Don't Sprint a Marathon

While my partner and I were on vacation, I decided to message a really good friend of mine to see how she was acclimating to her new home and job. We exchanged the usual, "How do you do's?" and I told her that I was glad to be on vacation, since I felt like I was really starting to burn out on everything, despite my best efforts to keep pushing.

"You tend to burn all cylinders for a sprint," she said, and I laughed sheepishly when I read it.

"And then I run a marathon," was my reply.

I'm not sure if my work ethic is the result of my schooling or if I just have that much intrinsic motivation. I'm leaning toward the latter, because for creative assignments I enjoyed in school, I tended to overachieve, such as writing a 20-page short story when we had to rewrite the story of Romeo and Juliet in high school. I think the minimum page limit was 2-3. Good times. Knowing me, it's probably buried somewhere on an external hard drive.

Surely I didn't have the right to feel burnt out though. Didn't I take a week off from blogging and everything just a couple weeks prior? Maybe I simply needed a new method of scheduling my time. Yeah, that's it. The approach I've been taking in my planner isn't doing it for me anymore, and I need to switch it up! While I'm at it, I need to re-prioritize my entire life's existence because I'm going nowhere fast, and there's too much to do!

That's how I justified my search for a digital scheduler that wasn't Google Calendar, because I had already attempted that one before, and it hadn't panned out as desired. I wound up downloading a free Excel template, which targeted more of a college student audience, and repurposed it for my own needs.

I honestly spent too much time trying to reorganize it the way I wanted, but that's because I'm not affluent in Excel.

Really, though, throwing my arms up in the air in exasperation and scouring the internet for a new way to track my time was just my way of procrastinating on actual work the last couple of days before vacation. I've since resumed using the physical planner in tandem with the Excel file, which I'm still hammering out, as you can see by the empty space in the visible bi-monthly schedule. We'll see how long it lasts before I decide I'm dedicating too much time to it.

One potential factor I can see myself liking is that the Excel file can reflect how I want my day to go while the planner itself reflects how the day actually went. The Excel file is easy to edit and erase because it's just text on a screen, so I'm not likely to dwell on unfinished tasks, since with a few simple keystrokes, *bloop,* it's erased, whereas for the physical planner I write in colored ink to categorize the different projects that have my focus.

Lately, I've been feeling this increasing sense of internal frustration, which I believe may have led me to the temporary overhaul of my scheduling habit. I want to work on the layout of Fear No More, and the more time that passes, the more it nags at me. I want to learn what I can for the month I have left of Skillshare, but when the morning is dedicated to writing/transcribing, and the afternoon to working out and walking, it's difficult to find the best time to slot in those activities; even when I do have some extra time on my hands, I feel this resistance to pursuing those endeavors. Underlying fear, perhaps?

To help with this conundrum, I've reworked my morning routine so that I'm doing less and leaving more of the chores to do at night before bed. I used to grind coffee beans and brew coffee in the morning, for example, but moved the former to the evening and delay the brew to a designated time the next morning. To say I'm surprised I didn't think of it sooner would be a lie. Oftentimes, the obvious ideas sail right over my head. The bulk of my walking I've also pushed back to when my partner gets off work, that way we can go together if he's up for it or I can still go alone if he isn't. Little tweaks can make a big impact.

As of right now, I'm feeling pretty good about this post-vacation setup. The challenge will be allowing the adjustments enough time to settle in as habit without abandoning them within a few weeks.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

• Not too much to note because it was vacation week, but I did finish listening to the 2nd Dresden novel, "Fool Moon," and reading Orson Scott Card's "Empire." The latter was an okay book, rather lackluster overall. There are a few notable quotes near the beginning that stuck with me as well as portions of his Afterword.

"Oh, Soldier Boy, you poor lad," said Torrent. "The American idea was thrown out with Social Security. We nailed the coffin shut with group rights. We don't want individual liberty because we don't want individual responsibility. We want somebody else to take care of us. If we had a dictator who did a better job of it than our present system, then as long as he pretended to respect Congress, we'd lick his hands like dogs." - Empire, p. 20

• I found this quote thought provoking because of how it relates to the current tension here in the United States. Obviously, it's not a direct comparison, but when looking at how politicians speak--how many people speak even--responsibility and blame is always pushed onto the somebody else. When was the last time someone of import actually shouldered responsibility for a mistake? Instead, it's more likely the ones making the mistakes double down in their beliefs that what they're doing is the right thing, that they weren't really at fault at all. "Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)".

The real danger was not losing his temper, however. For in the second year of his studies, he realized that he was beginning to treat some of the most absurd ideas as if they had some basis in truth. It was Goebbels in practice: If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point. We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe. - Empire, p. 22

• To me, this is an interesting quote because, again, one look at any political post made online will reinforce the thought behind this statement, how much people will flock to support lies (flat earth, anti-vaxxers) based off poor research or nonsense their friend from work spouted as truth. Yet simultaneously, just as likely are people to argue the opposite. The ability to express ourselves allows us to stand against "the tribe" when opposing beliefs clash. Because of the internet, we know there are like-minded individuals out there, maybe even in the same community. I would argue that if someone tells the same lies long enough and loudly enough, eventually someone is bound to come along to push back on those lies, and they won't be alone. I saw it at my old college campus when I was studying: flocks of students who didn't even know each other coming together to argue against enflamers from Westborough Baptist Church. We're not as isolated as we were once upon a time.

• Honestly, I would love to quote Card's entire Afterword because of the insight provided within. When applied to the turbulence found within society today, much of what he says is deeply insightful:

We live in a time when people like me, who do not wish to choose either camp's ridiculous, inconsistent, unrelated ideology, are being forced to choose--and to take one whole absurd package or the other. We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics. We live in a time when lies are preferred to the truth and truths are called lies, when opponents are assumed to have the worst conceivable motives and treated accordingly, and when we reach immediately for coercion without even bothering to find out what those who disagree with us are actually saying. In short, we are creating for ourselves a new dark age--the darkness of blinders we voluntarily wear, and which, if we do not take them off and see each other as human beings with legitimate, virtuous concerns, will lead us to tragedies whose cost we will bear for generations. - Empire, Afterword, p. 346 & 347

• This book was published in 2006, and I would say that those final few paragraphs are more applicable today than ever before.

• Still sub 5'00"/km on my week 1 run, though it'd risen to 4'57" for the one I did. My lungs were hurting afterward, like that feeling you get when you're getting over a cold or the flu, where inhaling too much hurts and leads to coughing. Similar to that.

  • I was hoping my right wrist would have plenty of time to rest, since I wasn't doing an extensive amount of typing, but playing fetch with Mura and a few other activities aggravated it. Been looking into a brace, but there are so many types, and I'm fairly certain I don't have tendinitis or carpal tunnel. Feels more like a strain injury, but I'm not a doctor. At the very least, I want to get a pair for lifting to help support my wrists in general, but at least the injury is forcing me to be even more cognizant of how I'm handling the weight.

  • Resumed my Built With Science workouts at a lower weight, since it'd been a couple weeks. Boy am I feeling it today, especially my quads. Felt my right knee just baaaarely starting to hurt while doing heel lifted goblet squats, like the whisper of a sharp pain threatening to become a shout at the wrong move. It never escalated and vanished quickly, but it has me thinking that, despite my best efforts to maintain proper form, I'm doing something wrong.

  • Transcribed Session 110.1, .2, and .3, about 11k words total so far. I still have .4 and .5 to finish, but because of my wrist, I may have to limit myself to doing only about an hour and a half max per day instead of trying to knock it all out in one go. I'm not thrilled with the idea, so we'll see.

Questions for Contemplation & Discussion:

• I'm definitely the type of person to run on all cylinders for any given project, even those where I should probably ease the throttle. I've been able to push the extent of my sprints to greater lengths of time over the years, but I still struggle with larger creative projects because I feel like if I don't finish them within a short time frame, then I never will. Flawed logic, perhaps, but it's been especially true any time I've ever tried to write a novel or work on a more involved drawing complete with lineart and coloring. When it comes to projects, are you a sprinter, a marathon runner, both, or something else entirely? Does the amount of effort change depending on the sort of project, more for shorter/less for longer?

• If you've found yourself in a similar situation I described above, instead of panic-overhauling your entire life's habits, consider instead each task and chore you complete throughout the day. What can you move from morning to evening, vice versa, or shift in general to allot more time to a priority that's been on your mind but hasn't been enough of a priority to make it the next to-do?

  • Do you keep your schedule purposefully cluttered, telling yourself you don't have the energy or the motivation or time because you're subconsciously afraid of tackling it, burnout notwithstanding? I know I'm guilty of doing so personally.

    • If you say you don't have time, etc...have you ever tried to block out and track how much time you dedicate to each daily task you complete? If not, doing so could be an eye-opening experience.

• Concerning the above quotes, comparing the fiction to what we're seeing in reality, what is your assessment on the characters' and author's viewpoints? Do you find them chillingly accurate or worthy of an eye roll for melodrama? What are your own opinions and observances, and how do they compare and contrast with some of mine?

• Any wrist brace recommendations?

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Salad

Soaking in the sun