I’m constantly experimenting with tools, systems, and routines to try to improve my quality of life.
As 2021 is coming to a close, I thought I’d write a little update on what worked for me this past year.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of the thing things that worked out well this past year for me. Maybe it can help someone out there as well.
No Meetings Before Noon
This year I really tried to give myself time during the week to focus on deep work and not worry about being interrupted. Before Covid, this meant having to show up to the office at 6:30 AM so I could do exploratory type work before everyone showed up and turned into meeting marathon time. This past year I made it a priority to give myself time to explore ideas that I knew would be both impactful to my company, but also self-rewarding in how I started each day exploring and learning. I’ve found over time that doing so each day, gives me energy to power through just about anything that the day throws at me.
Exploring new ways to be creative
One of my goals at the beginning of this year was discovering new ways to bring my family together. After years of trying everything from golf to the gun range, I accidentally stumbled across something that has changed the lives of everyone in our household.
Back in January, I realized that I wanted to reorganize our garage. For years we had a two-car garage that was full of old stuff we no longer really used, and a pool table that nobody had played on in close to 5 years. I decided that I was going to “remodel”
the garage. I sold the pool table and took out everything from the garage.
In doing so, I decided that instead of buying the metal storage shelves from Home Depot as I had done in the past, I thought Adrian and I would build our own. So we watched a bunch of YouTube videos and built our own garage storage shelves out of 2 x 4s and plywood. Pretty simple stuff.
What I discovered in doing so was that I really enjoyed building stuff on my own that served a purpose at home. So I started building more stuff out of lumber. We’d had old, cheap patio furniture for several years that was fading and just ugly so Steph, Adrian, and I watched a bunch of videos on building patio furniture. Before it was over we had built several patio chairs, Adirondack chairs, tables, and even a cooler stand. We ended up building an entire set for our front and back patio. Then we began to experiment with different types of wood, from milled lumber to live-edge lumber. That led to us building out several different types of live-edge tables, countertops, and even monitor stands.
Here we are a year later and we’ve begun doing commissioned work for customers. We’ve built everything from fireplace mantles to charcuterie boards. It’s been a wonderful learning journey where we’ve all found something that lets us be creative and productive at the same time, and do so together as a family.
Traveling… a lot
Traveling is one of my core principles so I intentionally do a lot of it. I’ve learned over the years that taking some time off from work and going somewhere with my family and friends is probably one of the best things I can do for myself to help increase focus and productivity.
We went everywhere from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico (amazing!), to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, to Vegas, to Puerto Rico. Probably my favorite trip of the year, although Glacier National Park was the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, was when just Steph and I snuck off to Puerto Vallarta for a few days. We just hung out on the beach in La Zona Romantica the entire time and it was amazing. It was one of the most enjoyable, stress-free trips I’ve taken in a long time.
As a side note, and I’m probably the last person that should give anyone relationship advice, but I can’t stress how important it is for your relationship to travel and spend time with just you and your significant other. Life can be a grind, and if you don’t take some time for just you two exploring new places, and just enjoying life, things can go south. If you take anything from reading this, plan a trip with only you and your other person. Don’t wait, do it now.
Stopped focusing so much on being, well, focused
Another thing that happened almost accidentally this year was I stopped worrying so much about maximizing my time and productiveness. I’m a productivity nerd by heart. I practice GTD, use every piece of productivity software there is, and literally clean and organize my workspace monthly to maximize “flow” (google it), but this year was a little bit of an awakening to me.
You see I kind of fell into a funk this year with the drag of always “getting things done”. As I get older, it felt like the more productive I was, any time I saved by being more efficient was only filled my more work. That’s no way to live long-term.
So this year, as I fell into a bit of a lull with productivity, I just let it happen. I forgave myself for not feeling bad about not being on top of my game. I stopped stressing about what wasn’t getting done constantly and just let myself go through the natural cycles of burnout and overwork.
I traveled more, I learned about other things other than work more, I watched more Netflix if I found a good show worth watching. I did whatever my mind and soul guided me to do rather than feeling like I constantly had to be grinding to come out of ahead.
I have to say, it felt really great, and because of that, my relationships are better, my son is doing better, I have new hobbies…. I just had a different year. I didn’t accomplish all of the goals I set at the beginning of the year, but that’s ok because I still accomplished some of those goals and discovered new things that are in a lot of ways more fulfilling than anything I could have possibly tried to plan for.
I’m 43 now, about to turn 44, and this year can best be framed as a sort of random walk for me that was something way different than what I usually do. What did I learn from this random walk?
Stop trying to plan everything. Stop trying to maximize every resource. Forgive yourself when you come up short or things don’t go to plan. They never truly will go to plan. There’s so much about myself that I don’t know. There’s so much that I could possibly do that I’m not even aware of and if all I do is plan based on what I already know, I may never discover some of the greatest things about my life.
Anyways, that’s my spin on this year. Bottom line, it was full of discovery and learning about myself. Derailed plans that turned into something better.
Here’s to an even better 2022 for all of us. Happy New Year!