I made several random attempts to start tracking my life over the years. I used to have a blog on the now-defunct Diary-X.com chronicling my daily life, and when that died I switched to a LiveJournal that I updated from time to time (excerpts from which you can check out in the Livejournal Memories tag). It was very retrospective. It was cathartic, but didn’t feel very powerful- Livejournal doesn’t make it easy for you to have a big-picture view of things. I started keeping track of things on pen and paper in a journal that my girlfriend gave to me around January 2010. It was very random and inconsistent.
Why did I do it? I used to subscribe to the idea that life should be random and playful, and that schedules and routines were anathema, killjoys. Life, as Lennon put it, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. I think I wanted to start tracking, though, to hold myself a little more accountable. I was frustrated at the amount of time I was wasting over the years, entire months completely forgotten with nothing to show for it.
I think NS was a great catalyst in pushing me to keep track of things. Everyday was so boring, empty and monotonous, and I simply couldn’t stand the idea of spending 2 more years of my life simply drifting about aimlessly. Successful people never become successful from living day to day, they become successful in part through intense scheduling and a determination to make something out of their lives.
“The essential thing in ‘heaven and earth’ is that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
Now I’m a huge perfectionist, and I hated doing anything that wasn’t perfect, so I often ended up not doing anything at all. Common sense dictated, however, that I wasn’t going to get anywhere by not doing anything, so I was going to have to start somewhere, with something, anything, and that would be better than nothing. So I started, put pen to paper and scrawled out a monthly calendar for myself. This was a month after I had enlisted, before I had fully fleshed out the idea of the 90 Week Project.
Messy! I didn’t keep track of much. The stars then represented workouts- I wanted to get fit, and began to hit the gym every 3 days. There were a lot of blank days where I don’t remember what happened. But that was okay. A rough idea was cool enough. I felt like I was getting fitter, growing as an individual, doing something I hadn’t done before. That was exciting.
I find it amusing to note that it was as early as June 2010 when I have black-and-white (or technically red-and-white) evidence of my realization that sleping late was a bad idea. I met my friends quite often. Looking at this picture now, I see little triggers that remind me of entire days- the day one of my friends came to my house because she was a little too drunk to go straight home, some petty drama that me and my friends went through that seems trivial on hindsight. It’s interesting to see what our thoughts were- “Last Cigarette Ever”, and “Decided I’m Going To Re-Take My A-Levels” both seem pretty silly now. I started keeping track of my finances in addition to my gym habit and my daily activities.
I was spending a lot of money on cigarettes- it seems like I used to smoke a lot more then than I do now. I also spent more money than necessary on transport, because I think I hadn’t yet gotten my EZ link card with the monthly concession. I ate out quite often, too. And I bet $100 that Germany would’ve beaten Serbia in the 2010 World Cup, which they didn’t. That’s a lot of idiot tax, but I’ve learnt strongly, since then, never to risk more than I’m willing to lose, even if I’m overwhelmingly certain that the odds are in my favour. Part of it is taking fewer stupid risks, but a part of it too is developing a mindset that’s constantly prepared for loss- aka Stoicism.
I tried to improve things each month-I kept track of my daily expenses in the corners. I bought tonnes of books at the book sale in this month. Note the blanks spaces at the end- apparently my back hurt (I wonder why? I think it was because my bed-frame collapsed. Ruined my sleep patterns, started falling into a sort of negative spiral, and my habit got crushed right about where most new initiatives do. What kept me going, though, was the fact that I had already started on the 90 week project, and I was intent on seeing it through to the end, even if I had entire months of blank spots in the middle.
I started a new book for August! The darkened boxes represent workouts- this was the time where I started going to a boxing gym, which was a really badass workout! YOG was happening, and my 2nd nephew was born. The hearts then represented days that I met my girlfriend- we were meeting really often, as you can see! Was playing poker with my mates on weekends then.
Notice how things are getting kinda tidier! (Overlaps with August a little bit.) I fell sick again- I was falling sick quite often back then, mostly because of inadequate sleep and hydration. It was quite a systemic failure on my part, more downtime than necessary. Was still working out quite a bit.
In October I began to synchronize my monthly day-to-day tracking (which I began before the 90 week project!) with my weekly tracking. You can see again that bad sleeping habits fuck me up, and continue to fuck me up to this day (albeit not nearly as much anymore.) The gym workouts were still fairly consistent. I fell sick again due to a mix of bad sleeping habits and the haze that happened then. A while after this I would begin to change my focus from months to weeks- so entire pages would be dedicated to weeks. The monthly pages would run simultaneously. Things would get a lot more interesting after this- I haven’t scanned those pages yet though, so you’ll have to wait to see those!
EDIT: No more waiting! Here’s Part 2!
How I started tracking my life, Part 1
I made several random attempts to start tracking my life over the years. I used to have a blog on the now-defunct Diary-X.com chronicling my daily life, and when that died I switched to a LiveJournal that I updated from time to time (excerpts from which you can check out in the Livejournal Memories tag). It was very retrospective. It was cathartic, but didn’t feel very powerful- Livejournal doesn’t make it easy for you to have a big-picture view of things. I started keeping track of things on pen and paper in a journal that my girlfriend gave to me around January 2010. It was very random and inconsistent.
Why did I do it? I used to subscribe to the idea that life should be random and playful, and that schedules and routines were anathema, killjoys. Life, as Lennon put it, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. I think I wanted to start tracking, though, to hold myself a little more accountable. I was frustrated at the amount of time I was wasting over the years, entire months completely forgotten with nothing to show for it.
I think NS was a great catalyst in pushing me to keep track of things. Everyday was so boring, empty and monotonous, and I simply couldn’t stand the idea of spending 2 more years of my life simply drifting about aimlessly. Successful people never become successful from living day to day, they become successful in part through intense scheduling and a determination to make something out of their lives.
Now I’m a huge perfectionist, and I hated doing anything that wasn’t perfect, so I often ended up not doing anything at all. Common sense dictated, however, that I wasn’t going to get anywhere by not doing anything, so I was going to have to start somewhere, with something, anything, and that would be better than nothing. So I started, put pen to paper and scrawled out a monthly calendar for myself. This was a month after I had enlisted, before I had fully fleshed out the idea of the 90 Week Project.
Messy! I didn’t keep track of much. The stars then represented workouts- I wanted to get fit, and began to hit the gym every 3 days. There were a lot of blank days where I don’t remember what happened. But that was okay. A rough idea was cool enough. I felt like I was getting fitter, growing as an individual, doing something I hadn’t done before. That was exciting.
I find it amusing to note that it was as early as June 2010 when I have black-and-white (or technically red-and-white) evidence of my realization that sleping late was a bad idea. I met my friends quite often. Looking at this picture now, I see little triggers that remind me of entire days- the day one of my friends came to my house because she was a little too drunk to go straight home, some petty drama that me and my friends went through that seems trivial on hindsight. It’s interesting to see what our thoughts were- “Last Cigarette Ever”, and “Decided I’m Going To Re-Take My A-Levels” both seem pretty silly now. I started keeping track of my finances in addition to my gym habit and my daily activities.
I was spending a lot of money on cigarettes- it seems like I used to smoke a lot more then than I do now. I also spent more money than necessary on transport, because I think I hadn’t yet gotten my EZ link card with the monthly concession. I ate out quite often, too. And I bet $100 that Germany would’ve beaten Serbia in the 2010 World Cup, which they didn’t. That’s a lot of idiot tax, but I’ve learnt strongly, since then, never to risk more than I’m willing to lose, even if I’m overwhelmingly certain that the odds are in my favour. Part of it is taking fewer stupid risks, but a part of it too is developing a mindset that’s constantly prepared for loss- aka Stoicism.
I tried to improve things each month-I kept track of my daily expenses in the corners. I bought tonnes of books at the book sale in this month. Note the blanks spaces at the end- apparently my back hurt (I wonder why? I think it was because my bed-frame collapsed. Ruined my sleep patterns, started falling into a sort of negative spiral, and my habit got crushed right about where most new initiatives do. What kept me going, though, was the fact that I had already started on the 90 week project, and I was intent on seeing it through to the end, even if I had entire months of blank spots in the middle.
I started a new book for August! The darkened boxes represent workouts- this was the time where I started going to a boxing gym, which was a really badass workout! YOG was happening, and my 2nd nephew was born. The hearts then represented days that I met my girlfriend- we were meeting really often, as you can see! Was playing poker with my mates on weekends then.
Notice how things are getting kinda tidier! (Overlaps with August a little bit.) I fell sick again- I was falling sick quite often back then, mostly because of inadequate sleep and hydration. It was quite a systemic failure on my part, more downtime than necessary. Was still working out quite a bit.
In October I began to synchronize my monthly day-to-day tracking (which I began before the 90 week project!) with my weekly tracking. You can see again that bad sleeping habits fuck me up, and continue to fuck me up to this day (albeit not nearly as much anymore.) The gym workouts were still fairly consistent. I fell sick again due to a mix of bad sleeping habits and the haze that happened then. A while after this I would begin to change my focus from months to weeks- so entire pages would be dedicated to weeks. The monthly pages would run simultaneously. Things would get a lot more interesting after this- I haven’t scanned those pages yet though, so you’ll have to wait to see those!
EDIT: No more waiting! Here’s Part 2!