Week 2023#01: Action!
What happens when you put productivity advice into practice
What I’ve learned
Advice and ideas are almost useless if you don’t put them into practice, and that is the step that is often forgotten or overlooked.
I started the week feeling like there are a lot of demands on my energy and time currently, maybe even too many.
Last week I wrote already that “assigning meaning to every minute” was a great help.
Actually, this idea is coming from a book: Indistractable by Nir Eyal.
I continued the whole first week of January with this, with the exception of the weekend, because I needed to recharge my batteries.
The result: I had what felt like my most productive week and this produced detailed records about where my time went.
This is what my calendar looked like at the end of the week:
While such days are still draining, at least get the feeling that I am making the most of them.
Expectation vs Reality
I’ll continue with the detailed planning of my day: yes! Actually assigning every minute of my working day to some meaningful task turned out to be liberating more than restricting.
I’ll make it to the gym 4 times: 3/4. To be fair, once I didn’t check the opening hours and arrived at a time convenient for me just to find a closed gym.
Waking up at 6:00 every day: total failure. I felt like a zombie and my brain didn’t work at all when I woke up before 7:00. Since I work mostly with my brain, I decided to listen to my body and just get up at 7:00.
We’ll manage to talk about emotions with my father at least once: yes! Even though we didn’t get to talk about some of the bigger topics, at least I know now how he feels about his sons being here with him.
The electricity bill for the house in Sweden will be around 220 EUR after my calculations: no. Since I can now put a number to my opportunity cost of not doing anything with the house, I feel forced to actually do something.
What happened
A lot of focused work, distributed throughout the week
Most of the week was a blur of work — going to the hospital — eat — rest — sleep
As a result, I let a lot of my side projects slide. Thankfully Käti took care of moving Talking To Strangers forward
My uncle and cousin came from Switzerland to visit my father and stayed for a night in Aschaffenburg. It was nice to reconnect because we hadn’t seen each other or talked really for 12 years.
My father had one really good day when he could talk mostly freely!