It has been super hard to find time or motivation to write lately, but at the very least I can get in a quick update about where goals are for the year. There were some changes I made about a month ago to one of the goals, and I’m going to talk about another one I decided to make. So the TL;DR version of this post is: two goals are still on track, though lagging behind lately, and two goals have been outright changed to better reflect how things are.
Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours -> Beat My Best 5K Time
I knew a month ago that there was no way I was going to run a half-marathon by the end of the year, much less crush my previous best by 15+ minutes. While I have been good at working out more often, my eating habits have not been improving, so progress is hard coming. I still think it is possible for me to get fit enough to improve in some way though, so we are just going to switch the half-marathon to a 5K.
I’ve run plenty of 5Ks, especially in the early days when I started running and I was working up to longer distances, but I didn’t get many of them recorded, so I don’t know what my actual best time is. All I have to go on is what I do have recorded from my races, which indicates my best 5K is 26:30. This was basically right after my first half-marathon as a way of recovering, so not me at my best fitness, but still a decent time. Thus, new goal, beat that time.
Publish a Post Every Week
Up until this past month I was doing well here. Having to catch up sometimes, but mostly getting them done on time, even if at the last minute. But lately the motivation has been lacking. For once I have enough things to write about, but I’d rather just do other things. It’s summer now, so doing more activities and I’ve also had some bad luck with illness. Got a summer cold that knocked me out for four days this past week, which means watching a lot of SGDQ and playing easy games.
Still, I have no doubt that I will be able to finish this out. I’ve got a few posts to catch up on right now, but eventually things will get back to the normal cadence. Just a bunch of distractions lately that will go away soon. Hopefully motivation will come back too, but I can always push through until I do (like I did with this post).
Listen to 200 New Albums
Last update I was at 33 albums, this time I’m at 51 albums. Halfway through the year, that’s not great progress. I basically have to listen to triple the amount of music I already have so far.
There are a couple reasons for this. One, I haven’t had nearly as much time to listen to podcasts or music or anything at work as I expected. I knew pretty early on it would be harder than it was at Amazon, but it’s gotten even worse as people have gotten to rely on me more. The pros and cons of open space offices. Collaboration is undoubtedly better, but focus time is much worse. I get pulled away from my tasks so often to help others that it’s not worth having headphones on most of the time.
So yeah, my original plan of using work time to get a bunch of listening done isn’t working too well. Need to find another strategy. I really want to increase the amount of time I spend on writing, so that will be a perfect time to get new music in. That’s not super reliable though since I can’t guarantee more writing will happen. I think ultimately it’s going to come down to reducing video consumption since that eats into podcast time, which eats into music time.
No real updates on albums that have stood out to me since last time. Finished the whole Queen catalog, and I listened to a lot more Stone Sour than I probably should have, but I just really like their stuff (Come What(ever) May is legit one of my favorite albums ever).
Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit
As I (tried to) explain in a post a month ago about Passions and Priorities, I have effectively given up on this goal. I haven’t fully decided what it should be replaced with, but what I’ve been trying to do since then is focus on one thing at a time, even if it’s not fun to do so. It’s not a new concept to me, I’ve tried it a couple times over the last few years to short-term success. But, going back to that previous post, since I find it hard to keep focusing on something unless it grabs my attention fully, it’s not going well this time around either. So it can’t be the long term solution, but it can help for now until something else clicks.
The other question with this is simply figuring out how to give myself the time I want to focus on anything. Inevitably it always comes back to being lazy about doing the things that are high priority and getting distracted by things that are the lowest priority. The internet is bad and I find it harder to ignore it all the time.
I’ve got nothing else for now. Turning out to be another year where I’m re-learning the lessons that I’d forgotten from failing in previous years. On the plus side, this really only impacts my hobbies. I’m still a very responsible person with a good job that I excel at, so I’m not a total screw up. I just have too many freaking interests and too many freaking distractions. Feeling like crap all the time because I can’t get healthy is having an impact too.
Sigh.