April Review: Creating a Workout Program

April marks the slow descent into Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere. Like everywhere else in the world, we are still in lockdown. I am working from home, which is not too bad.

I was able to stick to many of my habits quite successfully in April, especially in comparison to March:

Habit Tracking April

I think I am really starting to establish a habit around daily touch typing practice and keeping my emails in check, which is heartening after working on this for several months.

Here my thoughts on my individual habits:

• Exercise and Stretching: In April I tried a new exercise regime that involves bodyweight exercises targeting specific muscle groups. It actually took a surprising amount of effort to create a list of exercises. Each workout only contains three to four exercises. The idea is that I can do these quickly and regularly. I think this really helped me to do exercises more often. My only concern at the moment is how I best combine this with going running, which I think is critical for cardiovascular health but which unfortunately tends to make me stiff and sore (old man!) and thus discourages me from doing the other exercises.

Workout program

Exercises for two of the workouts

• Meditation: I used a new app to help me with meditating: Insight Timer. I think I was more successful in meditating regularily than in previous months but there is still some way to go.
• Touch Typing: I did this quite regularly but felt I was plateauing in my efforts. For the next months, I will try to mix things up by doing different exercises.
• Email: I managed to keep my personal email inbox organised and clean.
• Upright Go: I did not use Upright Go all that often. I think I still need to convince myself more of the value of doing this in order to have more motivation for this.
• Writing: I started tracking all the days on which I do some writing, editing or organising of thoughts. I don't know yet if I want to make this a habit as in a regular part of every day but I wanted to start by tracking how often I do this. I think writing is a great thing to do regularly since it clarifies thought and helps us to see things as our best self.

I am also still continuing to sort quotes I have collected from reading books. In April, I also had an issue with my local NAS setup, specifically bad sectors on one of my hard drives that I am still in the process of resolving. Further to my move to embracing organising things in Notion, I have also started to organise my random business ideas from the past decade into a nicely organised table. Much to my amusement, I must admit that many of my ideas have been pretty bad ones.