Stop Pretending

Ahh, New Year's, that time of the year where people reflect, party themselves into oblivion as a "final hurrah", and lie to themselves about who they'll become once January 1st arrives, as though the start of a brand new year alone contains the magic necessary to vanish all those poor habits and replace them with new, better ones with a simple flick of the wrist. Bye bye, obesity; hello, six-pack. Bye bye dead-end job that overworks its employees without compensation; hello, entrepreneurial enterprise. Bye bye--well, you get the idea.

Thoughts on Resolutions

I've been in that 40% crowd, standing on the side of New Year's Resolutions, holding up my fist in solidarity, writing novels on social media propping my ambitions up to balance on a pedestal gleaming under a halo of golden light, wagging my tail like the good little hustler I was. I could do it all, I would tell myself. Compose an hour every day? No problem. Draw an hour every day? No problem. Write, work out, go on walks, jog, read, indulge new experiences...the list exhausts me just looking at it. No wonder I burnt out.

I can hear the productivity gurus now, "Oh, you just needed to set SMART goals, that's all. Your goals were simply too vague," chanting like the advice has been tailored to everyone and advertised as, "One size, fits all!"

One size fits a handful, maybe, a particular group of people that thrives off the well-deserved rush of dopamine when they've snapped the finish line ribbon in their relay of goals achieved. The approach, however, doesn't apply to everyone, and to those people I say, "Don't set SMART goals; set goals smartly."

When goals become the trophy, scrabbling after them for that next hit creates this exhausting loop of pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, with the next goal landing just a little further out of reach or up a steeper incline so that by the time you claim them as yours, your mind and body are begging for rest. Yet the next one always remains in view, taunting, "Are you going to give up so soon? I'm right here. Oops, did I forget to mention how deceptively far away I am and that there's a chasm between you and me? Haa haa, good luck."

One of the most recent examples I can give in regards to my own experience with the above took place a few years ago, the start of 2022 maybe. I wanted to reintroduce drawing and composing back into my life after years of neglect, so I made it a goal to draw and color a full portrait of Efial and compose a short piano piece--I forget the duration I set; a couple minutes maybe?--by the end of February. Two months seemed feasible enough.

I spent every day either studying or practicing art or music all in service to completing my goal while also juggling my other obligations such as transcribing and writing Efial's journals. As the deadline drew closer, I spent more time locked away in my office, until the night of the deadline arrived all too soon. I burned the midnight oil to finish my promise to myself, and then I promptly tossed the habits I'd been trying to build aside, unable to look at my art supplies or composition software without feeling a churning in my stomach. I'd achieved my goal! At the cost of burning out. And that's not how goals should function.

Goals should be welcomed like old friends you're meeting for the first time, guide posts that say, "Hey there, you've made it, good to see you. You look like you've been trekking for a while, why not stay a moment and rest? I've brewed you some tea to enjoy before you head out on your way. Congratulations on making it here, by the way. Oh, that reminds me, be careful, there's a chasm up ahead, but don't worry, there are posts along the way to help you navigate it, though it might still be tricky in areas less traveled. But hey, you've had to cross a few gullies on your way here, haven't you? You'll cross this one as well then in your own time."

Past Applications

As someone who went from video game couch potato to caring deeply about fitness and wellness, I can relate to the struggle of getting started. I would stress over the rising numbers on the scale, try a plethora of different routines that never seemed to work, and research myself into a frenzy trying to figure out why.

Why? Why?

Why do I care? Why is losing weight so important to me anyway?

At the time I began seriously asking myself that question, I was living in Japan, and my reason was vain: I didn't want to take up more space in a country that values being small. If I was going to be looked at differently for being a foreigner, I didn't want to give others a reason to ogle my weight as well and confirm the bias, "Everything in America is so big, even the people!"

I walked up stairs to start, refused to take the elevator even when I had to climb to the highest reaches of the building. Okay, maybe I took the elevator occasionally but still! I loathe stairs from the deepest core of my being, but I told myself that if the kids can do it, then I can, too. This was where I started, and it's the only habit I focused on for a few months.

When my best friend from high school told me about Couch to 5K, I bought the app and downloaded it. Nine weeks. Nine weeks of dedication, 3 days a week. Three out of seven days didn't feel overwhelming. I could commit to three days with a rest day or two in between for nine weeks, I told myself. "I hate jogging, but if it's only 9 weeks...and besides, I only have to do one minute jogs in the beginning. Yeah, I can commit to that."

Fast forward to the end of those 9 weeks. I didn't stop. I kept repeating week 9, determined to beat my time. If I missed a week entirely, I started to feel it. I would become antsy, eventually reaching a point where I would need to go out on a jog, weather be damned. My reason for jogging had evolved beyond vanity into this near-craving I couldn't ignore. I jogged because it felt good, and I was seeing real results with decreasing weight.

I didn't want to just lose weight though. I wanted to start lifting and build muscle. However, while I was in Japan, I didn't trust to invest in any equipment because I knew well enough that I would eventually move back to the States, so I was at an impasse, happy with jogging but wanting more.

Once I made that inevitable move back to the States, I revisited the question, "Why?"

"Why do I want to lift weights? What will this do for me? Why is it so important to me?"

Well, I'd already experienced a mental shift with jogging from vanity to feeling better, but it was partially vanity that once again got me started on weight lifting. I wanted muscles that popped, arms and upper body especially, but that wasn't the extent of it. I genuinely wanted to become stronger than I was yesterday.

The difficult part wasn't wanting that strength, it was finding out how to incorporate this new series of habits to achieve sustainability. I started Built With Science to help provide the structure I needed for both weight lifting and nutrition, but I was more likely to cancel my workout on days where my motivation wasn't up to par.

"Ugh, I have to get changed before I work out."

"Whyyyy Bulgarian Split Squats?"

"This [insert exercise here] is later in the workout, and I'm absolutely dreading it...."

"I hate leg day. I hate leg day. I hate leg day."

In all those instances, I would need to change out of my day clothes into workout clothes, and that little needle shattered the glass of my motivation.

I remember watching a Wheezy Waiter video on YouTube. I couldn't tell you which one it was, but in the video he mentioned how he has to set his workout clothes out to remove that extra step from the habit he was trying to build. He had to make it so stupidly easy on himself to actually do the workout he couldn't talk himself out of it.

He had to make it so stupidly easy....

In the morning when I get dressed, I no longer change into regular shirts or pants. I immediately change into my workout attire, which has become a trigger for my brain to recognize, "Oh, we're in workout gear. We have to lift today and/or go out on walks. Okay, got it."

And that's that, right? Habits solved like one of Mark Manson's courses.

Well, no, not really. I needed to slot in when my actual workout would occur and when I would go out on my walk(s). And though I had already set my expectations logically that progress would be slow, accepting that emotionally was an entirely different bear to wrangle.

I used to go on a single walk for an hour and a half to hit 10k steps, but there came a point where I started to dread what I once enjoyed, so I started thinking, "Physical activity gives me time to sit in Cael's/Efial's head, and it can help clear my head from the clutter bouncing around in it. I do enjoy walking, but setting aside this one giant chunk of time feels like it eats too much into my day. How can I split up my walks so that I'm not left drained afterward? In Japan I had to walk to work and back. What if I had to do so here, too, even though I work from home? How do I trick my brain into believing that we need to walk first before we sit down to write/transcribe/etc...?"

Coffee deliveries to my partner became the answer. We live 4 minutes away from his work, and at first I only walked there and back for a total of 8 minutes. Gradually over the course of several weeks, I increased my walking distance to cover the whole road, hitting ~20 minutes and 2500 steps. Since he returns home for lunch, we walk together afterward, which became my 2nd trigger, another 20 minutes, another 2500 steps.

The issue was the last walk. If I wanted to reach 10k steps for the day, I would need to complete either 2 more of those shorter ones or go around the park for a 50 minute walk.

Except the problem wasn't the final walk itself, it was the distance. I felt like I had to reach 10k steps, which meant I had to go around the park, but with piercing cold and frozen roads, such a monumental feat could result in injury.

No, I had to be okay with hitting 8k as a minimum. If I can reach 8k as a minimum, then that's fine, that's doable. 10k steps on days where I'm able then becomes a victory, anything above that is just the cherry on top.

Ranges, I realized yesterday, matter to me more than some cold, unmoving metric. If I land within the lower end of that range, no problem, I still accomplished what I'd set out to do. If I land within the higher end or above, then that elates my overachieving goblin mind: "Look at me, I got an A+!" If I can't manage to hit 8k steps, then I know there's a reasonable explanation as to why, and I've learned to not worry about it.

This logic I subconsciously applied to my workouts as well. During most normal days, if I have a workout planned, I know, "Okay, morning is for creative work. After lunch then, I have from the moment I return from my post-lunch walk to the hour or so before my partner clocks out of work."

Through trial and error, I learned that I don't like doing the main bulk of my workout while my partner is home, and I know my workout take at least an hour, so I created a time range in which to complete it. I can either start right when I get back from my second 20 minute walk, or if I need to complete the morning's work/don't quite feel like working out yet, I have until ~14:30 to get my butt in gear.

The time range then becomes this countdown, and that same antsiness I mentioned experiencing whenever I took time off from jogging becomes my superweapon to spur me to lift. I lean into the discomfort and use it to my advantage instead of letting it overwhelm me and send me spiraling into a pit despairing at my own failures.

With results I can't see immediately, like with building muscle, creating this kind of sustainability matters even more, because it doesn't matter how well you know logically that it could take months, even years, to achieve the body you want if your emotional self doesn't align with the logic.

I know that it's going to take at least another year before I can do a pull-up unassisted. I'm just now breaking through my plateau with the green band. Emotionally, I wrestle with this question of, "Why can't I do this yet? I've been doing assisted pull-ups at various resistance band levels for over a year already. Why is it taking so long?" despite knowing logically it takes time. Patience.

Even arriving at this system where I am now versus when I started took me years of trial and error, experimenting with SMART and similar types of goals, no goals, vague goals, and more. That sort of discovery requires observation, self-awareness, introspection, walking in a world that demands everyone sprint. Summaries don't capture that process very well.

The New Year

If New Year's Resolutions are good for anything, it's that initial burst of motivation that, when utilized as caulk instead of a foundation doomed to crumble, can seal those habit bricks into place so that they can build upon each other. Obviously, I prefer to let New Year's be just another day--minus the celebration--and create new resolutions throughout the year, but I'll go ahead and share the conundrum I'll be facing, since funnily enough, one of the habits I want to build is manifesting around this time of "new beginnings." I'll walk through it step by step, so you can see my thought process as I labor to implement this system.

I've stated previously I want to reincorporate art and composition into my life. If I tried to do both, I would burn out, so we're not making that mistake again. So, I need to ask myself, "What is it that is most important to me right now and why?"

For the first question, out of everything my polymath brain wants to tackle, design work stands out the most. I have this site I want to redesign. I have a player mat design I'm working on for Daggerheart that I'd like to put out there at some point. I have a project journal design that's taken up residence somewhere quiet. So, "design," is the general "what."

The answer to "why?" should do most of the heavy lifting, because if the reason is weak, you won't be able to build sustainability easily. Why is it that I want to focus on creating a design habit? Why is it important to me?

I enjoy designing. When I was an ALT, designing the lessons I would teach or the final project each term filled me with a sense of satisfaction and excitement. One of my favorite lessons to this day was the restaurant theme we did, because I created a menu based off of Super Mario Bros and told the students to have fun with it, not to worry about whether or not their English was perfect. With such esteemed items as "Princess Peach Tea" and "Rainbow Road Ice Cream," who wouldn't enoy it? The "customers" also had the opportunity to rag on the poor "server" whenever I announced BOGOs or discounts, and the servers also had the opportunity to dish it right back by saying, "Oh, no no no, we don't have iced Princess Peach Tea. Only hot. Only hot tea." Did it make sense? No, but they had fun.

Redesigning Fear No More has taken up real estate and keeps picketing signs outside to remind me it exists and demands my immediate attention. The main point of contention is, in a week packed full of other tasks, how do I dedicate more time to as vast a project as this?

I needed a system that worked for me and turned my perfectionism into an ally or onlooker instead of as an antagonist. I needed to design a system that worked with my actual rhythms, not shove my square personality peg into the triangle of someone else's vision.

If I want to build sustainability, claiming I'll dedicate time to something each day sets me up for failure and works against my perfectionism, and I very much like making my perfectionism work for me. So, designing every day is a no go. If I think about the bare minimum I believe I can dedicate to design work in a given week, I would say, knowing my work ethic, 2-3 days is a good range. Two minimum seems possible to me, three feels like it could be a challenge some weeks, and more than that would be a massive victory. So, 2-3 days per week, which brings us to time of day.

The day or two after my partner and I have a game session, I transcribe in the mornings until lunch. Wednesday morning is blog day. The mornings in the latter half of the week I dedicate to highest priority creative tasks such as writing journal entries, correspondence, or soon-to-be transcript notes. Slotting design into one of those times would be feasible sometimes but not consistently. I would need to run under the assumption that my time is accounted for most days before 16:00, and that if I want to introduce this new habit, I need to slide it in between 16:00 and 19:00, the range where my partner and I do our own thing.

Energy, then, becomes the limiting factor I need to remain conscientous of, and that's where the conundrum begins.

The two most important points to help mitigate the energy problem would be 1) building consistency until I develop the flexibility to shift between days, kind of like how I post my blog on most Wednesdays with the occasional hiccup into Thursday or Friday, and 2) to never miss twice, a mantra I took to heart from my Built With Science routine.

If consistency is king, then I need to choose non-negotiable days to build upon it, no alternating off-days like Thursday or Monday or weekends. That leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday. Except Tuesdays are odd once a month when my partner gets off work at 11:00, and Wednesday evenings is game night most weeks, so that's a hard no. Friday is a weird day in that my partner and I don't work until 10:00 and don't get off until 19:00, but that could also be its advantage. Because of its weirdness, Friday could be an ideal anchor point.

As an experiment, I could set this habit up similarly to how I approached C25K and include a rest day on either side of Friday, making Thursday and Saturday as definite no's for anything design related, that way my mind has time to recharge. Looking at Wednesday again, most blogs don't take me the full day to write (this one being an exception), and I do my best to avoid workouts because of the time crunch. My three biggest Wednesday tasks include blog, 8k+ steps, and review the week/plan the next. Most of these I complete by 16:00, leaving an hour and a half window before we meet up with friends. So, maybe Wedesnday isn't as hopeless as I initially thought.

For now, I think Wednesday and Friday I'll set as my definite anchor points. I'll aim for 2 days first before I worry about adding a 3rd, but there's still one other point of friction that I have yet to address: the energy problem.

I need to make it so stupidly easy to begin the day's design work, I'd feel silly for not doing so, but I've spent the better part of a week contemplating this and am not yet clear on the answer. Leaving a pencil and sketch pad out and open wouldn't work. I build enough squirrel piles around my workspace to where that simple gesture wouldn't convince me to sit down and begin.

I've taken more purposeful breaks recently in between each task to help refuel a small part of my tank throughout the day, so I'm not as drained as I used to be, but that by itself isn't enough either. A trigger I'd like to try is reading first for a while, taking a break, then sitting down to practice design, but I'm not sure yet if that approach will stick. One suggested plan was to simply sit in front of my materials. The logic makes sense: if I sit at the desk after my break in front of my materials, I'd feel pretty silly for not picking up the pencil during whatever time I had left.

Setting up the expectation that this experiment will require tweaking until I nail it, my current frame of operation will begin with this:

1. Wednesdays & Fridays - These days are non-negotiable.

2. Wednesday before game night, sit down and practice design following my 5-15 minute breather after taking my final walk, posting my blog, or filling out my journal for the week, whichever comes last.

3. Friday, between 16:00 and 18:00 read, then after a 5-15 minute break, sit down at my creative work desk.

4. If I miss one day, don't miss the other.

5. If I feel so inclined, add in another day, but still never miss twice.

6. Briefly note how I'm feeling before and after.

7. Adjust as needed after a few weeks.

Actually, now that I think about it, if I've caught up on Cael's journals and correspondence, instead of focusing on transcript notes, I could switch gears and focus on design instead and save transcript notes for the evening. I'll have to keep that idea off to the side as an alternative, because notes shouldn't be as mentally taxing to compile with the help of an AI at my disposal. Hmmmm....

Resolution

If you've tried New Year's Resolutions in the past and they've failed you--and yes, they failed you, not the other way around--I would suggest trying a different approach this year. My system might not work for you. I won't claim it's one size fits all or even most. If you're new to serious habit setting, try out SMART goals (or whatever other types exist) and see how they feel. Give Mark Manson's articles about goal setting a read. Find a productivity journal and fill one of those out. Try the system I've been cobbling together and tweak it for yourself if you feel so inclined, but don't let the brand spanking new shininess of the year be your only motivating factor, because it's not like to last.

Other Notable Accomplishments:

• This honker of a post, 4k words, took me 5 hours today to write.

The character mat master template I've been designing for our campaign to help keep my 3 characters organized.

• Tentatively broke past my pull-up plateau. Managed 8 reps for 2/3 pull-up sets using the green band.

• Set up my new journal for next year: trying out Intelligent Change this time around and have already found sections of it that irk me, but I'm tweaking it to work in my favor

  • I honestly thought that creating 7 goals would overwhelm me; BestSelf only had you come up with 3 main objectives. Yet I found that with 7 I could break the bigger goals I had in mind down further, and most of them I can feed back into the main "rock," which is my site.

• Paid off the loan that we took out to pay for Salad's trip to the vet specialist!

• Condensed my Ritual system down to a single printable reference page

• Reworked the "Shadow Reading" Kayal ability I'd homebrewed:

  • The first time you meet someone, you can make an Instinct Roll (10, 15 if reading another Kayal). On a success, you can ask the GM one of the following questions:

    1. What shadow haunts them? (Trauma, guilt, regrets): Subconscious burdens

    2. What shadow are they hauling (Magical effects, curses, present burdens): External burdens

    3. What shadow are they hiding? (Concealed items, secrets, illusions, false identities): Conscious burdens

• Finally decided on my spider faerie's name: She Who Threads the Needle

• Rewrote & edited the 19th of Nudon, but feeel it needs more edits before I post it

• Figured out how some item mechanics work after porting them over from PF2e to Daggerheart

• Reflavored some Daggerheart mechanics to fit the image of She Who Threads the Needle better.

• Visited both my and my partner's families for Christmas

• Spent all of Sunday sorting junk from my childhood that I brought back from my parent's house....I still have a ways to go.

• Read "Neuromancer" by William Gibson. It was....an intriguing premise for a novel. I didn't care for how it started or ended, but I do enjoy stories that involve AI, so that was a plus.

Real Talk:

• Take one habit you want to begin building, just one. Break it down into its core components: what it is, why it's important to you.

  • Break it down even further and ask yourself, "What is the smallest piece I can commit to regularly?" and try it.

  • Make it stupidly easy to start so you can eliminate as much friction as possible--putting on gym clothes right when you get home from work so that you don't sit down and decide not to get up again; measuring what you're eating now without changing anything just so you have a baseline of how to track your nutrition; etc...

  • Let me know what experiments you're trying--what's working, what's flopping, what's surprising you?

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Salad