An Update on my Life
This Blog Post was originally published on adagia.org.
The daily writing sheriffs ( therealbrandonwilson and abrahamKim) demanded a writing update, and I'll have to admit I neglected writing in the last half year, to be honest. Anyway, today is the day to write something again, so here we go.
First, let's talk about statistics. As I have written previously (Life Change - First Tracking Insights Yours Truly), I kept to the habit of regularly tracking blood sugar level, weight and blood pressure. Besides that, I also started tracking the time I spend on the Company Laptop, steps, sleep and workouts. Last Friday, I finally had the muse to implement a small dashboard (which currently only shows weight, blood sugar and blood pressure) over at https://life.phaidenbauer.com/life. "DataPoints" displays how many different "activity" entries I've got for one day (blood pressure, for example, is one DataPoint, weight is another, and so on).
I'll have to add the other types of data I'm collecting sooner than later to get a whole picture.
Besides that, my Morning Routine Problems Yours Truly got even worse. My daylight alarm goes off at 6, and I immediately disable it. My iPad alarm goes off at 6:15, which I'm "snoozing" on till around 7:30. I get up groggy from snoozing, start the coffee machine, and head into the bathroom to put on sweatpants and brush my teeth. I usually start working sometime between 7:30 and 8:30. Around 12 to 1 pm, I eat lunch, and at around 3 pm to 5 pm, I stop working. After work, I usually cook for the next day and then watch videos or do some cleaning.
I haven't been reading regularly recently, and writing, as already mentioned, wasn't fitting in my "plan". Although I work fewer hours, I currently can't find some motivation to do more stuff with my gained free time.
I also partially identified a cause of this "missing motivation": I think it is the stress level drop from my past employer to the new one, and my body needs time to readjust to the new setting. Considering the standard working time, I only cut off six and a half hours (from 38,5h to 32h per week) but thinking about the months before my leave. A typical week had at least 50+ hours.
But not everything is terrible. I have been hiking with a former coworker onto the nearby "mountain" for the last two weeks. It is exhausting, but I enjoy those two to three-hour walks we now try to do every week. And I also really enjoy cooking my meals on my own. It also does feel like the more healthy stuff I'm eating now (I'm leaning towards less meat [down to only once or twice a week] and more vegetables), my brain seems to be working "better", or at least I don't have a down after eating like before.
The next steps are also clearly lying in front of me: fix sleep once again, find a daily routine that I can do the whole week (workouts and writing have a high priority on that list of habits) and enjoy my free time more.
As a closing thought, I have another update on the old company situation that I'm not sure I've written about. Mid-September, a former coworker wrote me if I've got time to get a coffee together or something similar. I agreed and also asked why he was approaching me in the first place. Well, it turned out several (at least six people I know of) have been laid off by my old employer. Not just recent hired ones but also people who have been at the company for several years. I wonder if I would still be employed if I hadn't cancelled on my own. But as my trial month at the new company is over, and I still have to show up (aka they didn't lay me off), it is something I don't think about often.