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

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,...

Deeper Relationships

I had a long talk with a good friend the other day about the need  to have more friends on Facebook/Twitter/etc. and what it means to have more friends. We concluded that there's something instinctual about the desire to make your tribe  larger. Our ancestors oftentimes survived by the size of their tribe and so we now continue to carry this base instinct to have a larger group of friends, family, and acquaintances just in case a saber tooth tiger decides to roll up and try to eat one of our babies. I've decided that I'm much more interested in having deep meaningful relationships with a few people that are extremely important to me than to have lots of tangential friendships where we bond slightly over a delicious looking cheeseburger that I like . Because of this, I'm starting to use Facebook much different, I've removed all of the people that I don't talk to routinely unless I'm going to make a conscientious effort to improve our current relationship. Bef...