Deliverable

I’ve completed the first 7 days of my 30 Day Exercise Challenge. I must say that so far it’s been a very positive experience. I can really see myself completing this challenge. I find that I look forward to my exercise each day, and am trying to find more and more variety in my exercise choices.

I’ve also revamped slightly the layout of how I’ve been tracking my progess. I flipped the Monday-Sunday format I was using so that it’s now laid out like this:

Su:
Sa:
F:
Th:
W:
T:
M:

This way I can more easily see the progression of what exercises I’ve done over the past week. I also set up a Fitness Tracking Archives page to make it a bit easier to edit the main tracking page each week.

Having the large variety of exercises to choose from assures that you’re not going to overstress or injure a specific body part by overtraining. The other thing that helps is knowing that it’s so easy to be successful. If my schedule only allows me to walk one of my walking routes, then I’ve successfully exercised that day. If it happens to be raining that day I have alot of other indoor options to choose from. The key is choices, choices, choices and structuring those choices in such a way that “exercising” can mean spending 4 minutes doing crunches on the ball.

I think the thing that most people miss about exercise is that the effects are cumulative. A little bit of exercise every day goes much further than alot of exercise engaged in sporadically. Exercising every day is more of a philosophical life choice. We often hear ourselves saying “I don’t have the time to exercise”, but that’s just not true. More specifically what we’re saying is “I don’t have 2 hours to spend going to the gym”, which might be absolutely true. By making their definition of exercise so rigid most people rob themselves of an opportunity to be healthy and fit. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making gym membership a part of your life if it’s something that you can afford and have the time to do. But it’s much more difficult to fit that two hours into your life consistently if that’s your only exercise option.

I’ll put this one in the “maybe” category. This morning I walked the stairs by Sakura Park. The idea is to walk up and down stairs for the same amount of time that it would take me to walk a 1/2 mile. (It’s taken me between 7 and 8 minutes the last 3 times I’ve walked my 1/2 mile route.) I’ll keep the amount of time consistent and try to increase the number of times I’m able to walk up and down the stairs. Today I went up and down them 9 times.

This exercise might not work for the long term but I want to include it as one of my choices now. I need to find things to do that raise my heart rate without pounding the hell out of my knees. This seems to fit that criteria. I broke a sweat, my heart rate definitely went up and though I could feel the workout in my quads and hips my knees seemed to do ok. We’ll see how it goes.

The main thing is that it gives me one more exercise choice.

For the next 30 days I’ll exercise at least once a day.

For the purpose of this challenge “exercise” is defined as anything found here.

My target date is Tuesday, June 20th. That’s 30 days from today.

I can do push-ups. I can walk. I can do pilates. If it’s on my list it counts. I’ll continue to track my progress on my fitness tracking page.

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30 Day Challenge guidelines can be found here.

30 Day Challenge: Exercise
Start date: Monday, May 22nd
Check-in date: Tuesday, June 20th

For the next 30 days I’ll practice at least one instrument a day.

It doesn’t matter which one, as long as I practice it for a minimum of 20 minutes.

The instruments I have to choose from:

• Trombone
• Bass
• Guitar
• Piano
• Singing

This includes weekends. This includes days that I’m really busy.

My thinking on this is that I’ll be making some type of music a part of every day. Hopefully any type of burnout will be sidestepped by the fact that I’ll have 5 things to choose from.

20 minutes minimum on at least one instrument for 30 consecutive days doesn’t mean that I can’t practice more. It doesn’t mean that I can’t practice several instruments in a day. It simply means that I’ll be consistently making music a part of my everyday life. I’ll also be doing a variation of the same thing that I’m asking my students to do. My hope is that by committing to practicing at least one instrument a day for 30 days, I’ll be more likely to practice the other instruments and will practice for longer periods.

To sum up the challenge:

• I’ll practice at least one instrument a day (for a minimum of 20 minutes) for the next 30 days.
• Check-in date: June 15th, which is 30 days from tomorrow.

30 Day Challenge guidelines can be found here.

I plan to create some 30 Day Challenges for myself over the coming days, and wanted to set a few guidelines before I begin:

• I’ll be as clear and as specific as possible when setting up each challenge.
• I’ll think through potential pitfalls with each challenge beforehand and plan for them as much as possible.
• I’ll include the 30 day “target date” in the post.
• I’ll keep a 3×5 card with me that has a list of my current 30 Day Challenges, including target dates.
• I’ll write my target date for each challenge on the calendar next to my desk.
• If for some reason I miss a day I must restart the 30 days.
• At the end of 30 days I’ll evaluate whether or not I’d like to continue the habit for another 30 days.

I may add to these guidelines as things occur to me over the coming weeks.

I recently came across a series of blog posts that deal with building habits. Given the things I’ve been focusing on lately, it’s like the universe stuck them out there just for me. In the post on conditioning, he talks about the 30 Day Trial as a tool to build a habit. That got me thinking about my own past experiences with something similar, my 3 Week Challenges for Cooking, Fiber, and Television. These had been back in August, and I’d almost forgotten that I’d done them. I started to ask myself some questions:

• “What were my experiences been back then?”
• “Had I stuck with these habits, and if not then why not?”
• “How might I use this concept in my life today?”

It turns out that I was successful in all three of my challenges, and that I received alot of benefits from the process.

Of the three challenges the one that I’ve managed to integrate the most into my life has been the fiber part. I eat breakfast pretty much every day now, and recognize that I don’t feel as good if I start my day without it.

On the TV and cooking front I completely let those habits slip through. I think perhaps I wasn’t ready to give up television completely back then and I never did find an effective strategy to cook consistenly. (Though I’m still working on it!)

I plan to revisit the concept of the “30 Day Challenge” in posts over the next few days as I research it more and figure out the ways in which I’d like to challenge myself.

I made African Safari Pilaf tonight. (Found via the Healthy Hillbilly Housewife by way of this really good blog post on eating more meals at home). I honestly have no idea what a pilaf is, but it ended up tasting pretty good. There weren’t any vegetables so in the future I’d probably have to add a side of something green. Looks to be a recipe I could tweak out a variety of different ways. It called for “beef broth powder”, which I assume meant beef bouillon because I couldn’t find any beef broth powder in the store. I skipped that, cause it looked like it had a ton of salt. The recipe originally called for ginger but I accidentally added curry instead. Didn’t seem to be a problem.

In the future I could also probably cut back on the amount of ground beef. I stuck to the prescribed one pound but I think it overpowered the rice somewhat. Also another note to self: The amount of water they suggest with brown rice never seems to be enough. I could probably have safely used 3 1/2 cups. The next time I’d also season the ground beef more when I was cooking it.

I’d try this again.

Adults have houses. Adults have children. Adults have car payments and lawns to cut. They have clothes to buy for the kids and gas to put in the car.

Does having kids and houses and cars make you an adult? No, but kids and houses and car payments quickly separate the adults from the non-adults. You can usually tell which parents aren’t adults by the way their kids act. If the kids are unruly and rude and obnoxious, I’d say the chances are much higher that the parents aren’t much more than adolescents themselves. If the front lawn is up to the windows and the inside looks like crap, the chances are much higher that the folks inside aren’t adults. They’ve never acquired adult habits.

My parents I’d consider to be adults. My father worked an honest job for 40+ years to put food on the table and pay the mortgage and put clothes on my back. My mom worked as well to pay for the things we needed and to raise our standard of living. The grass got cut. The inside of the house stayed tidy.

My parents have adult habits and in many ways I do not.

I spent 5 years of college building those non-adult habits. It’s the essence of college. Freedom for the first time! No need to go to bed at a specific hour. No one telling you what to do! Complete freedom! I continued and refined those habits in 2 years of graduate school. Many of them I continue to this day.

My parents never had the luxury of having the same habits that I’ve developed. (See above, re: 40+ years on the job, etc.) When you have to pay the mortgage and put food on the table “not working and letting days slip by” isn’t an option. I’m not saying that they’re perfect. I’m not saying that I’d want the type of life that they’ve made for themselves, and I’m also not suggesting that by not wanting that type of life that I think it’s less than admirable in any way.

The only thing that I’m saying is that my parents have adult habits and that in many ways I still don’t want to see myself as an adult. (To this day I have a phobia of dealing with the parents of my students because in some way I see them as adults that could rebuke me, rather than as equals.)

I need the type of habits that helped my father work a job 40+ years. It’s not that I want a “job”. What I want is to take the time he spent working at his “job”, instead investing in my own projects and my own creativity. I want to apply the type of adult habits that my parents have used to create a reasonably stable life for themselves in retirement towards creating the life of my dreams.

As though there were any doubt about. My day has been pretty useless, and I’ve not been able to focus on anything much so far. The morning was spent catching up on the sleep I didn’t get this week because I went to bed later on the days that I taught than I should have.

It’s a chicken/egg thing. Does erratic sleep lead to feeling overwhelmed which results in me losing days at at time, or is that I feel overwhelmed and I compensate by staying up too late?

My lack of sleep this week wasn’t because I fell asleep on the couch. It’s just that I didn’t go to bed at the right time and only got a few hours of sleep on the nights before I taught. By the time I got home from teaching (on Wednesday) and teaching then class (on Thursday) I was zonked. So really, it’s been five days that weren’t used effectively.

I know this can’t continue, but I’m not sure how to break the habit.

I’ve had some movement on how I want to approach my workflow for the book. It’ll look like this:

• Brain dump all of the sub-projects for the book onto 3×5 cards.
• Choose a sub-project to work on.
• Create a new folder with the sub-project title in the @Book folder
• Create a readme.txt file in the sub-project folder. You can leave any specific notes you have about the sub-project here (scaling settings in Illustrator, for example).

The sub-project will more than likely require several next actions, so…

• Staple the 3×5 card to a piece of lined notebook paper. Work thru the next actions on this piece of paper.
• Take the next action you have on your list

Some of the next actions might actually be another sub-project in themselves. If so, bump the sub-project over to a it’s own separate 3×5 card.

Other things to consider:

• Keep all of your associated Sibelius and .eps documents in the same project folder

• Don’t slack on naming things. Be specific, either in the way you label the folder, or the way you label the file. This will keep you from redoing work that you don’t need to.
• Don’t be slack in setting up templates. A well set-up template in the beginning will make things go much faster when it comes to repeating tasks.

I think that this should cover alot of the oranizational problems that I’ve had in the past that have led to duplication of work. It should also break things into manageable chunks. It just occurred to me that this is what I’m asking my students to do when I have them break down a song for practicing: “Why practice 50 things when you can practice the 5 things that will help you play the 50?”. I think that I can repurpose this into how I work on the book… just have to think through the possible connection a bit more.