Sleep
Didn’t do so well here… Out of seven days I only got sufficient sleep one of those days. Boy did I feel it. This week was a bit of a blur.
Diet
Although I didn’t even open the MyFitnessPal app once, I did manage to eat healthy homemade meals most of this week, with the exception of frozen yogurt one night and a pizza buffet another night. The app is not absolutely necessary, but it is immensely helpful for keeping me mindful of what I’m putting into my body and how much actual nutrition I’m getting from my food.
Exercise
Nope… I’m actually writing this on Sunday morning, so we’ll see if I manage to squeeze in a last minute workout to claim a sliver of success. (Update: No work out, but did catch up on a favorite tv show)
Meditation/Reflection
I did this the first day. I spent the first 10 minutes just thinking to myself and tried to spend the last 5 minutes thinking of nothing. The 10 minutes of thinking was tough. It was hard to focus my thinking on any single thing and I found my mind wondering quite a bit. During the 5 minutes of not thinking I dozed off. I did manage to circle back to this exercise later in the week. It looks like this may become easier with practice.
Expression
I did much better with this activity. I ended up doing this 5 out of 7 days and enjoyed it greatly. This definitely helped me maintain some level of saneness. I observed that even just knowing I would get to have some creative time allowed me to have greater focus during working times.
Here are some of the things I made this week:
-In Your Heart (musical piece)
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/137743688″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true” width=”200″ height=”200″ iframe=”true” /]
-Wednesday night expression (random hand lettering)
-Ferris Bueller (art series)
Hygiene/Appearance
5 out of 7 isn’t bad. I won’t go into detail about how religiously I adhered to each item in the routine, but I did write a routine and I did manage to keep up with some of it and that is a huge improvement. I felt a little more confident. I’m usually not worried about my normal, disheveled, sitting in the corner with his glasses and hoodie and messy hair sipping coffee crouched over his computer appearance. I think the pride I took in my appearance translated in some ways in my work. I guess if I could sum it up in a word it would be presentation. I felt like my presentation was stronger and more attractive/effective on all fronts.
Summary
If I was giving myself a grade for this week, it would probably be a 50%. That’s actually pretty generous considering what I had originally set out to do. I don’t feel bad though… this isn’t me beating myself up. This is me being objective. If I’m being honest, this is what most of my weeks look like so now I’ve actually measured the baseline and can work up from here.
I did get a lot done this week and, maybe just because I was being more intentional, felt more focused in my work. Here are some things I checked off of my list:
-Designed an event flier
-Finished the responsive coding for a website
-Recorded 3 podcasts
-Posted 2 brief articles to Crash Test Parents
-Finished a Hand Lettering piece
-Registered my son in kindergarten
-Composed a musical piece
-Wrote and Sent my design newsletter
All in all I’d say this was a good week AND I get to try again this week. On to the next challenge!
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