Habit Tracking January

I found the system for habit tracking I adopted in July last year overall quite insightful and useful for keeping me on track for simple habits. I thus decided to continue following this system in the new year.

Due to travel around Christmas and New Years it took me a while to get back into following my habits regularly. Here the overview of all habits for January:

Habit Tracking January

And some comments on the individual habits:

• Exercise and Stretching: I exercised a total of 13 times in January. Overall I am quite happy with this. We got the Nintendo Switch RingFit Adventures game, which provides a nice alternative way to my normal exercises.

Playing RingFit Adventures

• Emails: During our travels my email inbox got quite out of control. I regularly worked on reducing the number of emails in my inbox but it took me until the 11th until I had reached my target of less than five emails.
• Meditation and Learn: Since I had to get straight back to work after our return from travels and was not overly successful at waking up early, I did not follow my usual morning routine and thus failed to do my regular five minute meditation and touch typing practice.
• Posture: In January I tried a few times to take my Upright Go to work but more often than not forgot to take it in the morning rush.

Here my results for my touch typing practice this month. I think it is fair to say that my efforts are plateauing. The following inspirational quote keeps me going in my endeavours.

Whether you like it or not, there will be plateaus, which in my experience tend to occur right before a breakthrough. Weight lifting teaches you to embrace them, or at the very least accept them. This is an important outcome, with consequences extending far beyond the gym. “In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical,” writes George Leonard, a pioneer of the human potential movement in the 1960s, “but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.”

from The Zen of Weight Lifting in the NY Times

Learning January

I also did not write quite as regularly as I used to. I think writing is very important since it fosters clear thinking. I think in January and December I was not quite as successful since a lot of my free time was take up by another project: To move my collection of quotes from unstructured word documents into a structured database. This involved a lot of copy and pasting. But I am happy to say that I finished going through all the quotes I had haphazardly put into Word documents and moved them to Airtable.

Collection of quotes moved to Airtable

Unfortunately the quotes I collected in Word documents are only the tip of the iceberg. I have many more I collected on my Kindle as 'clippings'. I am now in the process of moving these into a database, so that I can categorise and tag them. I started with writing a small tool that can extract the information from Kindle clippings files: kindle-citation-extractor. However, there is a long way still to go and this might keep me occupied for another one or two months.