Topic
habits
- Resistance is signal
Luca Dellanna on Resistance: The point is that going to the gym is an activity, like many others, where you can technically produce its inputs in a negative mental state, but they won’t be good enough to bring satisfy…
- One good habit at a time
For the rest, we should look for the improvement of society, as we seek our own individual improvement, in relatively minute particulars. We cannot say: 'I shall make myself into a different person'; we can only say:…
- Dana Gioia on Writing
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.
- Shaping Our Environments
Our environments heavily impact what we do in them. But we have the ability to engineer our environments, and therefore, our habits and behavior. “Choice architecture” means architecting our surroundings to coax the h…
- Progress Report, August 2023
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…
- L’appétit Vient en Mangeant
From Stephan Ango: There’s a French expression I like: L’appétit vient en mangeant Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow. Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some…
- Progress Report, November 2022
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…
- Making Mistakes Means You're Doing Things
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, yo…
- Progress Report, October 2022
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)…
- Progress Report, September 2022
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 Re…
- Progress Report, August 2022
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 ░░░░░░░░░░…
- Progress Report, July 2022
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 A…
- Progress Report: June 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-…
- Progress Report: May
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 Tot…
- Progress Report: April
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 worki…
- 2020 Goals Review
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 a…
- Goal Progress: November
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 w…
- Goal Progress: October
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: | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|---------------|--------------|…
- Two Years of Everyday Writing
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 i…
- Improving Sleep
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 sl…
- Plus Minus Next Journaling
Anne-Laure Le Cunff created this simple journaling format that looks interesting: Open your notebook, write the date at the top of a page, and draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked,…
- Goal Progress: September 2020
For the month of September: | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|---------------|--------------|--------------|----------------------------------| | Running | 484.26 miles | 488 miles |…
- Personal Moats
Erik Torenberg, in his latest newsletter: Should you specialize or generalize? Either could work, but you have to actually be good at something. That’s a key concept. If you’re a generalist, you want to be the best at…
- Goal Progress: August 2020
Another month down of quarantine life. | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|---------------|--------------|--------------|----------------------------------| | Running | 426.44 miles |…
- Goal Progress: July
A quick touch on progress for July. I can't believe it's already been 5 months since the beginning of the pandemic. | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|---------------|--------------|-…
- Goal Progress: June
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'…
- Goal Progress: May 2020
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…
- Choosing Fitness
So many bits in this post from David Smith resonate with me. He committed to getting in shape 3 years ago, and this post is a summary of thoughts on what works and what doesn't. A key takeaway is one that should be ob…
- Goal Progress: April 2020
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-offi…
- Rolling Windows for Goal Tracking
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…
- Goal Progress: March
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…
- Goal Progress: February
A quick update for February. No big revelations or movements on goals, just slight progress. | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|-------------|-------------|--------------|------------…
- Goal Progress: January
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…
- Successful Habits Through Smoothly Ratcheting Targets
A couple of interesting thoughts in habit-forming, from Andy Matuschak. I like the idea of increasing the amount of an activity in smooth increments rather than whole days: When it’s time to ratchet up the target, add…
- 2020 Goals
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 m…
- Goal Summary: Running Stats
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…
- Goal Summary: Meditation
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 tha…
- Goal Summary: Wrapping Up 2019
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…
- 600 Miles
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…
- Goal Progress: November
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…
- A Twitter "bestof" List
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 re…
- Goal Progress: October
The big achievement this month was the culmination of the half marathon training, ending October by finishing my first one. | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|--------------|---------…
- The Every Day Blog
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…
- Goal Progress: September
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 an…
- A Quick Running Update
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 Septe…
- Goal Progress: August
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. | Activity | Progress | Pace |…
- Elevate for Strava
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…
- Group Training
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…
- Long Runs
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 goa…
- Goal Progress: July
I had surprisingly good results on goals this July given how much was going on all month. | Activity | Progress | Pace | Goal | Plus-Minus | |----------------|--------------|--------------|--------------|-------------…