The Diet Cycle

As some of you are probably well aware of by now, getting back on the running wagon is one of my goals for this year. At this point, almost 4 months in, I still haven’t gotten back into running regularly at all, but I am making strides towards getting the ball rolling again. On the exercise side of things, I mentioned in the 100 day update that I was considering doing Orangetheory again as a way to motivate myself, and I have since signed up and gone a couple times. I would’ve gone more, but I’ve been hampered with body problems and other things that ate up my time (excuses, excuses, I know). Of course, the other side of getting healthy is on the eating side of things, so this week’s post is about that.

To say that I have trouble sticking with diets is an understatement. It’s also universal among people in today’s world of food excess. I definitely fall into the camp of finding a diet that looks interesting, trying it out for a while, seeing results, and then slipping back into lazy mode once I’ve reached my goal.

To help give context for this monologue, I’ve provided a nice graph that shows my weekly average weight over the last 6+ years, starting in 2013 when I started taking daily measurements.

I really wish I had measurements all the way back to 2008, after I graduated from college, since it would show an equally impressive dip and climb back up to where the data starts. This post is going to cover essentially three different periods of time where I was able to make big gains, and then immediately fall off the wagon again, concluded with a look at what’s I’m going to be attempting this time around.

Before I start, it is important to note here that according to most estimates I’ve been able to find on the subject, the ideal weight for my size is around 195-200 lbs. That’s for a 6’4” guy, big frame, around 12% body fat.

First Cycle

As mentioned, I don’t have exact data from 2008-2012, but I mostly remember how it went. When I graduated college and moved back home (not having a job yet), I weighed around 215-220 lbs. The exact number isn’t that important, the significant part is that I gained around 30 lbs during those 4 years away from home, partly from time in the gym, but mostly because being a student means a poor lifestyle of ramen, potstickers, mac n’ cheese, chicken nuggets, pizza, and burger patties on toast.

Since I was living at home and had a bunch of time to fix this problem, I was able to undertake a pretty rigorous exercise plan. It’s not around anymore, but back then there was a website called I Want Six Pack Abs or something like that, and my best friend and I decided to give it a go. It consisted of six workouts per week, three days on strength training (for 30-60 min depending on number of exercises) and three days on cardio (30 min or less, focused on sprint intervals), plus some guidelines on what to be eating.

Food wise, the guide wasn’t too far off what many diets recommend these days. Meats and vegetables, some healthy grains, and allowed for desserts that consisted of applesauce or cottage cheese with berries. I also remember eating a lot of nuts between meals since the plan recommended smaller, more frequent meals that is common among athletes.

This strict routine lasted for almost 4 months, basically until I royally messed up my left elbow such that I couldn’t do half of the exercises anymore (and my elbow still has never fully recovered from this). But by the time this happened, I was able to get back under 200 lbs, so it was a success.

What happened after that? It took a while, but without the exercise I couldn’t maintain that weight, and my eating habits slowly got worse after I moved out on my own. I tried to get back into it a few times over the next few years, but it never stuck, so I ballooned back up to my post-college weight and beyond, as you can see from the graph.

Second Cycle

Now that I can use the graph, it is pretty obvious where the second cycle happened. There’s basically a peak around June 2013, then a consistent fall for almost a year into April 2014, holding steady for a few months, then another drastic drop from November 2014 to my ideal weight in the Spring of 2015.

The two main factors for the first drop are both exercise related. One, I started working at Amazon in September 2013, which meant that I started walking to work instead of driving. That alone had a huge impact on my mobility and how I felt. Two, I also started running in June, followed by joining Orangetheory shortly after starting at Amazon. I probably also made some diet adjustments to help fuel the new exercise, but I can’t remember exactly. It really was mostly just getting back into the habit of pushing my body.

The second drop was entirely diet related as I plateaued from exercise alone. November 2014 is when I heard about and immediately started trying the Bulletproof Diet. These days I have my doubts about the full efficacy of this diet since it seems to rely quite heavily on products that they conveniently sell, but at the time I was all in. And while I didn’t do the full Bulletproof Coffee since I generally dislike coffee, I stuck to the rest of it really well.

And the results definitely showed. My weight immediately started going down again and I cut off another 15 lbs in 4 months. However, maintaining the full diet is really difficult because of the limitations, so I didn’t stick with it much longer after I got down to that ideal weight. As I said before, I fall off the wagon quite easily.

Third Cycle

After falling off that diet for a few months, and seeing my weight creep back up again, I tried to find another diet that I felt would be easier to maintain with fewer restrictions. And I did find one that appealed because it was more about cycling through different modes of eating rather than limiting foods, so you would fast one day and then eat a bunch, followed by eating less again, cycling through different ratios of protein versus carbs versus fats, and so on. That also worked for a bit as long as I stuck with it, getting back down to 200 lbs again in early 2016. But again, it ultimately didn’t sync well with my normal life, so it lasted probably the shortest of any diet I’ve tried. I’m also not sure if the diet itself caused the weight loss or if it was just me focusing on healthy foods again.

And from there you can see the slow creep back up to where I’m at right now, hovering around 230 lbs. There are a few spikes along the way there and they are directly correlated with me quitting on my long-distance running due to foot injury, me moving away from downtown Seattle to a more suburb-like area (limiting good food options and walking), and me parting with Orangetheory because it got too inconvenient to attend. But even with all that I did seem to manage keeping the weight under control for a long while until I left Amazon in August 2018, at which point I became even more sedentary than before.

Fourth Cycle

That leads us to today where I’m aiming to start yet another cycle. I have no delusions that I will be able to lose the weight and keep it off forever, that’s just not how I operate. But if I’m going to fluctuate within a range, I’d rather it be around 200-210 instead of 225-235 like I am now.

So here’s what new. As I mentioned at the beginning, Orangetheory is back again, though I’m not planning to be as intense with it as I was before. Previously I would do 3-4 days a week, now I’m aiming for just 2, and try to get in a run on the weekends. Since my goal for the year is to run a half-marathon in under 2 hours, I need to be doing those longer runs at least once a week. Realistically the farthest distance I can get in at an Orangetheory class is about 2 miles, so that doesn’t cut it.

For my diet, I’m trying something pretty new. Not in the food I’m eating, I’m going to be attempting a close-to-keto diet, which is pretty similar to the Bulletproof stuff I did years ago that worked really well. No, what’s new is that I’m taking the super lazy route and having all my meals prepped by someone else. If I look back on my history of diets, the easiest time I had sticking to something was during those months after college when I lived at home. All I had to do was tell my parents what I was trying to do and they helped make it work. As soon as I was on my own, bad habits crept back in.

So this time I’m going to take myself out of the equation as much as possible, just eat pre-made meals with the right keto components and only involve myself when I feel like it. Yes, it is a little more wasteful and more expensive than doing it myself, but overall it’s still going to be a lot cheaper than what I’m doing now, which is going out 90% of the time because I’m lazy.

I don’t think this is something I can keep up long-term, but I’m going to do it for a few months, see how it goes, and then make adjustments if I find myself wanting to cook more. I’ve found over time that it’s easier to make good decisions when you’re already in a good place, hence why I eat so much bad stuff right now.

Hopefully things work out well this time around, and I’m sure I’ll have an update every month or two on how things are going.

Goals Update: 100 Days

As I promised at the 50 day mark, it is time for the 100 day update on how the goals are progressing. I probably won’t take as long to go over them this time around, so this will be short and sweet. This is everything up to April 10.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

Still the area where I’m behind the most at this point. I have managed to do three runs in the first 100 days, which is pretty bad. My eating habits also haven’t resulted in any significant body change, though it is definitely better than it was. Still eating too much and not cooking at home enough, but getting in more healthy and less bad foods.

The hard part right now isn’t that I don’t have the time, since I do have time. I just don’t think about it most days, so I need to start setting reminders and making sure that I don’t make other obligations for when I get home on the days I should do a run.

One option I’m considering is that there is an Orangetheory Fitness next to our train station, which I used for a several years in Seattle until it became too inconvenient. Positives with this option is that you have to go to the classes or forfeit money, which creates incentive. The workouts also balance cardio and strength training, and I do feel like I need both to make any real progress. Just need to figure out what time works best if I go this route. In any case, I need to do something soon or I won’t have enough time to train up.

Publish a Post Every Week

No real change here, I have managed to have a post for every week, even if they arrive a week or two late. This is week 15, and you can see that there are exactly 15 posts in the column to the right within 2019.

The biggest struggle has continued to be thinking of topics to write about. This is mostly due to not having as much time to work on things to review as I’d anticipated. I suppose this is also partially due to having ideas for posts I want to write about, but not willing to do so without having enough data/experience to give a worthwhile opinion. Like, I could talk about my time with VR, but I’ve only spent like 5 hours with it, which isn’t much. I really want to talk about some board games, but with only a couple plays I can’t say that I’ve really engaged with them (which is partially why last week’s post happened).

On the plus side, with my schedule more settled and fewer trips coming up, I have time locked down to do the writing, so I have been getting more consistent at being on time.

Listen to 200 New Albums

As of day 100, I have listened to 33 new albums. That means I’ve almost tripled the number since the last update, but still only 1/6 of the total I need. Considering that we’re only a little more than three months in, I’m positive about the trend.

What has been helping is that instead of forcing myself to follow a set list of albums, I’ve been jumping around between different artists and just going through their whole discography, making note of the new stuff. That was always the plan, but I’m okay with going with what I want to hear rather than doing a purely alphabetical journey. On the other hand, what hasn’t been helping is that I still have to try to keep caught up on podcasts, which eats into music time. My office is also not conducive to consistent listening since interruptions are constant.

Since the last update, a couple albums have stood out as worth repeat listening. Rubber Factory by The Black Keys, Favourite Worst Nightmare by The Arctic Monkeys, and Queen II by Queen (duh). I already liked all those bands beforehand, but these albums were new to me and I keep thinking about them.

Aside from those new ones, I’m also still giving Dreams in Space (my band’s album) a lot of listens, plus I’ve re-remembered how much I love the album Origami Eyes from my friends in American Island, so that’s also eating up some time. But, gotta do what you love.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

In the last update I mentioned that I wasn’t sure where I was with this, and I’ve had to make some adjustments to make it work better. I’m still tracking books (should read every day) and audiobooks (should listen every work day) the way I was before. Incidentally, the percentages for focusing on those are currently 65% for books (better) and 65% for audiobooks (slightly worse).

The games have completely fallen off because I realized it wasn’t actually what I should be focusing on. I kept having other things I needed to do, so what I decided to go with instead was simply marking if I got my focus activity done or not. Each day I determine what that activity is going to be, and then do it (or not if I get distracted). Some of these activities are games, but some are writing these posts, learning new skills, and doing things with my wife. It has made it a lot easier to make sure that the activities I want to do get more equal time, as well as making it less frustrating to see myself not getting things done (because I am getting things done!).

Back on the quitting side of things, I still haven’t encountered anything that I’ve wanted to drop yet. The audiobook from last time (Gone Girl, which I ranted on a few weeks ago) was able to survive the axe. There are a couple more things on the block now though, so we’ll see again what happens. The thing is that right now I’m doing enough different things that I haven’t had a chance to get a full experience of anything.

Alright, that’s pretty much it. Obviously I need to keep going in the areas that are going well, and I really need to get the exercise kicked up a notch. Another update will come at the end of June.

Grooming the Backlog

This post is, yet again, at the last minute for this week due to a number of factors, mostly that our stuff has finally arrived in New York so we have been unpacking and getting things sorted as quickly as possible. Obviously that leaves less time for anything else, so I’ll be quick this week and touch on a couple of the process changes I’ve made to how I work with the backlog of stuff I want to do. Yes, it is very exciting stuff.

As I’ve mentioned many times here before, I pay for and use JIRA to keep track of my backlog and how much time I spend on things. For those not in the know, JIRA is a tool lots of companies use (including the one I’m at now) for keeping track of development work for teams and projects. I discovered it when I started working at Amazon and not too long after that I realized it had the potential of being a good tool for other work besides just development. So for the last 5 years or so I’ve been using a personal instance to track various things I want to do. These include books I want to read, games I want to play, movies and shows I want to watch, as well as various creative projects.

It’s been a really useful tool, though it definitely has its share of negatives as well. The biggest one being that with all the reporting it has built-in, it’s easy to see just how bad I am about getting anything done at times. The last month and more has definitely been one of those times where the numbers are pretty stagnant. Not a whole lot I can do about that. But there have been a couple other negatives that I’ve been trying to address.

The first negative is something I’ve also seen on various teams that I’ve been on when it comes to using JIRA at work. One of the aspects of the way the backlog works, at least if you’re using the agile tools, is that you can arrange your tasks in buckets that are called epics. In a development team, an epic will usually tie into a specific feature, like adding a new page to a website or a new set of APIs to a service. But often times you will see that for tasks that don’t fit nicely into a feature, they will end up in generalized buckets that don’t have a goal in mind. It ends up being just a way of labeling things in a more visual way than the actual labeling functionality built into the system. These epics never, ever get finished.

I was guilty of this for a very long time as well. Some of the epics I’ve defined have had goals in mind. Like when I got my new computer I needed to do a bunch of transferring from my old laptop, so that became a small epic. When I wanted to study Spanish and Italian, I made epics to go through all the lessons on Duolingo. But I also had epics called “Video Games” and “Audiobooks” and “Movies/TV” and so on. These were just buckets for labeling things, there was no way I was ever going to actually finish any of these buckets because more would always get added.

To fix this problem, starting at the beginning of this year, I created a ton of epics to separate everything in these bigger buckets into smaller buckets that actually could be finished. Each epic now has some kind of limit such that, once it’s established, nothing else can be added in. For most of the epics, the limit is set by the content of the thing. For example, at some point I want to read through all the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. So there’s an epic for that since there are ten novels in the series, it’s a hard content limit. The rest of the epics are limited by a time window. So for audiobooks, since most of them are not in any kind of series, I have them separated into buckets by the year when I got them, three epics in total for 2017, 2018, and 2019.

This has a couple advantages. First, it makes it easier to find most things when I’m ready to get into them since the labeling is more distinct. Second, closing out epics is extremely satisfying, and having the ability to do that more often is going to be a huge boon to my productivity. I love checking things off and keeping track of progress, so this scratches that itch and makes me want to complete more.

The other big negative to how I’ve been doing things is that when you use JIRA you are generally forced into using the sprint structure in order to make use of the visual task tracker. The sprint board makes it easy to see what is currently being worked on, what’s been finished, and what’s the highest priority to pick up after something else completes. The problem I have with the sprint board is that you have to use sprints, which are timeboxed and require a lot of maintenance since I have to make new ones all the time. In an ideal world I could just have a board available all the time and not have to make new sprints since I don’t care about the reporting it provides.

With this in mind, I took some time to see if a kanban board would better suit my needs. It functions similarly to a sprint board but it’s just always up. Should be perfect in theory. Unfortunately I had to abandon it after I discovered that many of the tracking features are removed from those boards. Yes, it’s a sprint board that I don’t have to make sprints for, but I can’t actually keep track of how much progress I’ve made on anything. I use the time tracking aspect of sprints a lot to figure out how much I can realistically do in a given amount of time, but the kanban board doesn’t have any of that. It ends up being kind of useless then.

So I don’t have a solution for the sprint problem. Best thing I can do is just keep the sprints longer so I don’t have to make them as often (I do one per month) and plan things out ahead of time so that when the first of the month comes, I only have to a make a couple button clicks to roll into the next one. I could always just create a sprint and never actually close it, but that effectively removes all of the reporting features, some of which are nice to have and I do use.

Anyway, that’s really all I have to say about that. It’s not a perfect system but it works pretty well for me. The only other thing that’s changed over time is that I actually keep the true backlog in a different place (Evernote) since the amount of time to manage the whole thing in JIRA would be significantly greater. I keep the real backlog in simpler word documents that are easy to edit and just add things to JIRA as needed. I do have to keep track of things in two places, but it still saves a lot more time than it wastes.

Goals Update: 50 Days

I’m sure it’s getting a little tired by now, but since I don’t have any other things to write about this week, I think it’s a good idea to check up on how I’m doing in regards to the goals I set for the year after 50 days. This means looking at my tracking of goals up to February 19, though this post is being written a little later. I can already say that some of these goals are pretty far behind due to the craziness involved with moving, but there’s still plenty of time in the year to catch up. Hopefully.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

This is probably the one I’m the most behind on. In the first 50 days I didn’t do a single run and my eating habits have been worse than ever thanks to not having any real way to prepare normal food, since all my cookware was in Seattle while I’ve been in New York, and now it’s all on a truck waiting to get here. It’s also really hard to want to eat well when it’s cold all the time and you are traveling around a bunch to try to get things done at opposite ends of the country.

On the plus side, the amount of walking I’ve been having to do has kept my body less stiff than it got during my funemployment. I’m also trying to be more conscious about the amount of food I eat, even if most of it is just meat and carbs. My body didn’t struggle with any of the moving process either, so that’s a good sign that I should be able to ease back into exercise quickly.

Things are getting into a more predictable routine with work, so I’m hoping that in the next week or two I can cut out some time to get in some short jogs to at least get my mind and body back into the idea of doing something after work a couple nights a week. Still need to find a place to do strength training too.

Publish a Post Every Week

Well, you wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t doing this. I haven’t been on time with all of my posts, particularly in the last couple weeks, but I’ve been doing my best to make sure I don’t get too far behind. With this post I’ll be back on track to hit my scheduled time next post.

The biggest struggle here has been getting topics to write about. The idea was to always have a month’s worth of ideas stocked up so this wouldn’t happen. Problem is that I do have a bunch of ideas, I just can’t write about them yet because they are for things I haven’t done yet, but plan to do once I have time. I was relying a lot of having more games and other media to review for most of my posts, and I just haven’t had time to complete much during the last month. A lot of that is my fault for choosing movies and other brainless things over games and books, but you can only do so much when you leave for work at 8am and get back home around 9pm because you have to eat out every night. Not to mention the flying and focusing on getting a new apartment ready to live in.

Needless to say, I can’t wait to get back to some form of normalcy around here. That will help make topics easier to come up with since I will have time to wander, physically and mentally.

Listen to 200 New Albums

As of day 50, I have listened to 12 albums. So 6% of the way there, though almost 14% of the way through the year. That’s not too bad. I don’t have a full list of specific albums to listen to, but I do have a list of artists that I want to visit and see what I’ve missed over the years.

So far all the listening has been done at work. As it turns out, the new workspace is much more chaotic and full of disruptions than any team I had at Amazon, so putting the headphones on has been a must. That being said, I haven’t fully removed all other forms of distraction from my phone yet, so I am still spending more time on there than I should during breaks. I have also been spending a lot of time listening to my own music, which is cutting into time for other new stuff. I’m sure that will eventually lessen once the new album is not so new.

None of the albums I’ve listened to yet have stood out as particularly great (aside from my own band’s, of course!), but I now know some more music from artists I already like.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

I’m not entirely sure where I am with this to be honest. I can say that during this move I haven’t been good at focusing on certain things, but doing okay in others.

What I have been doing well is keeping the daily tracker of what I spent my time on. At least, as far as keeping track of whether I focused on the game, book, and audiobook I should be doing, that’s been going well. I decided to track those three things because they take up distinct parts of the day. Games only happen during normal after-work time. Books only happen during the hour leading up to sleeping. And audiobooks only happen during my commute. For the interested, my percentages for each of those are: 20%, 58%, and 69%, respectively, the goal being 75% over the course of the year.

Where I’m not sure if my system is working properly is that for days where I know I didn’t have any time or ability to do a focus task, I just counted it as N/A, but every other day where I had even the slimmest chance to do one of those things, I would count it against me if I didn’t do it, even if I didn’t actually get distracted from it. So, for example, I don’t count weekends against audiobooks because I’m not commuting, and I don’t count not playing a game against me if I don’t have the game with me, like when I was packing up things in Seattle to move. But otherwise, if I didn’t play the game, but I was spending the time calling or emailing people about moving, or I was writing one of these posts, it would still go against me. I haven’t been doing a good job of tracking those other things, so I should probably start doing that or at least assess if I truly missed my focus task because I got distracted with something lesser than.

Either way, I’m doing okay on books and audiobooks given the system I have been using. Games are in really bad shape though, I just haven’t played anything in almost a month, basically since I started my job. And most of those days are counted against me because I technically had an hour or two at home where I could’ve done it. Some of those days are valid because I would just watch a video instead, but many of them I had other important things to do, I just don’t remember which days they were at this point. Going forward I will make it a point to put the lack of playing in perspective since I shouldn’t penalize myself for doing something more important.

On the quitting side of things, I haven’t felt the need to drop anything yet, but the audiobook I’m currently working on might be the first one. I’m about 3 hours in and I’m not a fan of the characters or the writing. I will give it the 5 hours I said I would, but if it doesn’t improve significantly by then, I won’t have any problem dropping it and picking up something else.

Looks like I ended up having quite a bit to report on. I’m planning to do this again after 100 days, so shortly into April, and see if things have improved by then. After that it’ll just be at the end of each quarter, so end of June, September, and finally the full year assessment. So look forward to those I guess.

Year in Review: 2018

This review is going to be fully, internally focused because it needs to be. On a personal level, this year was incredibly disappointing. I am more frustrated with myself than I have been in a long time. Granted, it was a tumultuous year with a lot of unexpected events, but that is true of every year. No, what has truly frustrated me is that, as I write this, I am looking back on last year’s review and literally nothing I wanted to improve on has gotten better. In fact, they all just got worse.

2018 in Summary

There’s going to be a lot of negative in this review, so let’s start with some of the more positive things and just go through all the things that happened.

The biggest change for me this year was in my career as I left Amazon after almost 5 years working there. There were multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the team I was on a year ago was dissolved, everyone scattered to other teams within the organization. That was really de-motivating given that the organization as a whole is barely-contained chaos and our team was a tiny beacon of sanity and good practices. By the time this happened I was also getting frustrated with other bureaucracy in the company that was hurting my ability to advance my career the way I wanted to. So, as everyone else on that team moved on to other opportunities, I decided to as well.

This change was followed by a month or so of enjoying the freedom of funemployment, then three months of job seeking. The end result is that I do have a new job lined up for 2019, and it’s in New York City. So I can already say that this new year is going to be a game-changer as my wife and I move across the country for new opportunities and experiences. I’m also going to be getting into a completely new industry for me, finance, so that will be exciting.

As an aside, I specifically pointed out in my review last year that I loved visiting NYC and could see myself living there for a few years, but doubted that it would happen. Way to show myself!

On the home front, we managed to stay in the same place for another year without moving, but that is obviously going to change very soon. If I’m honest, I’m not going to miss much about our current home aside from the space, and even then I could do with a little less of it so I don’t have so much to clean.

As far as trips went, there were a ton of them, but most of them were small, so no big vacation trips like we’ve done. The year started off strong with another fun trip to San Antonio for PAX South, can’t wait to go down again in a couple weeks. Shortly after that was an unexpected trip to Mexico City for a recruiting event that was a lot of fun despite the long days, and my wife took the opportunity to go to Vegas while I was gone.

From there, a short trip down to California for a family visit in March, then April came with another couple work trips so that our team could transition our work off before we split up. I got to visit Austin for the first time (liked it a lot, would enjoy visiting again) and Vancouver, BC for the first time in over a decade. It made me sad that it took so long to visit Vancouver again after so long because I barely remembered my first trip, and turns out it’s a fun city to visit. April rounded off with another yearly tradition, the spring wine barrel opening in Zillah. Always one of my favorite weekends of the year enjoying good wine and many of my closest friends. This is going to be one of the things I miss most about moving away, unless we find a way to make it work.

There were no other trips until August, where I went to Minnesota for the first time with a few friends to visit their family. Not normally something I would do, but I had just left Amazon and wanted to take a trip somewhere where my wife wouldn’t be upset if I went without her, so this fit the bill. It was a good trip overall, got kinda bored after a few days, but that’s just me having difficulty backing away from the need to be productive. After that, once the job seeking process got underway I was traveling around quite a bit. In the span of two weeks in November I: went down to Santa Barbara for an interview (didn’t get nor want that job); went to Disneyland two days later for a long weekend with my wife (this was planned before the interviews); went to New York City for some interviews (didn’t get those jobs either); and finished off with another trip to Vancouver, BC with my wife (also planned before, she was jealous of my trip earlier in the year so I had to take her). Other than that, the typical holiday trips to visit nearby family. Overall a lot of new places to see, and they were all great in their own ways.

Before we move away from the positives, there is one more event worth mentioning that is the highlight of my year. After 7 years of writing and false starts, my band finally got into the studio to record our second album. It was a night and day difference from our first recording. We knew better what to expect going in, having learned our lessons the first time around. We had a recording engineer with decades of experience with many well-known bands who helped in so many ways we didn’t anticipate. And with the time we put into making the songs, we executed better on every level, and we had the time to decide which songs we truly loved. The second album sounds amazing, I’ve listened to it dozens of times since we got the mixes and I expect to continue having it on heavy rotation. The mastering is happening next week from when I’m writing this, so the final product will hopefully be out this month. It is hard to express how proud I am of what we did together. It’s not the perfection you get from a professional band, but it embodies who we are, and I cannot think of a better way for the band to say goodbye (we knew going in that we were breaking up, so my moving had nothing to do with it).

Looking at the great things I just listed, the list of negatives from this year is short in comparison, but it’s really the pervasiveness that made it insidious. Trips are a lot of fun for me and recording an album is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. But those are just blips when compared to the whole of the year.

On the work side of things, the only time I was really satisfied was in the first quarter when our team was still together. The transition was frustrating and the work the new team was doing just wasn’t fulfilling in the same way. And then I wasn’t even working for almost half of the year. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this year it’s that I legitimately hate being away from work that long. I tried to get myself motivated to do some stuff on my own, but that didn’t work very well. I’ve come to accept the fact that I am 95% eternally motivated to do non-recreational activities.

On the health side of things, I feel like crap all the time these days. My exercise sputtered the whole year and it’s effectively dropped to zero by now. My diet has also gone to hell as sugar addiction got to me and my overall dissatisfaction led to making bad choices more often than not. It’s one of those things where the scale doesn’t show that much had changed, but I can feel it. Constant inflammation and fatigue plague me, and being unemployed has only exasperated it. I feel that I shouldn’t complain about it since my wife was diagnosed with arthritis this year, so she’s in a worse situation than me. But at least in my case, I know what causing it and I know how to fix it. I just don’t.

On the free time side of things, I again failed to improve in any way based on the goals I had. They were pretty simple goals: reduce distractions (my social media and Youtube use went up this year, not down) and focus fire (I’ve played a dozen or so different games in the last month, only finished one). I think the most telling statistic here is that this year I read less than one-third of the books I did last year (15 books this year, 47 in 2017) and less than half of any other year in the past 6 years (since I’ve been keeping track). That’s just plain awful and points to how much of my time is being stolen away by useless crap and how bad I’ve been at prioritizing.

After all that, I’m not sure if disappointment in myself is enough of a motivating factor to really make things change. If that were the case, I’d be on the rebound by now. I really hope that a new city and a new job will help me refocus, but I need to have a plan and make conscious effort to follow through. Some changes to my environment and a few key habits should help, and I’ll go into those a bit later in the goals area. Overall, I am getting to a point where I’m starting to worry about myself, so something definitely needs to change.

Favorite Games

(Incidentally, this is the only area where I actually did better this year than any year previous, so that’s good, but improvement here shouldn’t come at the cost of everything else)

God of War - Best game I played this year, no real surprise here. It deserves every accolade and award it’s gotten this year. I feel like I have to play the game again before I can put it in my all-time favorites, but I have never been more impressed by a game. It is stunning to look at, the combat is a blast, it has just the right amount of difficulty throughout the whole thing, and I haven’t enjoyed exploring a world and doing the side stuff this much in years (probably not since Assassin’s Creed 2).

Cuphead - I don’t have an Xbox One so I missed this game when it first came out and didn’t think about it for a while until I saw the speedrun of it at AGDQ this year, and I knew I had to give it a shot. I’m really glad I did because I enjoyed the hell out of it. I never found the difficulty to be that bad, but there are definitely some bosses I struggled to get through. Still managed to get the full 200% completion on it though. I eagerly await the DLC coming this year and will jump back in when that happens.

Diablo 3 - Late to the party much? I’ve had this game for years but only this year did I finally decide to give it a spin (driven largely by an upsurge in my Heroes of the Storm playing). I never played the first two, so I didn’t really know what to expect going in, especially on console. But I had a blast right from the start. I’m pretty sure that’s largely because I picked the right class (demon hunter) first, if I’d chosen a different one I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. I’ve largely fallen off after going through it with a couple characters, but I still jump in from time to time to do the adventure mode stuff while I catch up on podcasts.

Marvel’s Spider-Man - I’m honestly a little surprised that this made my favorites of the year. I had heard plenty of good buzz about the game, but I’ve never really been a fan of Spider-Man, so I didn’t feel the need to rush to it. Eventually the buzz got to me and I decided to try it out. Oh man I got hooked quick, probably more so than any other game on this list. I think I got to 100% completion in about a week. I’ve also been jumping on each DLC pack and completing them in one sitting. It’s not the best game I’ve played this year, I have some big quibbles with some of the side missions and the controls, but when it clicks, it clicks. The swinging mechanics in particular, I never got tired of flying through the streets of NYC. Incidentally, this game was a big motivator for me to look for jobs there. It just reminded me of how much I enjoyed being there, so if a game can capture that feeling, it’s doing something right.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

Thor: Ragnarok / Captain America: Winter Soldier / Captain America: Civil War - About half of the movies I saw this year was my wife and I catching up on everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we had missed over the years so that we could go into Avengers: Infinity War with full understanding. Of all those movies, these three stood out on top, particularly Thor: Ragnarok. It is just a fun time from beginning to end. I think of all the MCU movies, Winter Soldier and Civil War stand out as the best in both narrative and action. While I don’t think I would go out of my way to watch them again like I would Ragnarok or the Guardians movies, I would never say no if the option came up.

Mission Impossible: Fallout - I’ve never been a M:I fan, I’ve only seen half of them and I can only recall what happens in one of those, Rogue Nation. I can’t fully put my finger on what it is about Fallout that appeals to me so much, but I had a blast watching it the first time and enjoyed it just as much on the second viewing. While it no longer had the element of surprise the second time, I was able to appreciate the craft of it a lot more, and it’s an impressive movie in so many ways.

Favorite Books

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy any books I read this year. That is probably a big factor for why I didn’t read much, I couldn’t find anything to get sucked into. Of course I am a completionist by nature, so putting down a book unfinished is extremely difficult for me to do. This meant that several books sat on the table for weeks or months while I pursued more engaging activities. I should probably try to be a little more selective in the coming months so that I get back into the habit of daily reading with books I know I should like to some degree.

Goals

Alright, finally to the part that I’ve spent several days thinking about. Looking back at last year’s review, I mentioned that it’s difficult to have a goal stick when you don’t make it specific. The goal for 2016 was simply “consume less, produce more”. That didn’t work. The goals for 2017 were basically the same idea but a few more specifics. That also didn’t work because they still weren’t specific enough.

So this year I’m getting a lot more specific, and I’m also going to lay out some actions I’m going to do to make positive habits around them. I did this to some degree last year with my goals of getting below 200 pounds, reducing distractions, and focus firing, but after a while I stopped caring about how often I missed my targets because I didn’t set up any habits around it (I especially stopped caring once I was sitting at home all day).

For the most part each of these goals is a response to something that I feel is bad or lacking in my life, so I will frame each goal as such.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

Hi, 2015 called and it wants its goal back! Yes, this is dipping back into that well again. I was doing really well at running a few years ago when I was exercising more regularly, and doing races really helped motivate me to stick with it. This goal is a direct response to how awful my health has gotten in the last couple years. The reason I stopped running was because of injury, but I have long since healed up. During the last couple years I have tried to get back into running shorter distances on a regular basis, but it just hasn’t stuck because of that lack of an external motivator.

I figure, if I’m going to set a goal like this, let’s really push the envelope. My previous goal was simply to finish a full marathon. Based on that experience and where I’m at age-wise, I don’t feel that doing a full marathon is ever going to be a good idea. It’s a cool feat, but not one I’m interested in doing any more due to the stress it puts on your body. I have done three half-marathons, so I know how it goes, and I think it’s a lot more reasonable. And where this pushes me is that my current record is 2:13:30, so I not only need to get back into shape where I can run it, I need to do it a lot better too.

So how do I get there?

• Get the diet back under control. Easier said than done, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m a lazy cook. So it’s going to be back to basics and get used to boring food. The hardest part is that I’m effectively going to have to go my own way here since I doubt my wife will want to share. Another thing I’m going to do that I’ve toyed with but haven’t committed to yet is cut out meat more often, have more vegetarian meals. Good for the environment and good for me. The trick here is that vegetarian often means more carbs to replace the protein, but I think that with a big a place as NYC is, I can find the right places.

• More tea, more wine. These are specifically to try to curb some of my bad cravings. When I say tea, I mean herbal tea because I don’t like black tea at all and I don’t need the caffeine. The tea is just a way to have something other than water so that I don’t get sugar cravings in my mouth. The wine, similarly, is a better alternative to beer and mixed drinks. Granted I’ve already cut back on those quite a bit this year, so this is just more in the right direction.

• Get back to accountable workouts. The main reason why Orange Theory worked so well for me was that there was some sense of accountability. We were already paying for the gym, but we had to pay a penalty if we missed a workout. With the CrossFit gym I joined, there was none of that, it was very loose. Despite the high monthly cost, it was just too easy to never go because there was no schedule to follow. So once I get to NYC, I’m going to need to find that accountability again.

• Monthly races. This worked really well before, so let’s go ahead and do it again. I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities in a city as big as NYC. If nothing else, doing a lap of Central Park once in a while will pay big dividends.

As far as finishing the goal itself, it could come through the form of a defined race near the end of the year. Another option I think would be cool (and there may be a race that does this), is simply do a run from one end of Manhattan to the other. It just so happens that the distance from Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip to Battery Park at the southern tip is about 13 miles. Not sure how feasible it is because running on streets means having to stop often, so I will need to do some research on possible routes. Even if I can’t use it for the goal purposes, I think it would still be cool to do.

Publish a Post Every Week

This is something I’ve also toyed with in the past, I have had several years where a goal was to write more. But again, “write more” is not specific, so those years inevitably led to little, if any, actual work. There was a period of time in 2014 where I was making a post each week (which you can still find on this site), but I ran out of steam because I ran out of ideas around the theme I was going with. There was another period of time in 2016/17 where I was doing mini-reviews and posting them once I had a few saved up. I took those off the site because they didn’t provide the kind of value I wanted them to.

So what is going to be different this time around? Not a lot on the surface. I already know that I can do it, as I’ve done it before. The average time to write a post is 3 hours, which is perfectly doable in any given week. The only real difference is that I’m not going to stick to one theme or topic (like the lessons series I did or the FF Challenge I failed a couple years ago), I will let each post come from whatever I happen to be able to speak on that week. I suspect that most of the content will come as reviews of things I’ve been playing or reading, but I will try to branch out into more lessons, observations, or other creative work. The only area I will not do is politics, not because I don’t have opinions, but because it’s just a lot of work to do research and stuff. I will leave that to the experts.

So how do I get there?

• Schedule out blocks of time. This is pretty obvious, so I won’t dwell on it. Not knowing what my new job schedule and commute is going to look like, I can’t say when the blocks will work. Most likely it will be blocking out one night a week to write up the post, then do a quick proofread the next morning before work and then putting it up. The key here is going to be making the time and not letting other things get in the way.

• Plan things out in advance. Also obvious, ideally I should have a month’s worth of ideas at any given time.

• Have more to write about. This comes back around to the focus fire idea from last year. The goal below will go more into this, but suffice to say that having more experiences will allow for more things to write about.

This will be an easy enough goal to measure. Come back in a year and see if I made 52 posts or not (this counts as number 1).

Listen to 200 New Albums

This goal may seem a little odd compared to the other ones, but it has a very specific purpose. The biggest problem I had during my last year at Amazon was self-imposed distractions, mostly in the form of streaming video and podcasts. Listening to podcasts at work isn’t new to me, I’ve been doing it my entire career, but I know from that experience that while it seems like good multi-tasking, it really wasn’t. The mind can only focus on one thing at a time, so it either distracted from work or become background noise and I’d miss things. Once I started streaming videos at work, the problem worsened exponentially as video is much better at distracting me than pretty much anything else. I have to be really disinterested in a video in the background for me to ignore it.

So the real goal of this is to remove my biggest distractions at work. It seems to me that simply saying no to those things will be tough, since, again, if it was easy I wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place. In order to keep podcasts and videos out of my head, I need to replace them with something else, like music. And in order to keep music at the top of my priority list of things to listen to, I need to make a goal such that I want to keep it there.

Thus, set a goal of listening to a bunch of new stuff. My natural inclination was to just say 100 new albums, but given there are 365 days in a year, around 250 of which involve going to work, I think 200 is stretching without getting too crazy. And realistically, I’m going to want to listen to a lot of music I already love. I also really like this goal because there are a ton of albums from artists I like that I haven’t gotten around to for one reason or another, so this gives me a chance to finally get to them.

So how do I get there?

• Remove the options to consume the bad stuff. Not knowing what my work environment is going to be, I can’t say what that will look like. But ideally I can set it up such that I cannot access things like Youtube or Twitch from my work computer. Similarly, I am going to remove all video apps from my phone and block non-music apps from being accessible during work hours. The latest version of iOS has most of this capability, though it’s a little clunky, so I might find another solution for that. But the general idea is that the only thing I can access during work hours is Spotify/iTunes.

• Make a list of music to listen to. This is another obvious thing, but not something I have done for music in the past. I do this all the time for games, movies, TV, and books, so adding music should be an easy enough thing. The list will also be easy to seed with all those albums from artists I like that I’ve missed, including the ones I already have in my library (soundtracks and such).

The nice thing about doing this goal is that next year’s review I’ll be able to talk about which ones I liked the most.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

The previous goal is very much this year’s version of focus fire/reduce distractions for the workplace.This goal is the same thing but at home. I really want this goal to be more specific than “create a habit” but it really is more of a process change than accomplishing any one thing. I can say things like, “write one completed story” or “read 30 books” and those would be fine, but there’s something deeper that makes those things easier. The ability to focus is key to getting more done, so this goal is around making it into a driving habit rather than an occasional thing I can do when needed.

So why is quitting also mentioned? I’ve noticed it for years, but it was especially prominent this year. My inability to quit things that I don’t enjoy doing is a key factor in my inability to keep focused on one thing at a time. Since reviewing and analyzing media isn’t my job, I don’t have any real incentive to actually finish things I don’t like other than the completionist side of me needing it to be done. At some point I need to break that side’s stranglehold over my habits so that I can get my time back, so why not this year?

What does this mean in practice? The focusing aspect isn’t any different from what I talked about last year. It involves removing distractions in order to block out time, removing decision paralysis via (selective) randomization, and having one thing in each category to focus on. Where the quitting aspect comes in is that if I find that I don’t want to focus on what I’ve already chosen, then maybe it’s just not for me, and it’s okay to abandon it and choose something new. For the things I loved this year, it was never a struggle to devote my time to them, so if it ever is a struggle, I need to do the right thing and just move on.

So how do I get there?

• Remove the options to consume non-focus stuff. Just like with the goal above, I need to remove the temptations of other things so that I’m necessarily funneled into the right thing. With my computer at home I can easily block distracting content, and my phone is going to be pretty barren in terms of things it can distract me with. And even with the things I intend to keep around, like Twitter, setting time limits will keep me from overdoing it.

• Keep a daily tracker of my progress. I already do this to some degree through a productivity app I use, but it’s really just a binary thing of “yes, I focused on one thing” or “no, I didn’t focus on it”. Having a tracker will give me a better idea on a weekly and monthly basis of how well I’m doing. Being able to see that I focused on my one thing 25 days this month is a better metric than what I do now. Keeping track of the number of things I’ve abandoned will also be interesting to see at the end of the year.

• Make the habit rewarding. One way I’m doing this, and I’ve already gotten it set up, is using more granular checklists. Completing checklists is super satisfying for me, and up until now my backlog lists have been just big buckets that never really finish. By breaking these up into lists that can be completed, I think that will drive me to finish more. Having a more tangible reward, especially for successfully quitting something, would be great too, so I will give that more thought and see what I can come up with.

• Check in on satisfaction often. In terms of determining when I should quit something, I think a good rule of thumb will be to do a gut check around 5 hours in. For any activity that’s about 3 days. It’s early enough that I should be able to avoid the completionist itch, but enough time that I should also get a feel for how the rest of it is going to go. If I am still interested after 5 hours, then regular checks every 10 hours will work too. It would be nice if I could find a way to automate this so that I can’t avoid answering the gut check, but I don’t know how to do that with the tools I have right now. I will probably just have to do it during my weekly upkeep.

As I pointed out at the start, this will be harder to assess because it’s a habit rather than a specific number or event. I think a reasonable goal, assuming I’m good at keeping a daily tracker, is to have 75% of days this year where I am able to focus on whatever my one thing is (this will likely be two things because I’ve always kept reading as exempt from this, it’s really one book to be reading every day and one other thing to focus on).

Here’s to 2019

Not that anyone else is counting, but this review is almost twice as long as any other I’ve written for this site, but I think it’s for good reason. I haven’t been this low on myself at the beginning of a year in longer than I can remember, so I have a lot to work on. I’ve laid out what I think needs to happen, so now it’s a matter of doing the work.

With a new city and new job ahead of me, this year has no choice but to be transformational. I want to be able to capitalize on that and finally kick some of my bad habits for good. Only once I do that can I really pursue my heart’s desires.

Here’s to 2019 and 51 more posts!