existence | resolutions

Resolutions are interesting things. They're traditionally a goal wherein the person declaring said resolution wants to better themselves. "I resolve to exercise more." "I'm gonna take more vacations." "I'm going to lose 50 pounds." The problem with these stated goals is that they are typically spur of the moment declarations with no plan. Now I won't deny that resolutions made in such a manner can succeed, but most fail because there's no plan on how to achieve said goal and most people lose the drive to continue to that goal when they have to put too much thought into it.

I'm not here to say I've failed. My goal is still to improve my health and wellness through exercise and replacing obsessive gaming habits. However, I did fall victim to the age-old failing to plan is planning to fail. And the past several weeks I've merely replaced obsessive gaming with copious YouTube watching. It's made me antsy during the week and then when the weekend arrives, all I want to do is play video games. So I've actually made it worse by saying no weekday gaming. I've managed to maintain my resolve thus far but eventually, it's going to be more problematic than a help. It also doesn't help that I was really sick for 4 days and have been recovering for the following week or two.

Which leads me to an actual plan. I decided my initial plan is to break up the evenings into 1-hour blocks for various activities. The first hour will be my productivity hour, like updating my blog every Monday, organizing my room Tuesday evenings, etc. Then I have a 1-hour block set aside for a walk. I won't necessarily walk that whole hour, but it will be allocated nevertheless. Then I've left a 1-hour free time block, which will likely be filled with gaming many evenings. But it's restricted to that hour. My last hour of the evening will be for winding down and getting to bed. I might include some amount of reading in the wind-down period provided it doesn't rouse my energy levels again. Weekends will likely remain fairly flexible with a tentative plan made each week for the coming weekend. This weekend I plan on spending Saturday morning at Disneyland wandering and enjoying various attractions. Because Disneyland is part of my exercise plan. :D

It's not a fail-proof plan, but it's at least 10% of a plan. And speaking of planning, that's part of my schedule now too. Each Sunday I have a review and planning session scheduled to make sure I stay on track. I figured it would be good to take an assessment of what works and what doesn't to make adjustments as needed.

Until next time:
Work smart. Play hard. Sleep well.

existence | introspection

/EXISTENCE
I'm pretty hard on myself. And I don't mean physically. I'd probably feel a lot better if I was more physical. No, I mentally beat myself down. A lot. I can't tell you the number of times the phrases, "You're an idiot", "You're a fat, lazy ass", and various other permutations of self-deprecation goes through my head per day. My method of choice to drown out that voice is to play video games. But it seems that voice has just used that as additional fuel to mock me for playing too much. It's a horrible cycle. But for the past week or so, my two best friends left their computers behind as they went to visit family for Christmas and we were each left to our own devices for entertainment. Combine that with some pretty slow days at work, and we have a perfect recipe for "Peter gets lost in his thoughts" time. And boy did I get lost.

A nagging consideration for years has been to completely give up video games. Remove them from all mobile devices, sell all consoles, sell all discs, have someone change my Steam password (and not lose said password), and just cold-turkey walk away from video games as a whole. I did that with Facebook games, so I figured I could do that with video games as a whole. And then my rational and logical thoughts kicked in and warned me against such a drastic action. For me, it would be social suicide to do that. Video games aren't just an escape, they're my social circle. Abandoning that would leave me with nothing and new spiral would form and probably take me down other dark paths. So I kept playing games.

A lot. And it's become a bad habit. Which through a series of conversations with a friend led me to this book about habits. I hadn't even finished it and I made a decision to start changing... no, replacing habits with ones that I benefit from. And when I thought about it, video games are my core and driving habit. But like I said, a complete firesale and removal of video games from my life would be social suicide. So instead I made the decision to reduce how much I play video games and restrict what games I play. The plan is to cut out Minecraft entirely and mostly only play co-op games with my friends. Playtime will also be restricted to the weekends so that I actually get things done during the week. As the book illustrates, habits can't be dropped, they need to be replaced. So in the void, I will put reading, blogging, and walking. I may need to be more specific with my schedule, but that can be determined on the fly.

This plan starts with 2018. This plan starts now.

Until next time:
Work smart. Play hard. Sleep well.

existence | inspiration

/EXISTENCE
This blog seems to have melted down and become something new over time and I'm thinking that this is more of a personal blog than professional. You can find my professional ramblings about those damn checkboxes over here. Sure, some of my professional life will seep in here, but it's really about me and what I do in my spare time. Most of my spare time for the past 4 years has been spent playing video games with friends. I've enjoyed it thoroughly but it's not really that interesting to talk about. I mean we're pretty juvenile in our humor and we rarely have any moments of insight. That said, we do have some on occasion and I may just share those here.

But I digress. I'm here to talk about inspiration. Inspiration can come from many sources. One more recently for me was hitting a weight that isn't good for my height or age. But negative inspiration rarely has a good effect on me. And so this brings me to my close friend Michael who has lost 250 pounds and transformed his life over that past 2.5 years to one of energy and life. His transformation is especially amazing when you learn that all of this has been done through changing what he eats, regular exercise, and breaking free of his own prison of the mind. I recommend you go check out his blog at http://chooselife.prohealthliving.org/.

Through his story and working alongside him during his journey, I've become inspired to improve my own life. I tried doing more dramatic changes, but they never seemed to work for me. Instead I decided to do small changes, make sure I succeed in making that change stick, and then move onto the next change. The first change I made was to eliminate gluten from my diet. It's been an interesting adjustment and my usual habits of eating out for lunch every day has undergone a change in selection. My current selection isn't the best, but it's a start. Only time will tell at this point.

Until next time:
Work smart. Play hard. Sleep well.