year on one of them. Half success.
• ✅ Improve our product narratives all around — Definite success. Even more progress and success in store in first half of 2020.

Other

• 🚫 Take the kids on a trip — Didn’t do anything spectacular here. Not mad about it. We had plenty of fun and plenty of other things to do.
• ✅ Buy a new house — Success! Super happy with the new location.

I’ll dig in on some of these in detail in the coming weeks. All told, a successful year. Tracking and measuring the numbers, it turns out, is a pretty big motivator for me.

The goal at the start of 2019 was to hit 500 miles running this year. Tonight’s run pushed me up to 602 miles for the year, with a couple of weeks left to go.

Through the mid-summer time I was only averaging 42 to 45 miles a month, which was barely keeping me over the pace mark week to week. I would log my runs and watch the moving plus/minus number I track and see myself float above for a couple days, below for a couple days, hovering around the pace for hitting 500.

In August I made the commitment to run the Halloween Distance Classic half marathon at the end of October, so August through October had me attacking a rough training plan to prep for the race. Mileage increased up to 71 and 88 miles, respectively in August and September. That really accelerated me beyond the pace and I crested 500 before I even finished the half (which I finished with under 10 minute pace).

I haven’t yet decided what I want to target for next year. There’ll likely be a couple of races and some kind of mileage target, but nothing crazy. I’ve got too many other things I want to spend time on. But I’m glad I was able to stay healthy enough to push forward to the best health I’ve ever been in.

This was a busy one. Between the All Hands earlier in the month and the week off for the holidays, those are brutal to maintaining the routine (though great to get a break and spend time with both workmates and family, respectively).

Here are the stats with one month left to go:

Once I hit the 600 mile mark on the running in the next couple of weeks, I’m planning on taking the rest of the year off to see if I can rehab the foot and ankle pain that’s built up. I’m past the goal line now on a couple of these, which feels good.

The only content feeds I regularly peruse anymore are my RSS subscriptions and Twitter. I’ve been trying to pull away a bit more from looking at Twitter so often. This is a common problem these days that people are responding to in much different ways. You’ve got folks like my co-workers Bill & James coming at it with a sanitization strategy, trying to clean up their feeds in various ways. Then you have those on the “Waldenponding” end of the spectrum (like Cal Newport) — deleting apps, deleting accounts, and fully checking out from the digital firehose.

My approach so far has been to simply be more conscious of how often I reflexively open the app as a muscle memory movement whenever I have slack time. These apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) all feed off of the “in-between” time when sitting on the couch, standing in line, et cetera. Then as happens with most of us, that slack time encroaches on non-slack time and soon we’re scrolling through Instagram while at dinner with someone or playing with the kids. We all do it, and it takes conscious effort to control. What’s helped me lately are the Screen Time reports iOS sends regularly that show the week-over-week trend in device usage and how it breaks down. As a week goes by, I try to remember that every few-minute-long Twitter session accrues against my total and will put me at an increase over last week — a small mental kick toward putting the governor on Twitter usage. Since I always have Kindle books at the ready, with each opening of Twitter a little bug in my brain says “why don’t you read a few pages instead?”

Over the weekend I decided to try out James’s method of using Twitter lists for a more targeted feed¹. So I created a private “bestof” list and gradually curated (so far) 43 people into that list. In the Twitter iOS app, a list can be pinned to the main view and becomes a pane you can swipe over to. In two days of usage it’s been an excellent substitute to the main firehose feed of infinite content. Because lists, from what I can tell, don’t display algorithmically-generated feed items, you get a simple reverse-sorted feed of posts from all accounts in the list. If I open it up after 5 or 6 hours have gone by, a minute or so scrolling down gets me back to where I was. I can read all of the posts over that time period. Reaching Twitter “inbox zero” has been impossible since about 2010 — following too many people, but also Twitter is on a mission (understandably) to never let you run out of things to read.

I still plan on keeping the Twitter habit as curbed as possible in favor of higher bandwidth books and papers, but this is a huge step in the right direction for filtering the signal from the noise.

The big achievement this month was the culmination of the half marathon training, ending October by finishing my first one.

The other notable movement was surpassing the 500 mile goal, which happened on this run and I didn’t even realize it at the time. I was able to knock out the mileage goal 2 1/2 months early. Back in March I definitely didn’t expect to be much over the target at all, let alone a full 100 miles beyond the pace mark. At this rate I’m pretty confident in hitting the 600 mile mark, especially with the nicer weather around the corner. I might do one more race in December, likely only a 10 or 15K.

This month I finally finished The Federalist, which I’d put down for a while. I made extensive notes throughout it. I’m looking forward to flipping back through for a refresher soon. Such a phenomenal work to put together such a deep, thoughtful, still-relevant rationale for strong but limited governance.

The other read this month that definitely made my “best of” list for the year was Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. A riveting story of a small team developing an early minicomputer. This story had to be one of the inspirations for Halt and Catch Fire, turning rooms full of geeks into a fast-paced drama.

Inspired by Fred Wilson’s AVC blog, I started posting something every day here last year on October 4th. The 1 year mark passed by and I didn’t even notice. It’s become such a part of my mental routine to keep up with that it’s become pretty painless.

Most of my posts are topics I find interesting or links I run across. I find myself zeroing in on themes that tend to appear in my reading patterns. Through the process I’ve also come up with a few recurring “series” type posts to do regularly:

• Weekend Reading — a link list of 3 recent interesting things, posted on Saturdays
• Places — a series where I highlight interesting geographies
• Best Songs — infrequently logging my personal favorites
• Book Reviews — also infrequent, but enjoyable to write when I find the time
• Goal Progress — on the 1st of each month, a review of progress against personal goals for the prior month

One healthy side effect of the blogging habit has been a reduction in social media usage. I still flip through Twitter occasionally, but the majority of my reading has converted to books, RSS feeds, and a handful of newsletters. Through this commitment to writing every day, I’ve had to pare down the amount of time I burn on “wasteful” activities — TV/movies, gaming, etc. Knowing that I have a commitment to keep up with a regular blogging pattern forces me to stay on task with relevant writing and reading.

One thing I would like to explore soon is how I might be able to schedule posts to go out. Since I write and publish this site with Jekyll and Netlify, it’s all managed in a git repository, without a good way to schedule future posts. So I’ve forgotten to push my changes a number of times, discovering a day late that I never published something. I’m toying with the idea of moving to something like Ghost for a more full-featured writing environment. I’ll mess around with that over the next couple of months and see if there’s something there.

Even though I hit the 1-year streak, I have no plans to stop the every day publishing. Let’s keep this train moving.

In September the training push continued for the half marathon. I did a personal record 88 miles in the 30 days, for an average of just about 3 miles per day the whole month. Somehow I’m not dead yet, but the aches and pains were there to prove it.

I think I’ve got the joint, knee, and foot pains to a manageable stage and seem to be turning the corner on that. My post-workout stretching process has been more diligent, shoes improved things, pacing, and proper rest days inserted in there. I’m really looking forward to the weather playing nicely in October and getting the temperatures down, at least a little.

The best books this month were for sure the two short story collections I read: Ted Chiang’s Exhalation and Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie. Both of them phenomenal blends of fantasy, speculative fiction, and historical science fiction, with imaginitive and thought-provoking short stories and novellas I’m still thinking about.

We’re moving into the final quarter of the year going strong on all of the goals. By the end of the month I’ll be able to report back on my experiences with the first 13.1 mile race of my running career.

I’m almost at the two-month mark since upping my mileage at the beginning of August. I did about 72 miles in August, up from an average of less than 50 per month the prior months of the year. With 3 days left in September I’m over 80 miles, with a couple of runs left to do:

A few notes on how that’s gone so far:

• Slowing down my pace has been essential to push the activity durations higher (obviously, to lower the average HR).
• After the first couple of weeks I started to get foot pain on the sole of the feet. Of course the distance increase is going to add stress all over, but I’ve also tried improving posture by standing up straighter and pulling the shoulders back, while also keeping the cadence more consistent.
• To help with the foot pain I got some better shoes to help with supporting my very-high arches. Anecdotally so far this has helped a lot. The On shoes I’d been running with are light and speedy, but lack support for my feet.
• Running while monitoring my HR zone is helping a lot to get in the distances I’m targeting. On longer runs I just get my HR into the range I want and adjust pace and cadence to keep it there.
• Once I get past the half-marathon, I’ll probably reduce the number of weekly activities but raise my average miles on each one. Back-to-back days are leading to some morning soreness I could avoid with more rest days.
• At this rate I should easily break the 500 mile goal, and probably reach 600.

This month I made a concerted effort to kick it into a higher gear with the running. Mid-month was the start of the Strava training plan I’m going to try and follow for race preparation.

The longer mileage is feeling good. I wasn’t sure what to expect when doing longer times with only single days of recovery in between, but it’s really not bad. The latest few runs have actually felt great cardio-wise right up until the end. The limiters at the moment are the heat (nothing I can really do about that) and some calf muscle and plantar fasciitis pains in the left foot. I’ve been doing lots of stretching and foam-rolling after runs, though, to try and counteract that, which I think is working alright so far. I’m trying to pace my mileage increase so I don’t end up with a real injury that really throws a wrench into the plan.

For books this month the most notable was the finale to Cixin Liu’s Remembrance trilogy, Death’s End. I haven’t had the time to write up many thoughts yet on that series, but it’s up there with the all-time best science fiction, for sure. Another pleasantly surprising read was Simon Winchester’s Pacific, which is a broad history of events and places on the Pacific Ocean since the 1950s. It’s one I plan on writing a longer piece about sometime down the road.

So that’s August in the can. Having pushed the running to 40 miles over the pace mark, I think I should be able to get to +60 at least by end of September, perhaps even higher if weather and health permit.

Jason turned me onto this Chrome extension for Strava data analysis called Elevate. It’s a pretty amazing tool that adds deep analytics on top of the already-rich data Strava provides natively as part of their Summit plan.

In addition to having its own metrics like this fitness/freshness curve, it overlays additional metrics into the individual activity pages on the Strava website. My favorite ones are this (which Strava has its own simpler version of) and the year-over-year comparison graph, which lets you see your progression in total mileage over time:

I love to see the consistency this year reflected visually like this. I feel like I’m doing well staying on course for hitting my goals, and this cements it. I was surprised to see how well I was doing in 2017 before the health issues struck. My long term goal is to be able to exceed that trend in 2020 after making progress on the fitness front this year.

Our SNI running club on Strava keeps expanding. We’ve got 12 members now and counting. Two people are committed to marathons in the fall, and two of us to half-marathons.

Somewhere in reading about marathon training I read that the community aspect of the training plan is one of the most important: finding a group of people around you for mutual support and motivation along the way. Proper training (aside from the physical effort) is time-consuming and requires consistency to get 4 or more activities in per week, without falling off the wagon. It certainly helps to have the visibility of those around you keeping their habits going as a motivator to push yourself.

When we do our semi-annual All Hands events with the whole team in the office for a week, we now have something of a tradition of doing a group run sometime when we’re all together. I think we’ve done it for 2 or 3 years now pretty consistently. It looks like the upcoming November event we’ll be mobilizing about 15 of us or so to get out there and do at least a 5K. There’s a half-dozen of us that are real active and do this routinely, but it’s awesome to see the communal gravitational pull working, attracting many to join in who are really just trying to get moving on building the habit.

This’ll be right after my half-marathon, so it might be the first recovery run after that race.

When I committed to the half marathon for October, I also enabled one of Strava’s Summit training plans to keep me honest on the times and distances I should be ramping up with as I prep for that race. My personal goal isn’t to hit some target time in the half; it’s mostly to finish in a comfortable time frame. I chose a plan that has a 10-week training course, 4 activities per week with rest days and/or cross-training in between.

Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying to manage my activities by duration and heart rate zone rather than just running with no plan. Throughout the year up until now I’ve been doing pretty high paces (sub-8-minute miles), but at that level I can’t keep the times up or the HR in the right “tempo” zone. I’ve been consistent with keeping under the threshold zone for my midweek runs for about 30-45 minute lengths. I’m particularly happy that I’ve gone 3 weeks in a row with long runs on the weekend and hour-long continued effort in the right HR zone.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow and this weekend as I kick off the training plan. It’s set to start next week, so my long run this weekend will be the pre-training benchmark for the 10-week program.

I’ve already crested the +20 mile mark over my year’s goal pace with my increased times and efforts this past month. With this lead up to the half marathon, I could be in the +50 territory by mid-October.

I had surprisingly good results on goals this July given how much was going on all month.

On the exercise front, I was able to get the same quantity of runs in even though we started out with the holiday weekend, which always makes sticking to patterns and habits challenging for me. Plus all month long has been exceptionally busy (more than usual) at the office. I’m planning on starting up a more formal training schedule in August in prep for a couple of long races later in the year, so I already tried to incorporate some long runs on the weekend at a lower tempo pace to start building the endurance. I got 46 miles in versus the 42 from June. For the first time this year I officially closed out the month 10 miles ahead of the pace mark.

On a different exercise-related note, I’m trying to bring cycling back into the regimen, mostly for cross-training with the running routine, but also because I enjoy being able to commute to and from the office.

I’ve still been able to squeeze in reading time somehow with a couple of really enjoyable fiction reads in The Dark Forest and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu collection, two that have been in the backlog a long time. Both are well worthy of longer write ups at some point. I’ve just now cracked open Liu’s final installment of that trilogy: Death’s End, which has to be an exciting climax given how original and expansive book two was.

I’m 3/5ths of the way there now on the running target, feeling good. Let’s see how early I can hit all these marks.

Last weekend I got the bike back up and running again. It’s been out of commission in the garage since the move a few months ago. Just had to clean it up a bit and put some air in the tires and it’s good to go. I’ve got a budding plan to start commuting down to the office, thinking I’ll start with a target of doing that two times per week to start. It’s about a 6 mile ride each way, which wouldn’t take much longer than driving, but in the summer heat here it’s plenty to require a shower when I get there. With the unpredictable weather here in the summer, committing myself to more than a couple commutes per week will just mean I’ll come up short on the goal.

My bike is only a single speed (a Takara Kabuto with no bells and whistles. It’s been reliable over the 7 or so years I’ve had it — no problems at all but tire replacement. I’m exploring getting a more serious road bike at some point, but I’ve told myself that’s not allowed until I can build up a good pattern of regular usage on the one I’ve got.

I went out for a loop ride yesterday and it felt good. My regular running has got my cardio up to make a decent pace ride pretty easy.

As I’ve written before on this topic, separating goal-setting from habit-forming is important to do if you want to have success at either. Often people set goals without defining the daily behaviors that will enable them to achieve said goals.

I felt the goals I set this year were firmly in the SMART category, but it’s required diligence not to fall off the wagon of the daily habits. I set some big numbers down (importantly, only in a few areas), so I needed to break down those into daily and weekly patterns to pace myself in getting there.

This Farnam Street post makes the distinction between the two, and how to think about habit-creation:

Stephen King writes 1000 words a day, 365 days a year (a habit he describes as “a sort of creative sleep”). Athlete Eliud Kipchoge makes notes after each training session to establish areas which can be improved. These habits, repeated hundreds of times over years, are not incidental. With consistency, the benefits of these non-negotiable actions compound and lead to extraordinary achievements.

While goals rely on extrinsic motivation, habits are automatic. They literally rewire our brains.

My recent interest in OKRs (both for personal and professional use) gets to the nuts and bolts of this issue. You define the “Objective” (the goal) and “Key Results” (measurable behaviors, or habits) that you believe will put you over the goal marker. Then at the day-level of granularity, you only have to worry about hitting your marks on the behaviors.

Since you can’t reach your overarching goal in a single day anyway, I find it unhelpful and deflating sometimes to think about the sum total of effort it’ll take to reach. If I took my 500 mile goal for running this year and looked at the remaining miles left, I might think “oh man, that’s huge”. But when broken down into small steps, everything looks much more attainable. With smaller parts, you can work on how to build those behaviors into a healthy habit.

So that’s a wrap on the month of June. This was my best month so far in terms of a consistent plan and feeling more productive with staying on target. Even with an out-of-town trip to visit the Cape and Jacksonville for a few days, which threw a brief wrench into the running plan, I was still able to climb enough above the target line get to my highest mark so far.

At some point mid-month I was actually about +10 miles over the goal line for running, but a 4 or 5 day break for that trip chopped it back down. It’s okay, though, since that’s exactly the point in overachieving for brief periods — creating the flexibility to go off-schedule if needed. I completed the Shore Acres running project, got under contract with a buyer for the old house, and had an all-clear follow up visit last weekend.

We’re halfway through the year and still tracking on all the goals. Let’s see what July’s got in store.

Books are one purchase I don’t restrict my spending on. I’m not a big buyer of “stuff” in general, but I don’t hesitate at all about my money going to reading. I do try to be circumspect to not overwhelm myself, and to limit that spending to ones that I’m highly interested in and likely to read. I tend to think along the same lines as Shane Parrish here (and, by extension, Charlie Munger):

Books contain a vast amount of knowledge and knowing what most other people don’t know is how I make a living. While books can be expensive, ignorance is costlier.

This is why books are necessary. Charlie Munger loved to quote a line from an old machine tool ad: “The man who needs a new machine tool and hasn’t purchased it yet is already paying for it.” You’re already paying for the knowledge you need but don’t have yet.

(I’ll admit, this may be a way to self-justify the expense, but hey, you can waste a lot more money a lot more frivolously than on books.)

In recent years I’ve tried to keep the diet of books diverse between fiction and nonfiction, quick high-level stuff and deeper, richer ones. Since my interests are so varied already, covering a healthy swath of subjects isn’t a challenge. Over the years I’ve discovered my interests leaning toward “first principles” and classics. My very-occasional hauls from used bookstores show my preference for a lot of original sources and old standards for the library.

I’m also an avid user of Audible and read more (by volume) via audio than print. It’s become so second-nature to me to listen to books, I’ve become much more adept at retention of information from listening than I was before. I still avoid reading deep stuff or books with heavy visuals in audio form if I can. People think I’m crazy when I say I always listen to books while running, but I’ve gotten so used to it that music while exercising sounds weird to me.

Now you might ask: why not support the local library instead of buying? I wholeheartedly support libraries and want them to continue to thrive, but the process of searching for, checking out, and returning books adds overhead to the process of reading that I’d rather not bother with. Not to mention the selection may not even contain half the books I’m looking for. Again, it’s a personal thing. Part of that is due to my own patterns of reading sometimes 4 to 6 books simultaneously, with 1 or 2 in there that might take 6 months to finish. Once my kids get older and start spending time at the library, it may tip my behavior in that direction, as well.

Earlier this week I finished up my personal challenge to run all of the street segments in my neighborhood, Shore Acres.

Here’s the breakdown of stats to get there:

• Total distance: 125 miles — by my rough calculation there are about 39 miles of streets in Shore Acres, but it takes significant overlap running over past ground from my house to hit new streets
• Total activities: 36
• Average run: 3.5 miles
• Longest run: 5.2 miles
• Started: March 22, 2019
• Finished: June 20, 2019

This was a fun challenge and added extra motivation for me to keep getting out there consistently. As I talked about in my post on habits, any form of personal challenge or goal-setting (even if manufactured) that forces you to get it done is a good one.

Now that this is complete, I’m planning to move on to Snell Isle to the south. Why not keep painting the streets with GPS tracks?

This year’s annual target for running (pinned at the 500 mile mark) has me trying to figure out my own personal flow — what it takes to get a consistent, comfortable process for building the habit. The number one factor consistency: making the appropriate time and not breaking the promise to myself is the foundation of being able to hit the target.

It’s also important to get your kit in place. One of the great things about running is its minimalistic nature. You truly need nothing but your own body and motivation to get started. As you get into it (and depending on your preferences for style), you eventually figure out a consistent set of gear that works for you.

Here’s my normal setup:

• Running hat
• Shades (for daytime) — Costa Pawleys
• Headlamp (for nighttime) — Foxelli
• AirPods — only the left ear, since I only listen to books and podcasts
• GPS watch — Garmin fenix 5
• Running socks — Saucony
• Lightweight shoes — On Cloudflash

This has been my consistent setup now for a few months for every run. I always have the AirPods and my watch on me, so there’s very little required to always have what I need. The headlamp has been a game-changer for night running, which I do a lot. Really makes me feel much safer even when running in the neighborhood.

I’ve really loved the Cloudflashes with their extreme lightweight build, minimal form factor, and still-decent support. Strava reports that I’m approaching the 300 mile mark on the shoes, and the wear is showing in the heel of the sole pretty bad. This week I ordered a pair of their new Cloudrush shoes that I should get in a couple of days that I’m excited to try out.

If you told me 5 years ago I’d be running 5K distances routinely like it was nothing, I’d have thought you were crazy. Now it’s a habit I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to. Just goes to show that (for me) consistency, good gear, and some stretch goals can really change that perspective.

For the second half of the month I got into a good rhythm with every-other-day running. I was even able to push almost 5 miles beyond the pace target to end the month. I started running with the kids again in the jogging stroller, which I haven’t done really at all since Elyse was little (2015-16). It’s good because it gets them out of the house, adds some cargo to push for additional workout, and gives Colette a nice break if I take them when I get home at the end of the day.

I was able to do more of what I’d talked about doing in previous months with more frequent, shorter runs rather than having to force the longer ones to stay on pace. Consistency is everything when working on a long-term goal like this. The last 8 sessions have been in the 3-4 mile range, which I feel works well right now — a good balance of exercise without taking too much time, so I can still squeeze them in later in the evening.

With my reading I’ve got too many threads open at the moment. I’m bad about getting 5 or 6 books in progress simultaneously, so sometimes it takes me longer to finish them up. This month I read Matthew Walker’s excellent Why We Sleep¹, which is an excellent scientific deep-dive into how sleep works and all of the interplays between sleep quality and other health factors. I’m looking forward to writing up something longer about it here sometime in the next few weeks when I have time.

June has quite a bit lined up both personally and professionally, but I don’t see anything in the way of plowing through on the goals all month.

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”

My post from yesterday got me thinking about this piece I read recently on Farnam Street that dovetails with the thoughts on long-term benefit and the compounding nature of good habits.

The idea of “Gates’ Law”¹ is that investments for the long-term can bear fruit sooner than you think. Why does this happen so frequently? And what does this have to do with playing the long game?

I don’t mean to imply that all long-term investments (like exercise or reading) compound so quickly that you’ve underestimated the results you can achieve over a shorter time period — you won’t start running and suddenly in a month have lost 60 pounds. But where Gates’ Law is related to compounding effects of good habits is in what the gradual gains enable that you couldn’t do before. In the running example, think about how shedding those first 10 pounds makes your future running that much easier².

The article mentions the biologist Stuart Kauffman, who calls this concept “The Adjacent Possible”. I love this idea:

Each new innovation adds to the number of achievable possible (future) innovations. It opens up adjacent possibilities which didn’t exist before, because better tools can be used to make even better tools.

Humanity is about expanding the realm of the possible. Discovering fire meant our ancestors could use the heat to soften or harden materials and make better tools. Inventing the wheel meant the ability to move resources around, which meant new possibilities such as the construction of more advanced buildings using materials from other areas. Domesticating animals meant a way to pull wheeled vehicles with less effort, meaning heavier loads, greater distances and more advanced construction. The invention of writing led to new ways of recording, sharing and developing knowledge which could then foster further innovation. The internet continues to give us countless new opportunities for innovation. Anyone with a new idea can access endless free information, find supporters, discuss their ideas and obtain resources. New doors to the adjacent possible open every day as we find different uses for technology.

Not only is there potential for the long-term gains on your positive habits, but you can even unlock adjacent, undiscovered potential along the way.

This year has been an experiment for me in how one goes about forming habits — at least those of the healthy, positive variety.

We’re all familiar with falling into negative habits and how easy that can happen. There are automatic gravitation-like forces pulling us toward unhealthy habits all the time. Eating junk food, lazing around the house watching TV, not exercising, not reading, spending too much time with social media. What all of these things have in common is short-term gratification. In fact, I struggle to think of any easy traps like this that only have a delayed, long-term payoff. If eating that extra snack late at night or staying up 1 more hour to continue your Netflix binge didn’t give you instant gratification, you’d just skip the snack or go to bed.

On the flip side, positive habits are those that everyone wants to do more of, the stuff of New Years resolutions. They have the opposite common trait: you don’t see a result right away, sometimes not for months or years. Not only that, for many types of long-term investments it’s actually painful in the short-term. All forms of exercise fit this model. Running an 8-miler involves some suffering today and doesn’t knock off those pounds right away. It takes months worth of them to make a dent. This short vs. long idea is not a secret to anyone, yet it’s hard to defer those immediate satisfactions for the big win down the road. Often very hard.

I’ve never been a particularly goal-oriented person. Putting big numbers on the board to hit isn’t required for me to stay motivated. My personal motivators tend to be more intrinsic; I don’t need an externally-set objective target to stay on track. Often the act of the work itself is enough of a motivation to keep building. I can’t put my finger on it exactly other than that my motivation tends to come from within rather than without. That said, I wanted to figure out how I could manage to work in some new productive habits in a consistent, accountable way. Would setting a goal and staring at it every day actually make a difference?

I took a new approach this year by picking some things and tying numbers to them to see how it’d go. So far at about the 4+ month mark, results look promising. Because I’m such a data-driven person, I knew that not only was it critical to have the target mark set, but to be able to measure the progress toward those marks over the course of the year. Building this spreadsheet to keep track of my pace against the trendline has helped. I look at it all the time to keep up with it:

One of the keys was to pick only a few goals and focus on them — running, meditation, reading books, and blogging. Those are what I’ve got on the board that I’m measuring. Trying to also add weightlifting, getting an MBA, or swimming to that list would overload the available resources and none of it would happen. I intentionally picked things that fit a specific class: not too time consuming, still enjoyable activities in their own right, fit my day-to-day pattern of life, and healthy over the long run.

Keeping it limited to things that are both good and enjoyable seems like a sound approach so far. It strikes me that this could be part of the problem with people consistently breaking their New Year promises by the time February rolls around. Creating habits around things you actually despise doing is extremely difficult. It also doesn’t hurt to have some sort of precedent of success first before committing to an every day routine. If you want to run a marathon before the year is over but you’ve literally never run 100 feet in your life, it’d be a good idea to start with some progress first rather than setting up for failure.

It’s a work in progress for me. I have a better sense now of how hard it is to get things to the point of being automatic. It’s getting close! I definitely think about getting my meditation session or running in each day without having to be reminded. It’s not on autopilot and may not ever be. My goal is to test these waters with myself on how to reprogram my own motivations so good habits become routine.

With all my commitments each day between work life, kids, and other things, it’s hard to fit exercise into the schedule. Combine that with the struggles I have personally with rising before the kids to get running in, and the only option left is running at night.

For the past 9 months or so I’ve been pretty consistently running at night time after the kids are asleep — anywhere between 9 and 10:30pm. I actually enjoy it, even though it took a while to get comfortable making that commitment to still get out of the house that late. It’d be easy to be lazy and “too tired” to go. That does happen occasionally, but I’m usually pretty good about keeping myself honest if I mentally commit to doing it earlier. As we move into summer, night running is also essential to help keep good pace and avoid the brutal Florida sun and heat.

Most of the miles I’ve done late were down on the waterfront toward downtown St. Pete. There’s a nice set back trail down there which is well-lit, so safety and visibility never worried me that much. After the move though I’m running mostly in the neighborhood where the street lighting is a lot less consistent and the sidewalks aren’t always great. I posted last week about the headlamp I got, which I tested out last night:

It worked great — comfortable to wear, plenty bright without being overkill, and adjustable to point down in front of me for good visibility. Today was a 90 degree heater, so it feels good to have an added level of safety for keeping up the night runs where I can get in miles without melting in the sun

I was able to stay on track this past month toward my 2019 goals.

We’re still in the throes of prepping our old house for sale, so between that and work at the new house, that’s occupying a good bit of time. I have a goal to have the house listed in the next couple of weeks, so that’ll be a relief to have successfully behind us. With our All Hands early in the month and a trip to San Diego right after, staying the course was a challenge to make the time. I mentioned last month wanting to do a higher volume of shorter runs. I did a bit better, with 11 runs instead of 9. With a more regular schedule I’m sure I could improve further.

Meditation practice has been steady. I’d still like to work in longer sessions, but I feel the only way I’ll get that done is to wake up early and get started before anyone’s up. I’ve tried 20 minute sessions in the evening once or twice, but by then I’m too tired to focus properly and I end up dozing off. Practicing early in the morning will be a challenge, but I’ll give it a shot a few times this month if I can and see how that goes.

Month three is in the books. A seriously eventful month for us, so I’m surprised I was able to stay ahead of the curve.

We closed on the new house on the 15th, had an out-of-town trip to Jacksonville right after. Plus there was packing, moving, and child-management throughout. With all that going on I’m surprised I was able to stay on track, particularly with the running. I know last month my main observation about my performance was the fewer, longer runs I was planning to avoid. Turns out I didn’t do a great job. This month I’ll chalk that up as intentional — all of the time commitments this month made me push harder on the days I could run to make sure I could get in the miles and stay on track.

There’s still plenty to be done on the house front, but we’re past the worst of it. For April, I’m going to target more frequent runs in the ballpark of 4 miles and see how that works.

⛈ Hurricane Season 2017: A Coordinated Reconnaissance Effort

The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. They’ve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:

The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection and curation of perishable data in DesignSafe. Auburn’s David Roueche, the team’s Data Standards Lead, was especially enthusiastic about the team’s customized Fulcrum mobile smartphone applications to support standardized assessments of continental U.S. and Caribbean construction typologies, as well as observations of hazard intensity and geotechnical impacts.

It worked so well that the team transitioned their efforts into a pro-bono Fulcrum Community site that supports crowdsourced damage assessments from the public at large with web-based geospatial visualization in real time. This feature enabled coordination with teams from NIST, FEMA, and ASCE/SEI. Dedicated data librarians at each regional node executed a rigorous QA/QC process on the backside of the Fulcrum database, led by Roueche.

🧘🏻‍♂️ The Surprising Power of the Long Game

Ever since my health issues in 2017, the value of the little things has become much more apparent. I came out of that with a renewed interest in investing in mental and physical health for the future. Reading about, thinking about, and practicing meditation have really helped to put the things that matter in perspective when I consider consciously how I spend my time. This piece is a simple reminder of the comparative value of the “long game”.

🎧 AiriPods

In this piece analyst Horace Dediu calls AirPods Apple’s “new iPod”, drawing similarities to the cultural adoption patterns.

The Apple Watch is now bigger than the iPod ever was. As the most popular watch of all time, it’s clear that the watch is a new market success story. However it isn’t a cultural success. It has the ability to signal its presence and to give the wearer a degree of individuality through material and band choice but it is too discreet. It conforms to norms of watch wearing and it is too easy to miss under a sleeve or in a pocket.

Not so for AirPods. These things look extremely different. Always white, always in view, pointed and sharp. You can’t miss someone wearing AirPods. They practically scream their presence.

I still maintain this is their best product in years. I hope it becomes a new platform for voice interfaces, once they’re reliable enough.

As I’ve been pushing onward with daily meditation practice on Headspace, the “streak” number has been climbing higher and higher. I have mixed feelings about this in terms of driving motivation. Is the desire to increase a number a healthy way to motivate positive mental health? Is it pushing the right buttons for the right reasons?

Headspace founder Andy Puddicombe recently wrote on exactly this topic:

Some people love this feature, viewing it as a source of motivation, a record of accountability, and a badge of honor that reflects their commitment in building a meditation practice. Others can’t stand it, viewing it as a source of anxiety, a reminder of days missed, and an unspoken judgment of their dedication, passion, or priorities.

I’m glad to see them thinking about this, and not just gamifying everything because every other consumer product does. It’s already crossed my mind that the temptation to meditate for the purposes of incrementing a counter rather than for health benefit alone can’t be a healthy one. But Andy (who trained in Tibet) says this structure of practice is common in the Buddhist traditions:

The romantic version of meditative training is often portrayed as one in which time is forgotten, routines are abandoned, and goals are immediately relinquished. Having trained as a monk, I can tell you firsthand that this is anything but the case.

The reality of that lifestyle is a commitment for a certain number of years, and a daily routine set by the clock. We even had a fixed amount of time to complete meditation exercises — a number to which we had to commit. Within this context, we used the concept of run streaks all the time, but it was never about the number; it was a tool to help us deliver on our intention and direction, ensuring we wasted no time and worked towards a singular point, in a clear and steady way.

When I started to think about my personal motivations, I’m definitely motivated by gamification systems and stat tracking. It’s just wired into my brain to feel compelled by data. Sitting here now almost 90 days into a streak, was the outcome of the motivation, whether inherent for its own sake or motivated by being a “game”, worthwhile? Am I at a better place now than I was 3 months ago with the practice? I would say the answer is a resounding “yes”. When I compare the patterns and results of practice now with some time in December, I notice a few impactful differences: it’s always on my mind to remember to sit down and do it, I can get into focus mode more quickly, and I don’t feel the same resistance to practicing I once did — that voice that says “I don’t feel like it”. The routine is much more like clockwork now. So regardless of the means it took to get there, it’s begetting the desired results.

One good reminder is to not get hung up on the number, to not treat it like the front-and-center measure of success:

As long as we are doing our best, that’s all we need to know. We all miss days, and that’s okay. In fact, some people don’t even want to meditate on a daily basis, and that’s okay, too. The important thing is to realize when we have missed a planned session and then continue with the next, a little like noticing when the mind has wandered off before returning to the breath.

While the streak counting does drive me to do the behavior to some degree, what I’d actually rather see is a measure of aggregate momentum — like a score that indicates the “consistency” of practice. It could rise in increments with each session, and decrease slightly when skipped, but wouldn’t drop to zero immediately when a chain is broken. I think that’d be a better balance of keeping the positive driver there. Not deflating the balloon, but still exacting some negative feedback when you fall off the wagon.

We just crossed month number two of the year, so here’s another pulse check on how I’m tracking against some personal goals for 2019. I’m tracking on all fronts, slightly better positioned against the pace marks than I was at the end of January.

With meditation practice I’ve widened my plus gap more than last month through some longer sessions. Experimenting with longer 15 or 20 minute sessions has been positive, but I don’t want to push that too far and demotivate the daily routine. I’m also still working out how to best fit that practice into my schedule in a consistent way — inconsistency in the timing (sometimes morning, sometimes night) makes it challenging to do longer sessions.

I came out ahead on the running this month. Not losing a week to illness like I did in January certainly helped, but I was able to do a week-long trip out west without disrupting the routine too much. One thing I’ve fallen into over the last couple weeks is fewer, longer runs rather than frequent, shorter ones. It’s been okay for the most part, but I could see that irregularity breaking up the pacing too much, so I need to do better about an “every other day” general goal. Having 2 or sometimes 3 full days off in there requires 10K+ distances to be able to keep on pace (Bill actually wrote on this topic recently, also). Every so often I have an evening where I go out with an intent to do 3.5 to 4 miles, but end up stretching to 6 just because I feel good. It’s fine for that to happen occasionally, but I don’t want to risk injury. Yesterday I did a 3.5-miler with a half-numb mouth (I had just gotten a filling at the dentist less than an hour before), so that was interesting. But I kept on pace!

There were a couple of great books in my reads for the month. In particular John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country is one I’m looking forward to writing about soon.

I haven’t had much time lately to spend on my cartography projects, but that should change in the next couple of months. I’m still rolling with the daily writing routine. There’s no sign of a shortage of topics to write about. I thought this would be much more challenging than it is, but I guess (like any habit) the key is routine. I tend to write longer-form things in spurts where I’ll add to 3 or 4 posts in one sitting so I gradually can build a backlog of content. Post ideas come to me at all times of day, so having a ubiquitous capture method to always log those somewhere is helpful to keep track. Making the time for writing each evening definitely takes commitment. Getting a bunch of it done while I’m “in the zone” helps to lighten the load on other days where I don’t have the mental bandwidth to write very much. For example, on a long flight a few weeks back I wrote about 3 or 4 posts in one sitting.

In other personal news, we’re under contract for a new house in Shore Acres, which is exciting. Will post more here as that develops!

On to March. We’ve got a visit to Jacksonville, Elyse’s spring break, Disney on Ice, and some other fun things planned.

This is the first year I set some goals on a few things. I’ve never been strongly goal-oriented, so I thought I’d put some stuff down to hold myself accountable and see if it helps build some healthy habits into my routine. Also, I thought it might be fun, as long as the goals were aggressive but attainable.

For the month of January, here’s how things stack up with each area. We’ve got my progress in the first column, the pace mark I should be at to keep on target, the total goal, and “plus-minus” is where I net out against the goal:

I ended January technically behind on running, but caught back up with a 4+ miler today.

I’m ahead of the pace on the other fronts. After 1 month it didn’t feel like a stretch to achieve any of them. Meditation is all about building it in and making the time. Running is about committing and not backing out even when I don’t feel like it. And reading more or less comes naturally, but it leaves little time for things like TV and whatnot. The running target has definitely felt the hardest to keep up with. Part of it was getting behind with a head cold the first week, but even without I’ve got to put in about 10 miles per week to make it happen. What that first week did was demonstrate how hard it is to catch back up after going 8 miles or so into the negative. Too many days missed (vacations, illness, other commitments) could really screw me up.

Pushing on into February.

Since late last year I’ve been keeping up with practicing every day. Mostly 10 minute sessions, but recently I’ve been upping that to 15.

One important thing I need to work in is how to fit it more consistently into the schedule. I don’t have a set time when I practice; sometimes its before work in the morning, but sometimes also late at night (when falling asleep is a hard competitor). Comfort level is rising with each session. Mindfulness doesn’t feel natural, so the repetition at least makes that part go away a bit.

With the breath focus I’m having the common struggle of mind-wandering while trying to focus attention on breathing. I picked up a book called The Mind Illuminated which I’ve heard great things about as a guide to all phases of the process, but especially to help break through this particular early hurdle.

With 2018 in the rear view, it’s time to set some goals for 2019.

Here are some things I want to focus on, and some markers to aim at by year end.

Health

• Run 500 miles — At just under 10 per week on average, this feels achievable, but will require consistency. A fall off the track will be hard to catch up from. I’d like to do some races in here, also.
• Eat better — Nothing specific here. More cooking at home, more plants, less grease/fat, less quantity, more fish, more variety.
• Meditate 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week (a total of 43 hours) — I’m enjoying this so far, want to get it closer to an automatic habit. It’s always something I enjoy having done once it’s done, but I don’t always look forward to it yet. As I’m learning, mindfulness practice can be frustrating once you know what you’re supposed to be doing.

Reading, Learning, and Writing

• Read 50 books — I did almost this many this year. It’s doable.
• Learn and do some work with R.
• Get better with SQL.
• Keep working on cartography and keeping up with open source geo (QGIS, PostGIS, OpenStreetMap)
• Continue writing every day, 365 posts. Combining this with the reading habit is working well. I like using the process of writing “reviews” of books as a way to digest and think about what I read. If I could put together a full year streak, I’d be elated.

Professional

• Go big with Fulcrum Community — We have some plans in store for this. Exciting to think about; time to execute.
• Launch two new products — Good progress here already, will be bringing them public probably midway through the year.
• Improve our product narratives all around — This goes for internal and external purposes.

Other

• Take the kids on a trip, just the family — Not sure where, but somewhere out west would be fun.
• Buy a new house — Working on this now. Kind of a big deal, but we’ll see!

I’m planning on putting together a tracking tool so I can keep myself honest on progress. I’ll publish something on that in the coming weeks once I get it figured out. I’ll also put some reminders on the calendar to revisit my progress here on the blog once a quarter.

Now time to go read.

2018 was a good year, both personally and professionally. Rather than a long-winded post about everything that happened, here’s a brief summary of accomplishments, major events, family stuff, and travel.

Personal

• Read 43 books. Check out my favorites of 2018: part 1, part 2.
• Traveled to NYC, San Francisco, Atlanta, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Toronto, St. Augustine, and Boston.
• Ran 214 miles in 66 separate runs. (This one is particularly special to me. Since I had two major abdominal surgeries in August and October 2017, with a 12” scar running down my belly, I’m glad I’ve been able to push and get back up to pre-surgery pace.)
• Completed immunotherapy treatment in November. Clear scans mean I’m on “maintenance” for the foreseeable future, with scans every 3 months for now. Probably the best “accomplishment” of the year!
• Wrote a post per day here since October 4th. 88 days in a row.
• Began practicing mindfulness once a day. Going strong the last month and enjoying it.

Family

• Everett turned 1, started crawling at 8 months, climbing at 10 months, walking at 11 months (yes, he was climbing ladders and stools before walking 🤷🏽‍♂️).
• Elyse turned 3, started school 3 days a week, and switched to a new school 5 days a week. She loves every second of it.
• Colette and I celebrated our 10th anniversary!

Professional

• We reached over 1800 customers of Fulcrum. It’s been used by customers in 180 countries. Zooming back to when we launched the platform in 2011, I never thought we’d achieve what we have so far (and it feels like we’re just getting it figured out).
• We brought on 33 new people — now up to 53, across 11 states.
• I wrote 7 posts on our blogs — my favorites: on the benefits of SaaS, our DroneDeploy integration, and on creating lookup tables with Fulcrum.
• Late in the year I’ve been getting back into cartography. Hoping to keep that effort alive in 2019.

This is a 2005 commencement address delivered by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. Worth going back and listening to from time to time.

Once a year around this time I like to do some “winter cleaning” of my personal security footprint, mostly covering passwords and internet service accounts I have that may be out-of-date, unmaintained, or unneeded.

1Password is a dream for things like this. If you don’t maintain an account, it’s well worth setting one up for the family with their 1Password for Families product tier. Worth every penny¹.

Good hygiene with passwords has been a perennial problem in internet-land, and the security risk only goes up with seemingly-daily announcements of the next hack or data breach. While those risks are part of our current reality, it’s possible to lower your risk profile with some simple maintenance tasks with 1Password. Here are some general best practices and my personal annual review process.

Raise the complexity

There’s no excuse not to be using highly complex passwords these days. When creating new 1P entries, you can autogenerate complex passwords. Sometimes you’ll need to tweak the generation parameters to create passwords that are acceptable for certain sites², but it’s worth making sure you’re maximizing the complexity where you can. When I review my accounts, I look for any entries that have less than 1P’s “Fantastic” rating, and sign into those and update them.

Watchtower

1Password has a feature called Watchtower that helps you conduct targeted review to keep yourself secure. Things like compromised or vulnerable logins, reused or weak passwords, or where 2FA isn’t enabled. It’s nice because it checks against a couple of known databases to help keep you on guard. This is the go-to spot to look for areas of attention in the review. It’s worth setting yourself a reminder (quarterly or so) to check here for any changes. If services you rarely use have security incidents, you probably won’t know, so this helps.

Two-factor authentication

I wrote previously about 1Password’s native two-factor authentication. Wherever possible and recommended I go through my account entries and enable 2FA setups with the one-time passwords configured. Another tip for this is to use a password field type to store the “recovery codes” that most services will generate for two-factor, which allow you to recover your password if something gets hosed. Web services commonly generate these codes in a text file for safe storage, which you can do in 1Password if you want, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the way file storage and linking works in the app. I prefer to copy the codes directly into the 1P database entry anyway.

Purge unused services

Shutting down accounts for services you don’t use is another good practice to reduce your exposure to breaches. If you aren’t using or no longer need a service, might as well not have it hanging out there. Since you can sort entries by “date used”, it’s straightforward to comb through ones you haven’t used all year and assess. When I go through my annual review, I always find a couple not worth keeping, so I sign in and spin them down if possible. If they don’t have a public-facing way to delete my account, I usually reset the password to something huge and delete whatever unrequired personal info might be on file (like credit cards and the like).

Other scattered tips

A few other pointers that factor into my annual review:

• Change any duplicates — I don’t intentionally create dupes, but it happens occasionally, especially when creating accounts from my phone when I just want to type a password in signup
• Check for https — This isn’t a huge problem these days, but a nice recent addition to 1Password will alert you to entries with insecure URLs
• Assess shared accounts — Using the 1Password for Families account, we have a single shared vault for accounts we both need: bank accounts, credit cards, kid-related stuff, Netflix, Amazon
• Organize — I go through and change entry names, make things consistent, and just generally scan through for any junk to keep it all clean

With the review done, it feels good to have a renewed sense of security having checked your digital footprint. A well-organized, clean 1Password setup can also be a huge productivity boost. The more services you work within (and the more secure you want your behaviors to be), the more a clean, healthy passwords vault will help you.

For all of the todo list apps out there, I’ve only seriously tried a couple of them. After using OmniFocus since its first version, I switched over to Todoist a couple years ago. There are many I haven’t even tried, but I’ve always tried to stay focused on doing the tasks rather than fiddling with my system. It’s especially ironic with productivity apps to be constantly messing with the workflow in search of some kind of optimization. As Tom eloquently put it a few years ago: “todo lists don’t make you productive.”

While I’m fully aware of that fact, the main value of a todo system for me is to have a container for ubiquitous capture, in GTD parlance. All of the knobs and switches with various tools — projects, contexts, due dates, start dates, priorities — don’t help with the core initial problem of getting the things in a single place. The second need (again, a simple one), is a straightforward interface that simplifies continued review.

So it needs to be as easy as possible to:

1. Capture new things
2. Review said things regularly to slot them into my plan

It turns out that most apps are at least passable at item two; it’s the first that can cause problems depending on preferences, work style, and day-to-day activity. I love having a notepad and pen for writing and sketching as often as I can, but I just don’t reliably have it with me enough to use for collecting things that need doing.

The number one advantage I quickly discovered with Todoist over other options is its cross-platform simplicity. Because of it’s web-centric architecture, it has a wide array of integrations with other services. It also has native mobile apps for any platform, a web app, and a desktop client (wrapper around the web app). This kind of “available everywhere” foundation forms the first basis of a good productivity tool. As the saying goes about photography: “the best camera is the one you have.” I treat productivity apps the same.

I don’t have too fancy of a setup with projects or contexts. The main way I use the app is to get things into the inbox as quickly as possible, then review and sort things into their proper places as often as I can. Usually once per day I’ll run through the inbox and file things off where they belong, or delete them if I’m actually not going to commit to them.

On the capture side, items get into the inbox one of three ways:

• Cmd-Shift-A quick add shortcut on the Mac
• The Today widget on my iPhone
• A Today workflow from the Shortcuts app I called “Dictate to Inbox”

The dictation flow is one of my favorites. I’m not a fan of the full Siri integration since I have too much trouble invoking Siri and getting the initial command to go from speech-to-text correctly. The Shortcut method makes it one swipe and one tap to invoke, and still leverages the Siri dictation piece. The problem with the full integration is it misunderstands the initial directive that I’m trying to make a new todo for the inbox, and will mistakenly call someone or look something up on the web (the ultimate useless cop-out from Siri that no one ever wants).

Todoist has a “karma” gamification component that I wish I didn’t enjoy as much as I do. Being motivated by artificial points rather than the importance of the work itself isn’t really what you’re going for with a productivity tool. But it adds a psychological gratification element to checking things off the list. I’m an advocate of keeping the end in mind, so if the means (ticking boxes for points) keep me actually doing the work written down on the list, then it works.

I’d like to try the sharing elements, so far I’ve only used it solo. Todoist isn’t great for general list-making (though it can do it if needed). Colette and I still use Wunderlist for groceries and shopping. There’s still not a better simple replacement we’ve found yet. It’s possible that a shared project in Todoist could do the job and is something I’d like to try.

I’m now a couple of weeks into writing a blog post every day. I started doing it sort of on a whim because I’ve wanted to write more often, and a forcing function of “something” every day at least drives me to do the behavior.

Writing out ideas helps me clarify and expand my thinking. For a number of years I’ve tried to keep a personal journal using an app, to varying degrees of success. I’ll go through periods of doing well, then fall off the wagon. My entries there have always had a more personal edge, like documenting things the kids are doing and family activities we do. I also keep a health journal there separately for medical- and exercise-related things. This venue I intend to be a place to “think out loud” and share things I’m working on in an open format.

I set myself a personal goal to see if I could post once per day for a month to start out. No other restrictions on what it could be, anything is fair game. I’m experimenting with some repeating varieties of content that might stick longer-term. Once a week or so I’d like to write something longer, more detailed, and related to thoughts or ideas. Occasionally I’ll mix in technical things, notes on books, and some links to things I’m finding interesting.

The process is proving fairly easy so far. I can spend 30 minutes writing something each evening before bed, and work on longer-form things little by little over time. If I can get through the first month successfully, then I’ll move the goalpost out to 3 months and see what happens. My overall aim is to convert writing from a project to a habit — something I just do as a general pattern. Success will be if I make it to each goal marker while still feeling motivated. As comfort level builds, I suspect it’ll not only get easier, but I’ll look forward to it every day.

I’ve been collecting paper maps for years. It’s one of the few collection habits I’ve allowed myself to keep (well, including books). Some time back I wanted to inventory all of them. So I built an app in Fulcrum to log the title, source, publishing date, and photos of each.

My collection’s up to 210 now. I’m working on a way to publish this. The other similar app I built a while back is a “map of maps”, basically a similar structure to my collection, but actually geotagging out in the world where I run across maps — park signage, street areas, outdoor mall floor plans, transit maps, and the like. I should set up a Fulcrum Community project to share out for folks to help build the ultimate map of public maps.

For the last 7 days I’ve only been using the iPad. I’ve had a 12.9” iPad Pro for about a year, but have only used it in “work mode” occasionally so I don’t have to lug the laptop home all the time. Most of what I do these days doesn’t require full macOS capability, so I’m experimenting in developing the workflow to go tablet-only.

Slack, G Suite apps, mail, calendar, Zoom, Asana, and 1Password covers about 85% of the needs. There are a few things like testing Fulcrum, Salesforce, any code editing, that can still be challenging, but they partially work depending on what I’m trying to do.

I’m really enjoying it now that I’ve gotten a comfort level with navigating around and multitasking features. I find that the “one app at a time” nature of iOS helps me stay on track and focus on deeper tasks — things like writing documents, planning, and of course being able to sketch and diagram using the Pencil, which I do a ton of. I’ve liked Notability so far of the drawing apps I’ve tested for what I need.

One of the biggest things I had to figure out a solution for was being able to write and publish to this website efficiently. Since I use Jekyll and GitHub Pages under the hood, I hadn’t found a simple solution to manage the git repository and preview posts. I’ll go deeper on that workflow in a future post, because it’s a pretty comfortable setup (for me) that others might find useful.

Overall I’m liking working on iPad more and more. It gets easier as I accrue knowledge of tips, tricks, and other workflows.

Reading this post on the value of conference participation prompted some thoughts on the subject, from my perspective as someone who’s done it a couple dozen times, with a wide range of results.

A few years back, I had never presented or given a talk at a conference, but had attended quite a few. I’d always treated conferences and events with a focus on meeting people and absorbing the “state of the art” for whatever the industry or topic at hand. After a few conferences around a given sector, though, they begin to run together. If you’re a doer who is continually self-educating, you quickly find out that you’re already caught up with or ahead of the game on much of the subject matter you’re there to educate yourself on. With the pervasiveness of online information, you can read up on any subject without waiting for the so-called experts at a conference to tell you about it.

I think 2011 was the first time I gave an actual talk to a crowd of peers on a topic I cared about (read: not for school or an assignment). I’m not a natural at public speaking, so breaking down that wall and just doing it wasn’t easy. Ever since, though, I feel that events and conferences are barely worth attending unless I’m an active participant—whether I’m putting something out there I’ve been recently working on, talking about products or projects of my company, or even simply talking on a subject I enjoy and want to promote.

That’s not to say all events are wasteful if you don’t have an opportunity to present. After all, not every one of the thousand attendees can take the mic and have the floor. The value of active participation depends on your objective or desired outcome from the event you’re attending: strictly educational, promotional, or to meet and engage peers in the community. For whatever my motivation is going into an event, I find that a mission to engage with as many people as possible is where I draw the most value. I form lasting relationships that go beyond the last day of the show, and ultimately contribute to the other two motivators: I end up learning a ton and find plenty of areas to promote what I’m doing.

Ultimately, my primary reason for promoting public speaking to my peers is that you always get a return on the time you invest doing it. At the most minimal level, you get a lot smarter on your subject matter if you’re forced to organize your thoughts and convey them to someone else. And most of the time, you’ll end up having interesting conversations and meeting new people based on throwing something out there.

For the last month or so, I’ve been readopting the GTD methodology for organizing my work, personal and business. I read David Allen’s book back in 2007, and attempted to adopt the workflow. This was before having any sort of smart device, so workflow systems were much different back then. My system when I initially jumped in involved pens and pads, inboxes, folders — most of the recommended elements from the book. I didn’t last long, and since then I’ve only dabbled around really getting back into it. Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin’s recent podcast series on the subject spurred me back into giving it another serious go.

Without getting into the weeds of the system, I’ve always seen three pillars to GTD that are critical to reaping benefit:

• Ubiquitous capture
• Breakdown your work into discrete, actionable tasks (processing)
• Weekly review of projects and actions

There are more elements to the total system, but these are the core functional components of GTD that I’ve adopted, eschewing the parts about the 43 folders and some of the other fiddly things like labelmakers and lettered reference file cabinets. I think a contributor to my initial dropoff with the system was not appreciating that you can adopt only some elements of the total system, as long as you’re closing all the loops.

Here’s a snapshot of how I’m reintegrating GTD into my daily flow:

Capture

I’m a heavy user of OmniFocus for everything task-related. The notion of “ubiquitous capture” is the first step to getting the thoughts, ideas, and tasks out of your brain and into the flow. For me, ubiquity means it needs to enter the river of material to be processed either through my Mac or my iPhone, one of which I’ll have at fingertips at all times. I love the tangibility of pen and paper, but I’m not trustworthy enough to have that at all times. There are OmniFocus versions for Mac and iOS, so that gets that piece out of the way. Plus they stay in sync over the air. If something you need to do something about enters your mind, there needs to be a frictionless way for it to enter the pipeline.

Processing

This is probably what I struggle with the most. This is where the majority of the thinking comes into play; What project is this action part of? Should I just do it right now? How many smaller actions does it need to be broken into?

Effective processing requires regular attention. If you just load up the inbox for weeks on end without sorting through each item and determining the next action (which could be deleting it), you end up working through tasks right out of the inbox. I can sort through the cruft in my inbox with vigilance and a heavy delete-key finger, but where I tend to fall off the wagon is with keeping the processing frequent enough not to get behind. I’ll find myself after a few consecutive hectic days cherry-picking actions to tackle right in the inbox, instead of hitting things from a higher level based on project importance or context. This can lead to wheel-spinning and procrastination, and put you right back to thrashing around with all that data in your head.

This time around, I’m putting more energy into the processing steps. Failure there is a large part of why I fell out with GTD some time back.

Reviewing

The weekly review is processing’s older brother, meant to walk you through each of the projects on your plate, reorganize them, enter any missing actions, and just generally get a “control tower” snapshot of all the runways in front of you. OmniFocus has an awesome “review” mode designed to handhold you through looking at each and every project in your OmniFocus database one by one. With a full force inbox dump, plus effective processing, it’s insane how many projects end up in the system. A good, regular review is a healthy way to clear the decks and make way for the projects that you’re actually going to do. This is another area I’ve struggled with in the past, it’s one of the last steps in truly closing loops and making sure your task database isn’t filled with garbage to fight with.

The unspoken “fourth pillar” in all of this is, naturally, doing. Inboxes, apps, text files, and folders aren’t going to actually accomplish those next actions for you. Many blog posts out there neglect to mention this most-critical piece of the flow (it seems obvious, right?), but it’s important. Making sure that the actions are as mindlessly straightforward as possible in the processing phase is critical to making the actions so easy, you hardly have to think while you’re cranking. GTD mostly serves as a method to create order from chaos. My personal objective is to get comfortable enough to make the system second-nature. I don’t want to think while I’m doing, at least not very much.

Related links:

• David Allen’s talk at Google, 2007
• Getting started with GTD