30 Days of Discipline Week 3

If you missed last week’s progress, check it out here.

Day 15

Back on schedule like an absolute savage.  It’s been tough getting up because I am having serious difficulty getting to sleep in the first place.  That being said it feels good to get back in the swing of things and get cracking on more work

I have been toying with the idea of releasing new blog posts every day for the rest of the program.  No idea what effect this will have on my blog in regards to traffic, but I just want to do it to do it.

This may be crazy, but I am finding that I can’t sleep because I am anticipating the next day.  I’m actually getting really pumped to do some work.  This is a complete 180 from when I was working a 9-5 where I dreaded the next day.

Day 16

Got up a little later than I would have liked but such is life.  I couldn’t sleep at all last night just sitting in bed tossing and turning.  I really gotta get a handle on getting to sleep.  I’ll try and put together a few tactics to make it easier to sleep such as getting off the computer, doing some reading, and making it as dark as possible.

Pumped out a few blog posts today and I’m pretty happy with them.  Carrying a notebook is extremely useful because ideas are coming to me all the time now.  It’s just a matter of jotting down the idea, throwing it in a Google doc, and putting up an outline.  From there it’s just a matter of fleshing out the ideas and I have a strong blog post.  Easy stuff people.

Making it easier to start your work is critical to getting it done.  Starting is the hardest part, so if you make it easier, you will have a greater chance of getting it done.  My work is writing, and making outlines for posts makes it extremely easy to get ideas on paper.

Day 17

Got up again today a bit later than I would have liked, but at this point my sleeping is so erratic that I just have to roll with it.  I keep getting up in the middle of the night and have a hell of a time getting back to sleep.

The hardest part of doing the exercises is doing more than you did the last day and progressing.  I can do squats with no problem.  My legs are friggin burning, but it’s just mind over matter.  Push-ups are a bit harder, I’m plateauing at around 70 push-ups in a row.  I would really like to get it up to 100 in a row.

Day 18

You know it’s a funny thing doing stuff like pushups.  It’s a very specific example of being able to muster the will to push through boundaries.  So many times in life we find that we are getting stuck in a certain position.  We place boundaries on ourself that seems like it’s absolutely true.  Then we push through the pain and find that the boundary was only in our head.

After talking about hitting a plateau with doing pushups yesterday, I decided I’d just try and not think about it and see how far I got.  I ended up doing about 10 more pushups than the day before.  The lesson here is that in anything we do, most likely we can do better.

For me, writing is the big area I need to work on.  I’d really like to be getting more of my thoughts on paper.  I have a list of article ideas that are just sitting in a list and all I have to do is write them.  I have said in the past that I would like to do an article a day, but after pushing through boundaries, I wonder what’s really possible.

Day 19

I got up today and felt super at peace.  I’m pretty sure I have a mental imbalance because some days I’ll feel like shit and other days I’m super hyper manic.  I have no idea really, I just roll with it.

Did even more exercises today than yesterday.  It’s a matter of deciding that you can go further.  Most people don’t lift to failure.  I’m not even sure if it’s a good idea to do so or not, but if there was a competition to go to failure, I’ll bet most would stop before they actually had muscle failure.  It’s just too easy to stop because of the pain.

Wound up not getting much work done today until later.  No reason in particular, but I wound up going to the book store today to pick up some books to review.  As you can tell from this review, I actually like digesting the material before writing a review and documenting the process.  These are meaningful books to me, so I’m pretty excited to get my thoughts on them down.

Day 20

Got up today and again did better with the pushups.  I’ll stop harping about this now, but it’s really a mindset to do more than the previous day that gets you doing more.

Wound up going to my sister’s house today to help her move a bunch of furniture, so I’m getting to my work kinda late.  As such I’ll still get it done, just a bit later.  Just in time with Sunday rolling around.

One of the interesting things I’ve found 3 weeks into the program is that some days I’ll be on point with everything, and other days I won’t be.  On the days I’m not on point it is usually something like not doing as much work that I could.  Other days I’ll get up and say to myself that I’ll do the exercises later in the day and I end up skipping them.  I imagine that it would be difficult to follow this program for the rest of your life, and I don’t think it’s meant for that.  So I am picking things out now to follow through on for the rest of my life once I’m done with the program.

Obviously for me, writing and getting things crossed off my to do list is my number one priority, so I’ll strive to keep that going forever.

Day 21

Got up late today and got my coffee situation under wraps.  I made a new batch of cold brew last night and had to take care of the grinds.

I’m getting a bunch of blog posts ready to publish this week so I don’t have to think on the fly during the day.  What I’ve been doing today is going in Google Docs and just making a blog post idea, putting down the bullet points, then fleshing them out a little.  This makes it easier to write the posts during the week.  The only other thing I’ll possibly do is make an accompanying video.

I really use Sunday to plan the next week in terms of what things I want to do when.  I like to use Google Calendar for this as it’s easy to use and just plug stuff in.  I’ll then get any videos I made from the last week edited and exported to my desktop for easy uploads.

Week 4