What I’ve Learned So Far

Last week’s squat workout seemed to tweak my calves a little bit — not bad, not much, but enough to make me cautious for a few days. (It’s been two and a half years since I tore the medial head of my left gastrocnemius . . . but the memories are fresh.)

Remedy #1 — I took several days off, which fit my life better anyway since the past week at work was hectic.

Remedy #2 — On Friday I got a massage in the spa at my gym. Per my instructions, the masseur ironed out my legs thoroughly. Ow . . . but in a good way.

Remedy #3 — I’m taking yet another day or two off for my legs, drinking lots of water, taking some ibuprofen for inflammation, using the foam roller to keep my calves loose, and doing workouts like this one:

• Warmed up on spin bike — 10 minutes easy.
• Foam roller.
• Incline dumbbell press:
• 10 x 40#’s
• 10 x 45#’s
• 10 x 50#’s
• 10 x 55#’s
• 10 x 50#’s
• 7+ x 45#’s
• 10 x 40#’s

alternating with . . .

• Dumbbell row:
• 10 x 40#
• 10 x 45#
• 10 x 50#
• 10 x 55#
• 10 x 50#
• 10 x 45#

• Steam room.

~(Image by WilsonB, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

My family’s addiction to affection for Torchy’s Tacos has grown to the point that my son now tells me “I’ll have the usual” when I ask him what he wants to order there. Since he’s nine, that comes across as super-adorable, and indeed I also enjoy being enough of a regular at any place — coffee house, barber shop, etc. — that the staff can guess what I want before I order.

But just now I was doing my normal morning routine, drinking coffee and poking around online, and it occurred to me how much (too much) I’ve cherished that feeling of “the usual” in other parts of my life — especially the parts where “the usual” doesn’t carry the freight for my bigger aims in life.

If you’ve been reading me for any time, you’ll detect already that this is one more way of making a point I’ve made often: habits are incredibly powerful. When they’re good ones, they can liberate us from the ordinary; when they’re the wrong ones, they can imprison us.

“The usual,” for me, includes lots of good things — time with family, a rewarding job, good friends. But it also means subjecting myself to too much communication across my 19 inboxes and beyond. It means dithering around, noodling about things I’d like to do rather than leaping in and doing them. It means too many open channels at once, and not enough production.

It means . . . all the things that have gotten me where I am today, for good and for ill.

The thing to do is to hold onto the things that are worthy of your highest aspirations (friends, family, career, or whatever else is working for you), while amending the habits that aren’t pulling their weight for your big life aims.

The best way to amend them: replace them with new, better habits that do the work of delivering on your dreams.

That’s enough on this subject for now. I have some amending-and-replacing to do.

~

(Image by Nealy-J, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

That’s what my wife, daughter, and I counted up to last night at the dinner table, what with work e-mail, personal e-mail, Facebook, Twitter (two accounts with two channels each), my physical P.O. box, voicemail, et cetera. Those are just my inboxes, mind you.

This “down periscope” thing is looking better and better.

While I don’t feel the intense pressure about this that my friend Chris Brogan does — he has more responsibilities and a much bigger audience than I do — the you-must-respond-NOW syndrome he diagnoses in his latest post is a pernicious one:

The Assault on Anywhen

We need to cut each other some slack in the timeliness of our communications. We need to cut OURSELVES some slack, too.

Now I’m off to rethink how often I check each inbox. I’m hoping to shock myself with my answers.
~

(Photo by Mick Stanic, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

Probably this will be my “Rosebud” — the thing that haunts my thoughts throughout my life — but anyway here I go again . . .

You may know that I’ve warned the world before about becoming a Neal Stephenson-like “bad correspondent.”

You may know that I had a vexed relationship with my Gmail inbox for something like a year.

You may know that I obsess at intervals about getting to Inbox Zero — even for Twitter DMs — and staying there.

(You may know that I’m perfectly happy to flog a rhetorical device like “You may know . . . ” well past its expiration date. But I’m done now.)

So, here we are. Once again I awaken to the reality that the communications load in my life is unsustainable. I love talking to people, I’m good at talking to people, and my job depends on talking to people all day long.

BUT . . . if I spend the whole day talking to people, the Real Work doesn’t happen.

Talking to people is Real, too, when it’s sincere and achieves something in terms of human connection or (*gasp*) business success. But I know a lot of really neat people with whom I could talk for hours just for the pleasure of talking. That pleasure is one of life’s high points — but achieving something lasting with your work is even higher.

All that to say this: I’m experimenting with my conversational load.

You likely won’t see me as much on Facebook and Twitter, or, when you do see me, it will be in more concentrated bursts. I may not be as quick to respond to e-mail. You’ll still see me blogging here and elsewhere, but more of my words will be spent in outward transmission rather than in two-way communication.

In sum, you can assume that I will spend more time in my shell than I have been. It’s not you, it’s me.

I hope the results will be worth it.

~

(Image by MATEUS_27:24&25, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

It’s an idea that hatched from a Twitter conversation with Tamsen McMahon and Amber Austen, based on their replies to my CareOne post about reading books to improve your attention span. Here’s the idea:

1. I use a blog post — this one, in fact — to tell you what I’m reading.
2. If you decide to read any of those same books, you let me know.
3. When we’re both/all done with the book, we discuss as much or as little as we please — via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog comment threads, whatever.

That’s it — no big whoop, no big commitment, no set meetings, no hurt feelings, nothing.

The point is to reinforce our love of good books, but without creating yet another obligation to overload our already busy days. (If my count is correct, Tamsen, Amber, and I have a total of seven children, with another — Tamsen’s second — on the way. We’re busy enough already.)

So, here’s what’s on my nightstand, more or less in the order that I intend to finish them:

• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
• The Snowball (biography of Warren Buffett) by Alice Schroeder
• Mort by Terry Pratchett
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
• Delivered from Distraction by Hallowell and Ratey
• The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• Plus several back issues of Esquire and The Threepenny Review.

Care to join me?

~

(Photo by Nicholas Laughlin, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

If you send me a direct message (DM) on Twitter, expect to have it deleted.

WAIT. I know that sounds like complete Twitter geekery, and it’s hard for me to beat that rap after posts like this recent gem, but stick with me here, because it’s not ALL Twitter geekery I’ll be spouting.

Okay, first the Twitter part. If you use Twitter you already know this, but to bring everybody else up to speed, here’s the context: Most of Twitter is carried on publicly, in “tweets” that will be seen by anyone who is following you on the service. (You can follow as many or as few as you like, whether or not they reciprocate. I’m following about 1,140 people and have about 3,300 people following me.) But if you and the other person are both following each other, you can also trade “direct messages” or DMs, which are private between the two of you. Basically, these are like text messages on your phone, travelling in a back-channel parallel to the public tweetstream.

So far, so good? Good.

If you use Twitter as much as I do, and for business purposes like I do, that DM queue can become like another inbox, because it’s an easy way for friends to get in touch with you. And there’s the problem: you can’t archive DMs. There’s no way to store just the ones you want, or to tag only the ones you want to remember. (You can tag public tweets that you want to remember by using the “Favorite” star.)

Since I can’t highlight or archive just the DMs I want — and since I need to remove things from my line of sight that would distract me from what I need to remember — and since in general I’m looking for minimalism in my inboxes . . . I delete every DM that I can.

Which creates another problem: Twitter’s architecture means that when I delete it for me, I delete it altogether and everywhere, so that it also disappears on the sender’s end.

*sigh*

I’d like it if Twitter would let me flag certain DMs for follow-up, or archive — but keep available in storage! — old DMs that don’t need follow-up. But until that happens, if you DM me . . . expect subsequent deletions. Please know that it’s not you, it’s me.

Now for the broader, non-Twitter moral to the story: maybe it’s a good thing that Twitter is so minimalist, as Leo Babuata suggests. Maybe there need not be an archiving or flagging function for DMs, or threaded conversations or any of the other things I’d like to suggest as improvements to Twitter.

But, in general, if you want to increase the utility of any digital communications medium that saves past messages (i.e. not cell phones, which don’t record every call, but e-mail, SMS, etc.), fix it so that a message can be live (in the inbox), dead (deleted), or archived (out of the inbox, but not deleted).

~

(Photo by Andy Ciordia, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

Sunday’s workout was okay — squats, bench presses, and lots of stretching. Overall, though, February has been a hollow month for me in terms of fitness: a few workouts, but no consistent progress, and I’m nowhere near the goals I set out for myself.

It’s not like the frustration is gnawing away at me, but it has led me to think more about Dave Tate’s advice on pursuing one’s real priorities, plus my own advice for sticking with a workout program.

Here’s what struck me: plenty of people, myself included, “work out” regularly — often without ever hitting any particular milestone. Or, if they hit a milestone, it’s an oh-by-the-way side effect of what they’ve been doing, rather than the fruit of a cherished or methodical pursuit.

Contrast this to how the winter Olympians we’re watching every night train for years on end to achieve a particular goal. I’ve been struck by how many of the competitors have said, both before and after finding out whether they won, that they’re happy with the outcome regardless because they know that they have trained as hard as they could and then given their absolute best effort in competition.

My goal now is to go back to the drawing board to decide (a) what I want to train for, and (b) how I’m going to go about it.

What are you training for?

~

(Image by snakemanrob, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

We’d all do well to heed it.

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

That comes from an excellent profile of Ebert, whose bouts of cancer have cost him the ability to eat or speak for the past four years, in the current issue of Esquire. The article has just been made available online; it’s well worth a read.

The furor over tape delay of events: Overblown.

The mix of pro-American and pro-other-people coverage: seems reasonable to me. (Relevant footnote: Aksel Svindal seems like an amazing person.)

Last night’s obsessive showing of pair after pair in the compulsory segment of the ice dancing competition: unforgivable.

And those are the thoughts I have to share for now.

You know what? I’ve worked like a dog this week. Well worth it, though.

I’ll come back and write something coherent . . . when I’m coherent.

Y’all be good.