Weekly reviews

Weekly review - 6/8/07

This is the second weekly review I have written.  I am deliberately keeping this short and informal as well as adding it in as a secondary post today.  If you aren’t interested in my progress or you don’t get inspired by stories like these, feel free to skip this and read one of my proper articles.  I am writing these reviews as much for me as for you, so you will have to excuse my introspection 

In my own life I have had a few wins and losses this week.

1. I was up and writing at 5:00 four out of five days last week and the day that I didn’t make it, I learnt an important lesson.  I realised that as I go to bed at night, I set my internal alarm clock.  The last thing I think about consciously, is waking at 5:00 the next morning.  I decide it and it happens.  However, when I have to get up during the night to a screaming baby boy, this internal alarm is disturbed.  When I finally fall back into bed again, I am so happy to be horizontal, that I forget to reset it for 5:00 and subsequently I sleep through to 6:00.  It is simple logic, but powerful.  I can now see how to make waking early more sure by locking in 5:00 no matter what time I lie down.
2. My afternoon power naps have been marginally better.  Maybe half of the days I have had a successful power nap of 20 minutes in the early afternoon.  This is difficult but important for me, so I’ll have to stick to it until I succeed.
3. The readership of this site has continued to grow, with the RSS subscribers up from 40 last week to 60 this week.  The average site visitors is also up from about 100 to around 130 per day.  Of course these numbers aren’t too spectacular until you remember that the site is just over 2 weeks old.  Reminding myself of this helps to keep me motivated.
4. I am working on a new challenge.  Late last week I decided to take on a new language challenge.  I am going to learn the readings for the first 2000 Kanji Japanese characters.  I have selected a book and accompanying  cards to use and I am now just working out the time frame.  Theoretically I could manage the entire 2000 in 30 days, a feat which takes most people a year or two if they ever make it.  I might take it easier on myself because of my current work load, but perhaps I should go all out just to stick a bomb under me.  I have a few days to decide before I am locked in to the new goal.
5. On the down side I have been getting a bit loose with my running form and am experiencing a mild recurrence of my old calf injury.  It is my own fault and so tomorrow it is back to the drills as I seek to sharpen up my style again, to give myself a chance to recover.

Overall I am finding that this whole site is an exhilarating motivation for pursuing my own development.  I am doing things that I would do otherwise, but I am giving them a lot more thought and being a lot more deliberate in how I use my time.

I hope that these articles are inspiring you to do the same for yourself.  Nobody can develop your life for you.  It is up to each of us to use the best tools that we can find to make the most of our finest asset.

Thanks

Tom