Where Am I Now: 4 Months Down
In the spirit of being accountable, looking back at where I thought I might be at this point during 2024
The Teardown
Friday:: April 19th, 2024
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how daily life evolves in concert with the technology we use every day. If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, hit the subscribe button below.
In my January 4th post about 2024 aspirations, I mentioned three mundane tasks on my to-do list:
I need to hang shelves to store my daughter’s Lego sculptures
I need to claw back a refundable deposit from a brand that refuses to answer my calls
I have to renew my parking pass for the local train station.
I’m happy to report that I accomplished or delegated all of these monumental tasks. So, of course, my year is done, right? I’ll coast into summer with my feet up and cocktail in my hand.
The reality is not so rosy.
Positioning For The Year
That earlier post also expanded on a number of ideas for how I wanted to spend my time this year. Here’s the condensed list:
Read More
Write More
Add Character To My Office
Plan Evening Meals
Restructure My Workouts
Run Miles Each Week
Build My Personal Finance App
Explore Ideas For Businesses
Rediscover My Golf Game
I might have fooled myself with the belief that all nine items would have proper airtime. In fact, I described a tangible chance of failure to achieve one or any of those items:
Tackling multiple lofty resolutions at once seems to squash the likelihood of tackling any of them. I haven’t back-tested this conclusion on resolutions from past years. But in general, this conclusion is true of my life in general. Aspirational multi-tasking is fastest way to accomplish nothing.
With that in mind, this post doesn’t cover my strict resolutions for the 2024. Instead, it’s a digest of ideas I’m thinking about for The Teardown, my professional life, kids, and friends. I sometimes describe myself as always dissatisfied. But perhaps another framing fit for this post is: always curious.
What I didn’t say in that post is anything about a check-in system. It’s easy to say I will do that and follow the words with inaction. It’s easy to get distracted by other things. And, it’s easy to overload your brain and sink into all sorts of unproductive behaviors when you try to do too much.
But, I wanted to check-in on myself in this post. Many of us are used to professional life syncing and coordination. So, why not with our own to-dos? I’m hosting a 1x1 sync with, well, me.
What (Sort Of) Worked
I’m qualifying what worked because most of my accomplishments are progressing in various ways. And, to be clear, some of my items don’t have pure end states. I need to be comfortable with the lack of a finish line.
#1: Write More
My first goal was to write more. I wrote more. But I didn’t publish The Teardown much more than in the past, despite the desire to do so. My targeted ideas were:
Write every morning - even if for fifteen minutes
Publish The Teardown every week - a full post, not the Writers Room
The first of those two sub-plots happened quite often at first. But, I was writing in the morning at the expense of other things. My gym routine suffered from somewhat inconsistent timing. And, I was subsequently scrambling to take care of other morning items after spending more time than allotted in the writing state of mind.
My once-per-week post goal fell flat in short order. I posted a handful of Teardown issues and then got stuck under the weight of day-to-day work needs and something akin to writer’s block. I was writing but not achieving the more interesting goal: telling stories in a compelling way - even just to me.
Today, my schedule is much more flexible than it was, and demands on my brain not as taxing and narrow as they were. So, I’m back at that intersection of space, time, and motivation.
#8: Explore Ideas For Businesses
This idea was perhaps the most “meta” of all the idea. I would sit around, and well, think? In essence, yes. In practice, no.
What I did was shift into gear to generate ideas. The process covered two core activities:
Talking to people about ideas, both theirs and mine
Writing down and dissecting ideas
Of the two, I progressed beyond the starting point on the latter. These days, I consult a Notion page on a regular basis that houses numerous ideas for businesses and things I care about.
Right now, much of what I’m iterating in that page focuses on things that suck brain space and time from parents. You (parents) need (or want) to schedule your kid in activities, deal with school obligations, get them basic sustenance like food and clothing. It’s sometimes a struggle to find the balance between rewarding and punishing, or in another friendlier phrasing view, rule relaxing vs. rule enforcement.
During the iteration process, I’m often stuck on an important question: do I feel passionate enough about this thing/idea/problem to start a business?
More than not, the answer seems to be something squishier than no. It’s not really. I could muster some effort, but I worry I would lose the motivation to push the business forward. Growing a business requires making rational decisions with some level of irrational motivation. You have to chase with some explicit and blind sense of achievement.
I feel more accomplished on this point than expected. I’m spending real time generating and dissecting ideas rather than just thinking that I should.
#9: Rediscover My Golf Game
Golf is a game many people despise for its propensity to cause mental rage. You’re practicing at a driving range but lack the vision to understand why you keep hooking the ball left or slicing it right. The drives and iron shots that looked so masterful in your practice flip to balls lost in woods, water, or rough. You seem to be putting away from the hole rather than toward it.
I like many things about golf but rediscovered one major benefit over the last couple weeks. In short: there are only so many things you can control, and quite a few you cannot. It’s a good (daily?) reminder for broader life.
Weather plays a major role. A straight shot might land in some unsavory earthen mess due to a momentary or sustained wind gust. The fairways and greens might be slow or fast, causing unwanted behavior once your ball touches ground or gets moving at all (if on the green).
It’s also hard to predict how you’ll behave during a round. And, certainly, most of us don’t believe that mental fogs are always easy to resolve. Sports history and the world at large is full of examples of loss of momentum. You had it, and then all the sudden, you didn’t. It would be obvious if you used a driver on a putting green like a drunk person. But, when you thought you did everything right, the lack of matching outcome killed you.
I’m now playing more than I have in twenty years. I’m enjoying the physical practice. And, I’m enjoying the mental practice. Perhaps it will help train me to be less of an over-thinker.
What (Mostly) Didn’t Work
Note: some of these ideas are in progress, but I’ll explain below.
#4: Plan Evening Meals
While I can make any number of excuses around this effort and subsequent failure, I won’t. What I know is I’m good at locking down the hatches and ignoring things when I feel overwhelmed. And, until very recently, I couldn’t cross the chasm to plan food for the week ahead. I was at capacity in some broad sense and let this goal languish.
I also realized that evening meals were just the example, and maybe not the most acute problem. The broader view is on total consumption and supply in my house in my house. You probably ask yourself these questions too:
What things are running low?
What things have adequate or too much stock?
When it’s two-o-clock on the weekend, how will we ensure everyone eats?
What will we tell the babysitter to give our kids for dinner?
These innocuous questions caused all of the headaches. And, when something causes this sort of metaphorical headache, you might choose to address it or ignoring. I was frustrating myself with the process of answering these questions rather than just answering them.
I made my first plan this week. It day-by-day view looks like this:
The ideation process didn’t take that long. Each day’s items are a mix of things I think everyone will eat crossed with my desire to keep junk out of my house. And, if you think a cumin pea and lentil egg fritter sounds gross, well, you might as well unsubscribe! We aren’t friends!
What also happened is fun:
I started thinking about a simple app that would make it easier for me to make these plans in the future.
I also wondered about delivery-box services for kids. Do these exist? The world is awash in delivery platforms and at-home cooked/partially-cooked meals delivered to your home. But, I can’t think of a single kid-focused service off the top of my head.
Perhaps there is a business of some sort brewing in those bullets.
#6: Run Miles Each Week
Running was a short and simple miss: I prioritized the gym and weight training instead. For the most part, I’ve retained that balance. That said, running creates a zen mindset that is hard to replicate elsewhere, even in weight training.
What also helps is three weeks of recent running and the resulting boost in aerobic capacity. Like many other sports, the earliest days and weeks of ramping into gear are the hardest. I’m already suffering (during runs) much less than I was in mid-March.
#7: Build My Personal Finance App
This idea hasn’t worked, yet. But I described my desire as something worth exploring on a longer timescale:
In conclusion, I’m going to build my own app. It will take a while. But it will be fun learning experience. And ultimately, if I’m pleased enough, I’ll release it as a simple SaaS app in the spirit of Indie Hacker.
I now have the benefit of free time that wasn’t present in January. And, last night, I spent quality time chatting with a good friend about the opportunity cost of time. He recommended I read the book Transitions by William Bridges. Lots of us in high-intensity lives neglect some adherence to personal space, time, and maintenance. I wrote about that concept in the past.
So, building a personal finance app benefits my maintenance in several ways:
There is time to learn new technology and/or improve my knowledge of tools I already know.
My effort will nurture my technology tinkerer brain
The result will be something I use on a regular basis
Little To Say About Other Things
If you’re keeping track of my original list, you’ll notice that I left some ideas out of this update. I concluded that I had nothing interesting to say about them. Perhaps I’ll update this post again soon and touch on whatever I didn’t mention today.