Weeks 11 and 12 are officially in the books, so let’s take a few minutes to see how deliberate I was with my time and attention.
Week 11 Notes
The end of Week 10 was spent wrapping up another family wedding in Buffalo, NY which meant Week 11 started with a super early flight back to Virginia. I remember when I was doing this every week. Not a fan.
Emily and I had our first couples golf lesson. This is the first professional golf instruction she has ever received and it went really well. She’s a natural. My game is really coming along, too.
I had my first in-person training session with my coach. I met him at his home gym and we worked on my (utter lack of) swimming technique. It was the first professional swimming instruction I’ve had since I was a child. We took video of me from various angles and I now have a bunch of things to work on during my solo training sessions.
I made major progress on my book proposal. Focusing on getting shitty first drafts of each section written with the idea that I’ll come back and polish them later.
Emily and I went to the local jeweler we worked with for our engagement rings to design and order our wedding bands. Exciting!
Week 12 Notes
I watched the Apple Event. Kind of ho hum in terms of what I’m interested in.
I had a solo golf lesson. I’m still working on a tendency to turn my hands over too late, resulting in shots going consistently left. It feels like I’m so close to dialing this in to where it needs to be.
Emily and I had our fourth salsa lesson. We’re starting to string together some various moves into something that actually feels like legitimate dancing. I continue to be surprised by how much I’m enjoying this.
I completed a shitty first draft of entire book proposal (minus sample chapter).
What Has My Attention
I tried to jump into the deep end with a deep work experiment — 3 hours of deep work every day for the past two weeks. I very quickly realized it was unsustainable and that there’s a huge difference between understanding what deep work is and actually having developed the ability to do it well. My eyes are always bigger than my stomach when it comes to experiments like this. Lesson learned — if I care about developing my deep work muscle I’m much better served by doing something smaller and building from there rather than trying to do way too much way too quickly. This is apparently a lesson I will never stop needing to learn.
I’m still really enjoying all my triathlon training, particularly the cycling. It feels really good to see myself do difficult things regularly.
It feels really good to make progress on this book proposal. I’m holding it extremely lightly because I think there’s a lot of things I don’t have going in my favor in terms of selling a non-fiction book to a publisher, but even if this doesn’t turn into a traditionally published book it’s pushing me to develop my ideas unlike anything else I’ve done to this point. That work and thinking will show up somewhere, even if it’s not a book. If you want to help increase the odds of this thing being traditionally published, though, you could always follow me on Twitter and/or sign up for my newsletter!
Recap of Reading & Other Media
Started and finished Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Really enjoyed it. I like Oliver’s take on personal development topics. Check out his other book, The Antidote, too.
Finished Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change by Beth Comstock. I was extremely peripherally involved in some of the stuff mentioned in this book so it was interesting to get another perspective on what I thought happened. Surprisingly good.
Started Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. Geology rocks, man.
Started Reinventing Scale-Ups: Radical Ideas for Growing Companies by Travis Marsh & Susan Basterfield
Started The Art of Leadership by Michael Loop
Continued Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman et al.
Continued The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Continuing watching each episode of season 2 of Ted Lasso as it comes out
Started the new season of What We Do in the Shadows
A few episodes behind on the latest/last season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Personal Metrics Recap
As always, the format below is (Week 11 statistic/Week 12 statistic):
Average Hours Slept Per Night: 7.6/8.1
Average Quality Hours Slept Per Night: 5.7/5.7
Average Deep Hours Slept Per Night: 2.18/1.98
Average Sleeping Heart Rate: 51/48
Average Steps Per Day: 13,149/9,416
Average Weekly Weight: 207.3/207.2
Days Exercised (Out of 7): 7/7
Days Read (Out of 7): 6/7
Days Written (Out of 7): 4/4
Days Meditated (Out of 7): 2/1
In Week 12 I relaxed the expectation of waking up at 6:00 AM everyday and just let myself sleep until I naturally woke up (or Emily’s slightly later alarm woke me up). I’ve done experiments like this in the past and my takeaway has always been that even though I think sleep is really important and I feel better when I get more of it, I end up actually feeling worse by not getting those relatively early morning hours that waking up at 6:00 AM affords me. I’ve always self-identified as a “morning person” but something I realized this week is that I’m only a morning person in the sense that I like to be awake early — but I don’t actually like doing anything when I’m awake early (other than drinking coffee and reading). It’s not like I’m getting up early and really getting started on my day (although I do think I need to learn how to workout in the morning if I’m going to get more serious with triathlon).
I’m suddenly less inclined to keep getting up early when the reality of my life is such that I could probably be getting more sleep. Isn’t it stupid to be under slept in the name of sustaining some kind of arbitrary identity? Can I evolve out of this mindset of being a “morning person” and instead become a “sleep as much as possible person”? I’m not 100% sure but I think I’m going to keep it going for the next couple weeks and see how it goes. Also, now that I’m looking at the sleep data above, while I slept more in Week 12 my Quality Sleep and Deep Sleep were both better in Week 11. I’m going to have to keep an eye on that…
Looking Ahead to Weeks 13 & 14
We’re well and truly into the homestretch of this sabbatical now, with only four weeks remaining.
Emily and I decided against doing another trip to Cape Cod so the only remaining travel on the docket is a quick trip to Michigan to visit my family in Week 16. So, nothing the next two weeks. Looking forward to the calmness and stability associated with staying in one place.
Triathlon training continues. I’m working out 6 days a week and will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. My coach is starting to sprinkle in some new workout types (Fartleks!) so it’s still feeling fresh and fun.
My main productive output will be refining the book proposal and writing the sample chapter that needs to be included in it. If I can have a more polished draft of the book proposal and a shitty first draft of the chapter finished by the end of Week 14, that would feel like a big win.
This week’s experiment is going to be to repeat my 3-hour per day deep work experiment but drastically scale it back to simply 30 minutes of deep work per day. Those 30 minutes are going to be super high quality and I’m going to take a few minutes after each session to just jot down some thoughts about how it went. 3 hours was way too audacious and 30 minutes feels too short, which means it’s probably just right.