Skip to main content

Enough Excuses

Today I'm starting something a little different, I'm keeping track of my excuses.

There are so many times that I've tried to create new habits or start new things and fail for one reason or another. I almost always start this process by looking at my available free time, trying to optimize my schedule where I can, and then putting that schedule into a calendar with notifications. All this effort put forth and then when the rubber hits the road I just ignore the calendar and swipe away its notifications.

I'm starting the same way I always do but I'm adding one more thing to it. I want to make myself write down why I didn't do a thing that I've scheduled for myself; I'm trying to outsmart my future self. I'm adding to this a list of things that I want to make sure I do like running a few times a week, writing (like this blog), connecting with friends, and yoga almost every day. To help me keep track of these excuse, I've set up a Google form that asks what activity I was planning on doing and then why I didn't do it and added this link to each calendar item so that I can just click the link without much effort.

What do I plan to do with these excuses? Well, I thought about posting them on Facebook or Twitter but realized that would just keep me from writing them in the first place. So, at the moment, I just plan to look at them periodically and try to figure out if they're real or fake. Ideally, if they're real, then I might just find new times for the activities. I suspect most of them are actually fake though and I want to get that realistic view of who I am so that I can be better.

If I had to take a guess why this would fail it's because I'm going to not want to spend the time writing the "why" but only time will tell.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"The Push-up Experiment" or "How I learned that being able to see progress is motivating..."

I've found that when I'm able to visualize progress it motivates me. I'm not a productivity expert or a psychologist but this makes a lot of sense and I figured I'd share it even if you've heard it before. Since March 28th, I've been doing push-ups and tracking the number of push-ups I achieve in a spreadsheet. Yes, I know this completely classifies me as a total nerd, but I'm OK with that; I'm writing a blog post about my push-up spreadsheet, I'm well aware of the overall nerdiness going on here. I won't get into the nirty-gritty about how I used IFTTT  to send me a Google Drive survey every morning on my phone reminding me to do push-ups as well as providing a convenient place to simply enter the numbers. I won't go into the details about how that survey automatically goes into a Drive sheet and the graph (pictured below) automatically updates with each response. No, I won't go into that because I'm afraid that you will think ...

I'm Restless

I've been thinking about doing a lot of different things lately. I've been wanting to learn the violin, go rock climbing, start a side business, and drive to the west coast, just to name a few. I'm not exactly sure where these urges started or why they're just now coming up but it seems that something in me is stirring. Part of this may be caused by my age; I'm not old by any means but in October of 2012 I turned 30. I've been living in the same house working at the same job for roughly 8 years now and I wonder if I'm starting to feel like I'm letting life pass me by. I'm sure this is a very normal feeling around my age and probably every milestone birthday from here on. I want to make sure that when I hit 40 I don't think to myself, "What did I do for the last 10 years?" I want to be able to look back and say "Wow, look at all the fun I had, the people I met, and the work I accomplished." I'm going to start right now,...

My Life After LastPass

I'm sure this post is going to feel like a commercial and I'm fine with that. :) A friend (who will remain entirely anonymous) posted a light-hearted jest on Facebook about some password requirements being insane and asking about ways to make up a password that worked within these particular criteria. All of the usual suggestions came up: take a normal password and change some letters to numbers, the algorithm that you remember that turns the url of the site into a password, XKCD's awesome method at http://xkcd.com/936/ , and I mentioned LastPass . At this point I hadn't used LastPass, only heard about it and thought it would solve his problem. LastPass is a secure password management tool that will generate (and remember) new passwords for anything you want. The passwords tend to look something like this "bQ0SCNPS7Q1c" and are encrypted and stored locally as well as on their servers so that you can access them from anywhere. Your master password is the ke...