Archives for December 2023

I get wild ideas all the time. Most of the time I’ll come to some senses and stop before I actually enroll in the course or book a flight or buy that land but sometimes I go through with the thing I never thought I’d do.

Example: One day I decided that in 2024 I should do 10,000 squats.

For a short backstory, I started in mid-October to do 10 squats per day and then added 10 more in mid-November. I needed some different movement types besides my bike and I figured that squats were free, portable and rarely lead to injury so why not?

But 20 squats per day is a very different goal than 10,000 in a year.

Or is it?

What sold me on trying this wild hair of an idea is the math. If you divide 10,000 squats by 366 (2024 is a leap year) then you will get 28 squats rounded up.

Which is… not many more than I’m doing right now. And if I keep going with 20 per day in December and then increase to 30 per day, I’ll make my goal by November. There might be a few days that I don’t get to 30, but that gives me a buffer.

What’s incredible to me is that 10,000 feels massive. 28 feels doable.

So maybe it feels out of reach to read 50 books next year, until you consider that the average book is 250 pages and that’s just 35 pages a day to get through 50 books in a year.

My cycling goal is another one that I chose randomly, to always match the year to the goal. 2,023 miles in 2023 is just 5.5 miles a day. But if you consider when I travelled (away from a bike), getting the flu, then COVID and just the days when I needed to rest, averaging 7 miles a ride is enough to get me to that goal.

Maybe you want to earn more in the next year, could you make a $27 sale every day to add $10,000 to your revenue?

Or you’d like to organize your home so you pick one room per month and try to reduce 10 items per day. There are so many way to take a big goal, one that feels impossible and break it down into possible pieces.

And, as a bonus, you’re creating the habits that enable you to continue such a practice long term. If you told me I was physically able to cycle 1,000 miles in a few days to hit my annual goal faster and check it off a list, I wouldn’t do it. Not only is that a lot of pressure but the consistency matters more to me than the end goal.

Now, if you start off January 1st with a $10,000 sale, that’s fantastic! But don’t stop the habit of seeking a sale every day. Because some days will be $0 and others will be $27 and others may be $10,000. It all adds up – the money and the habit.

(P.s. This is the kind of math and metrics I love because if you tell me, what’s the point? my product is $400 and I can’t do much then I’ll run some numbers. What if you made offers every day and over a year you made a sale, on average, every 5 days? That’s 73 sales throughout the year. If your average product is $400, that’s $29,200 in a year!)

Anyway, I look forward to looking back after completing 10,000 squats and deciding if I was fully delusional or happy that I set this goal for myself. The nearly 1,000 squats I’ve done since mid-October are just the warm up act.

I never really understood those folks who would take off the last half of December and skip out on all the amazing quiet time at work. I used to love working in my offices during this timeframe because I could get so much done.

Well, I’m joining the crew of being offline and largely unavailable until early January and I have a good list of things I want to do with my break at home.

I suppose I could just lie around in pajamas, do puzzles, watch movies and read books but that’s not really my personality. I mean, I’ll do those things anyway because I love movies and books and puzzles but I also love the practice of habits and pushing myself.

So one night when I was hosting my good friend Insomnia, I started a list. If I could do these specific things by the end of the year, I would be extremely happy. Then, like a good writer, I determined I would need to edit “sober”, aka rested, and make sure I was being realistic.

This is a necessary step because I have the tendency to start a weekend to do list with “clean the windows” and end it, 53 items later, with “re-roof the house.” My brain does not always easily comprehend what I can do in 2 days or 2 weeks.

But the best part of a list like mine is that you can probably start ticking things off right away. For me that included a few accounts I needed to cancel, some emails to send and a couple of links I just needed to save. See, I tend to email myself articles and artists, books to check out or products to look into and then they sit in my inbox. Clearing those out takes very little time and is perfect when my mind is racing at… 2am.

So what happens to all those ideas I can’t get done in my time off? Well, they go into my bullet journal for 2024 to accomplish throughout the year.

Planned Rest

Of course, I do anticipate time to rest, if my body cooperates and allows me to sleep during normal sleeping hours. But I don’t know if you ever experienced those summers as a kid when you didn’t have anything to do and after a few days you were merging into the couch as your eyes glazed over watching reruns on tv… just me?

Well, I feel we all get that way a bit now. We’ve seen the funny memes or videos on TikTok or Instagram, there’s always new rage baiting on Twitter and Facebook, news stories keep on coming, YouTube recommends the same old stuff over and over again… it can be frustrating and actually take more energy away.

I have two books I want to finish by the end of the year, and a nice stack of books to kickoff 2024.

Also on my list is finishing up some quilting projects and when I get to the last part, it’s all done by hand and a little slow. So listening to music while I attach binding to a half dozen quilt projects feels a lot like relaxing (especially compared to days full of video calls and Asana projects and emails).

While I don’t plan to spend much time out shopping, when the weather is good I’ll take a walk around town and maybe stop in the local coffee shop for a drink.

I have the time, after all I won’t have calls to rush home for or appointments until January. And I’m beginning to get very excited about that reality.