Being my own employer: Short write-up of my Thirty-Day-Lifestyle-Challenge

 
 
So finished this Challenge last Thursday. http://manwhore.org/forum/content/thirty-day-lifestyle-challenge-fixed-schedule And so far I didn’t get around to sum up the results. Now here they are:
 
It was overall very successful. By successful I mean it worked very well for me and I will stick to some variant of this daily structure from now on. Period.
 
I did at least the minimum amount of required working everyday as scheduled (and more). It was focused work, without any self-induced distractions*. No facebook, no surfing the web, no shit. I did socialise with my roomies a bit when having breakfast. Took urgent phone-calls. Opened the door for craftsmen. But more or less, that’s it. If I had an employee I would want him to be like me. That’s more or less the bottom line. haha.
 
On the one hand I finished some pretty important university projects during the time and got pretty awesome feedback on it. But more important is that more or less for the first time in my life I followed a rather strict but reasonable, self-imposed work routine to make it happen. And I started to implement some pretty good work habits, which will undoubtedly pay off big time in the long run.
 
For instance: When I couldn’t concentrate or the good thoughts just didn’t come to me, I would either do some mobility work, especially for my ankles and hips (I’m working on my squat currently), or just lie down flat on my carpet, take a nap, meditate for a few minutes. That helped me quite a lot with out messing with my focus. Before that I would usually, surf the web, youtube, whatever, basically just look up some insignificant bullshit, whose only real purpose was to distract me from whatever important shit I was doing. I think this a biggie.
 
I had some fuck-ups, too. Main one was that I jerked off to porn once. It was in my off-work time, though, but still not in the plan. After the Romanian Part it seemed I couldn’t go without seeing some pussy. Well anyway, will take care of that now.
 
Also, I’m still pretty bad at estimating, how much time I need for stuff. This will however only get better by doing more.
In terms of scheduling, and day planning actually not that much actually went on. I just followed the route I had scheduled. The way I lived the last thirty-days I didn’t actually involve a lot of day-to-day planning, because frankly there wasn’t much variety. So I don’t think I improved my scheduling skills very much. I will worry about that as soon as I need to schedule more different things on a regular basis.
 
One thing I’d say that was actually not very lucky in terms of the life-balance-objective was that for like two weeks, I had to work significantly more than I had scheduled. This is not good. It is okay for a couple of days. But for longer periods of time, it really sucks. It is way easier to tell yourself to concentrate and to not give in to weak impulses, if there is a clearly defined end labouring for that day. This difference is noticeable, especially, if you are facing down some dead-ends, writer’s block, or the like.
BTW: Interestingly, going all out in order to put the finishing touches on a longer project is no problem for me at all. Doing the final sprint. But probably that’s, too, because the end is in sight. And it kind of even serves to make me reach a deeper flow-state.
 
As this had been asked: did anything change significantly in terms of my inner wellbeing? I wouldn’t say so. Not in the way one might feel a change after doing thirty days of meditation for the first time, or really getting off a shitty diet for the first time, etc.
What it does though is to impose a structure on your day that it frees your willpower for the important things instead of always having to decide from scratch what to do with your day. The latter obviously leads to a lot of shitty decisions.
It does put you into your rhythm right from the start of the day, without having to make any kind of complicated choice. And living to the beat of your own rhythm does make you feel good, or better at peace with yourself. We all know that.
Thus, what I’d say having a clear structure for your day that actually does for you, is that it facilitates getting into your more rhythm consistently. You will have shit days still, (I had many) but in the end you know you did your part anyway. And it gets you off your ass, if there are no externally imposed work schedules that would otherwise do that for you.
 
Areas of improvement:
 
I think the greatest leverage in terms of work-productivity (i.e. reading and writing) for me now will be to have time-specific mini-goals each day. Challenge myself to become more efficient. I think this will also greatly help me to get a better feel of what I can really do in what time. I’ll experiment here a bit and let you know.
 
Also I mostly I didn’t really use my playtime very well. Lots of shitty movies watched. Lots of shitty food, you get the drift. But very well that was all in the deal. Thus fine, as long as the important stuff got handled. The rest will follow step by step.
 
However, main focus the next month will be pick-up. Doctor said I need some pussy. I earned it. I’ll post some more specific stuff in a different post.
 
 
Any questions, thoughts etc.? Just gimme a shout.
 
Peace
Chris
 
 
*I’d say I was roughly 95% tight sticking to my own rules during the challenge. I did for some time have my mail-program open, though because I was so freaking curious to get the feedback on my work. Lol.
I also didn’t really hurry my breakfast every time to get back to work. But I made sure it was always a quality breakfast, hehe.