For January 2015, I tried to declutter around the house for 15 minutes a day. We now have a couple rooms that are much cleaner, and I gave away a bunch of magazines . For February 2015, my 30 day challenge was to go on daily 15 minute walks with my wife.
I’ve been spending more time surfing the web on my laptop than I’d like to. I’ve also noticed more emails that lure me into short tasks, but eventually eat up a large chunk of my day.
So how did I do on my 30 day writing challenge ?
Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Let me tell you about the 30 day challenges I’ve been doing and what I learned: – March 2014 : I went back to doing no external email , and I learned this one weird, simple trick that helped. In previous “no email” challenges, I relied on sheer force of will not to reply to email
In January, my 30 day challenge was to limit my social media. That was a productive month. In February, my 30 day challenge was to eat more slowly
I like to set myself different challenges every 30 days.
Some relatives were visiting this past week, so my inbox has a triple digit backlog. That’s after aggressive pruning of mailing lists and so on. Nearly all of those emails mention me in a “to:” or “cc:” line and request a response
For June 2013, my 30 day challenge was to record a second of video every day. I was inspired by Cesar Kuriyama’s wonderful TED talk about how he records a second of video every day . There’s a couple things Cesar said in his talk that really resonated with me: – “ [A]s the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that “.
For May 2013 I decided to try making a Chromebook Pixel my primary laptop. So how did it go?
I realized that I didn’t mention this widely: my current 30 day challenge (July 2013) is not to read any news or social media. So no Twitter, Google News, Techmeme, Google+, Hacker News, Reddit, Imgur, etc. So if you’re wondering why I haven’t replied to a question, that’s the reason