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A Summer of Distraction
With the summer officially over as of Thursday, I have to wonder where it went. I had lots of goals that I wasn’t able to accomplish (though I did work on many of them), I was unable to get away from the office and go down to the Oregon coast this summer for the first time since 1999 due to a rather increased workload at the office and a mild reluctance to kennel the cats (especially Barclay), and I can hardly remember anything that I did do this summer without laboring to think about it.
I honestly don’t know what happened, though it’s likely that Dragon Quest IX was a fairly large contributing factor to my lack of goal accomplishment. I think the biggest problem I had was that there were so many things that I wanted to work on that I couldn’t really focus on any one thing all that well, so I ended up not doing much of anything out of frustration.
One of the biggest goals was to get my site cleaned up and fully optimized, but I’ve only been able to do some precursory work on that and I’ve got 90 blogs to go back through and format to the current style. Also, none of the pages east of the Blog tab are even there. I’ve wanted to at least do basic pages for all of the tabs and I haven’t found the time to. I’ve tried multiple ways of trying to optimize my time and none of them have really worked.
I’m working on a two-hour block system this weekend, and it turns out that I have a two-hour block for everything that I wanted and needed to work on this weekend, with a block at the end of each night for some gaming. So far, I’ve been able to stay on it, but this is only the 2nd block of the weekend. I’m going on the theory that working a little bit on everything will be more fulfilling than spending all day on one thing, which has generally held true for me in the past.
I have been able to keep up with some of my goals this summer, and those are writing this weekly blog, recording a song every month for the site, working out every weekday morning, and building my dividends. I’ve also created a few fractal designs that are pretty cool to look at, but I’m not sure what to do with them yet. A project of creating futuristic wallpapers for websites could be in my future – gotta love the niche markets.
Speaking of the workouts, I’ve increased my workouts this summer from six sets (with 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4 repetitions) of four exercises to six sets (with 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, and 6 repetitions) of six exercises. I’ve basically doubled the amount of repetitions and my strength gains over the last month have been rather noticeable. I haven’t seen south of 190 in a while, but I’m hanging around 195 and I’m cool with that as I know those extra five pounds are muscle.
Another thing I’ve been working on is going through my CD collection alphabetically. I’ve been doing so since mid-October 2009 and I’m still not done (though I am on W now). I was listening to the CDs at work for the most part, but I’m being more proactive about it this morning and currently listening to the dulcet tones of Rob Zombie and his band of psychoholics. I’ve been going through and listening to everything to see what I want to keep and what I want to sell. While I’ll likely be keeping about 85% of my collection, it’ll be nice to clear up some space.
Speaking of which, clearing up space is definitely a long-term goal for me, as for my first 29+ years on this planet, I had a severe case of packrat-itis. I’ve been making a little headway on this, but I’ve still got a long way to go and a couple blocks this weekend will be set aside for working on that. I’ve had a mental shift in this aspect thanks to a few of Steve Pavlina’s blogs and some of the blogs over at Zen Habits. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the frugality that I’ve been practicing this last year as well, as a reluctance to buy things I don’t really need matches up well with not having lots of things.
While the summer may be gone, the fall is here now and it’s always been one of the most productive times of the year for me. I’m ready to knock some serious projects out this season and have a good time!
Discuss this post at the For the Love of Creativity Forum!
Posted on September 25th, 2010.
External Links
• Dragon Quest IX – Dragon Quest 9 for the Nintendo DS – Nintendo DS Games
• Steve Pavlina – Personal Development for Smart People – Steve Pavlina
• Zen Habits – breathe. | zen habits
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