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Week of 09/15/2016 - Featured Blog Post
30-Day Streak: Are You In?
I have an online friend who is a teacher and a writer. She recently passed her 1000th day in a row of writing at least 250 words. She is amazing. Today, I read her post where she reflected on 1,009 days of writing over 1 million words. It made me reflect on a few things.
First, her "pile of unfinished projects" and the starting again and again seemed awfully familiar. When I track calories, it tends to be for a few weeks or a few months at a time. This year saw my longest streak yet (I don't remember how long, maybe 4 or 5 months). But, it is always feels like such a defeat to end the streak. Almost every time, it's a conscious decision, and even if I try to convince myself I'm doing it for X reason, I still feel let down.
Second, her post made me consider exactly what I do daily on a long-term basis. I mean more than 1000 days is like 3 years or something. That is a LONG time to maintain a habit. All I could come up with was brushing my teeth, reading, and futzing around playing games on my iPad. Those are the only things I could think of.
When I compare the things I actually do to the things I WANT to do ... well, let's just say it's not pretty. Although, in my own defense, there are many habits that I maintain, just not daily. For instance, I work on my fiction project at least 3-5 days a week, every week. I usually exercise 3-4 days a week, for 30-1 hour each time. Those are good habits.
In some ways, streaks make me uncomfortable because I know that one day, I WILL break them, and when that happens I will feel like a failure. There's no sense in starting something feeling like a failure before you even have the chance to fail.
When I looked at my list of things I want to do on a daily basis, here's what I came up with:
1. write
2. track calories
3. exercise
So, I've decided to do a 30-day experiment. I like 30-day experiments; they give you enough space to see how a thing feels, but there's an end point so I don't feel like I'm going to fail straight out of the gate.
Today is day 1. I've already written this morning. I'm also tracking calories (did yesterday too). The exercise might only be 10 minutes of stretching -- the idea is to spend at least 10-minutes a day doing some small thing to care for my body. We will see how this goes. Maybe at the end of 30 days, I'll take one day off, then restart. I don't know if that will help with my premature feelings of failure or not, but it's definitely worth a shot.
Who's with me?
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