Nine weeks down, and I skipped eight for Reasons.
After nine weeks of very heavy work, I am now facing a whole week off. Much of the time is going to be spent resting and recovering as I am definitely exhausted and need some proper recuperation. However I don’t intend to be asleep all week, so I need a few things in mind to fill the time and this brings me to one of the favoured topics from the early days of lockdown - self-improvement. Back in the beginning, a very common way for people to face the lockdown was with the idea of learning something new - languages were a very common suggestion - and I remember looking on these suggestions with envy as I completed my tenth 12 hour working day on the trot. However, now I have some time so it is worth having a bit of a think about what it means to me these days. Then I can ignore my thinking and spend the time being kind to myself.
In the before time, I used the act of leaving my home as a trigger for shifting my mental state. I wanted to write something, so I went out to sit in a coffee shop and put digital pen to paper. It gave me a good separation between rest and doing things and in the current climate of no coffee shops and staying indoors, it’s something I’ve noticed. I need to build a new way to get going mentally - ideally without relying on caffeine.
There are three things I think I need to look at in the world of self-improvement and I hope to be able to kickstart all three this week. The first is programming. This has taken a significant backseat over the last year or so, and doubly-so since lockdown started. The division between work and life has always been thin for me, and lockdown has hit that very hard so avoiding even vaguely work-related things has been a must for the last few months. However programming is something I enjoy and I’ve got a few things I want to get done, so I need to figure this out.
Next up is exercise. I’ve been far too physically idle since lockdown began and I need to fix this. No great insights here. I’ve got a skipping rope and a nearby park. I’ll start there.
Finally, I think I will pick up on my reading. I used to read extensively on the train and the tube, back when I travelled around on those things. But now I don’t and I haven’t really found a good gap to get back to books. I also need to pick up something edifying - too much of my time at the moment is spent pondering pointless or unhelpful things so something something meaning of life would be a far better use of my brain cycles as well as enhancing my pretentious nerd credibility.
So this week is: do some programming, do some exercise and do some reading. Today I slept most of the day after a night’s insomnia. Great start!
This post is from a series of shorter posts, written roughly once a week while the country is on lockdown to capture my feelings and reactions as we go. They are all tagged with coronavirus.
No comments:
Post a Comment