30 Days: Multi Health - Aftermath - Part 4

After Blogger has deleted my lenghty summary on my last part of the challenge about sleeping without an alarm clock I now have to write the whole thing again. Not amused about this.

So here is my summary: It's great! Try it!

....OK I give you more details.

This part was a 100% success during the challenge and I have never ever used an alarm clock again since then. After the first few days I got used to it and before going to sleep I take a look at the clock and tell myself when I want to wake. Nine times out of ten I wake on the scheduled waking time with a variation of plus/minus 20 minute. Otherwise I'm about 1 hour off.

I compensate any lateness with cutting down my morning routine, so I was only late for work once so far. On any other day I feel much more refreshed and awake because I woke naturally without my alarm clock shocking me in the middle of an inappropriate sleeping phase and leaving me awake but as tired as I was the night before.

I can only recommend this to anyone to try it. During the last three months on average I got to work earlier than before and way more refreshed.

30 Days: Multi Health - Aftermath - Part 3

I started with my summary with those parts of the challenge that were not overly successful and now I will come to the ones that went rather well.

Giving myself a full bathroom routine was something really refreshing and relaxing. For everyday during the week it was rather time consuming because it took about 1,5 hours every time. Yet I expected that my overall skin condition would change and improve a bit over the period. This was not the case. Only the peeling led to a little improvement in skin softness but otherwise I didn’t notice any change. The usage of more washing and peeling products caused my skin to be a little more stressed than usual which was soothed by using several lotions, so the net effect was about zero.

Since the longterm improvements were dwarfed by the invested effort, I will not continue this part of the challenge. It is nice to do this routine from time to time for relaxation but the cost in time and money isn’t worth it if you want to change anything in the long run.

Maybe I will refine this challenge and do some research on a beauty routine that might really be more effective. At least this part of the challenge was rather enjoyable and I would like to focus on this part again sometime in the future.

30 Days: Multi Health - Aftermath - Part 2

Eat 5 pieces of fruit every day and reduce sugar and sweets as much as possible:

The first 2 weeks of the challenge were rather easy. The fruit tasted great and I felt my energy renewed. I didn’t reduce my other meals much though and therefore didn’t lose any weight. To reduce sugar was also easy during these weeks because the fruit were sweet enough. The remaining weeks of the challenge got considerably harder and harder. I got extremely fed up on fruit. I think maybe vegetables would be less boring than fruit. 

Three pieces worked fine for a while but even this got boring during the last few days. I don’t know why, I could eat steak every day but a month of fruit was tough. Since this challenge I haven’t eaten any more fruit. At the moment I cannot imagine to integrate fruit on a daily basis into my diet. I also noted some backfiring since the end of the challenge. My eating habits were worse than before and I ate a lot of chocolate and junk food but I think I'm over it now and my diet returns to normal.

On the whole I consider this part of the challenge a success because for the most part I managed to stick to my plan. There were some positive effects but for myself this diet is not suitable for daily use. For the future I will consider doing some kind of challenge involving vegetables or one where I will drastically reduce unnecessary sugar.

30 Days: Multi Health - Aftermath - Part 1

This challenge had a very easy start and a very tough finish. As I might have mentioned before during the first two weeks of this project I noticed that some parts were easier to concentrate on than others, so I decided to view this challenge as a kind of overview on different health related aspects of my life that I would like to change or improve. Those parts I failed will possibly be part of a future challenge were I will concentrate more fully on this aspect.

Since there were several parts to this challenge I will split my summary into the different parts instead of giving you one big summary.

I start with the part that I failed most. Drinking only Water or tea or fresh juice. I guess this will need special attention in a future challenge. I usually drink water for the most part but when I go out, the temptation to order a cocktail or a soft drink is often to great. On many occasions I only remembered this part of the challenge after I have already ordered something. I simply forgot about it. Due to the fact that I usually drink water for most of the time anyway, the effect of going to extremes might have been minimal to begin with. So I don’t feel especially guilty because I didn’t manage this part too well.

30 days: Writing a Novel - Aftermath

Given the fact that a particular idea for a sci-fi-novel is bobbing around in my head for over ten years now but my lazy self could never get around to actually write something down I chose this challenge to finally do something about it. Since it coincided with the NaNoWriMo I took their approach and participated. As a starting point for my novel I wrote down a timeline of historical events that lead to the world in the distant future were my story takes place long ago. I used that historical timeline together with some keywords on a general plot outline, which I also noted down years ago. This was my whole starting material. The things I missed was a strong antagonist, character names and also a big showdown. My hope was that these necessities would come as soon as I get into the process of constant writing. Making things up as you go along is a big part of the NaNoWriMo approach and since I usually need hours to develop a single name for a given character and then lose interest in writing any further this approach appealed to me very much.

What did I expect from this challenge? Well, to be honest I know that I’m far to removed from writing fiction for so long now that I rather wish for a ghost writer to just write down my ideas than to make it myself. What I wanted to achieve is some kind of text which has a considerable length and which at least plots down my novel idea in any kind of form. I was not expecting to get a sensible piece of good literature. It was more a challenge of willpower and to prove myself that it is possible to write down an elaborate and long idea. The hope was that the feeling of getting things out in the real world would give me a sense of success and motivation to go on and continue to be creative.

So what was the result? Well, as you know if you have read the blog so far, I aborted the challenge after 19 days because I couldn’t stand the process. I made it through ⅔ of the time of the challenge and managed to write about ⅓ of the planned 50000 words. I am happy that I have at least gotten some text done and I still think that with some refining my idea can be a decent novel some day in the future, but some obstacles blocked my way now so I will come to the things that lead to the premature ending of this project.

The first thing I noticed during writing is, that writing a long text as such is no longer such a special task for me as it might have been 10 years ago when I first wanted to write a novel. 10 years ago my phrasing in the fiction sector might have been better than now, but then I was unable to even imagine to write such a long piece of text. Today I write texts as a living. I write letters, patent applications and petitions the whole day and if I count the words or pages of what I write each week I think that the amount will be enough for two novels each year. The only difference is that these texts are separate pieces and never one long work of art. Nevertheless the technical process is the same. So, not only do I know that I can write this amount of words, which means that I don’t have to find this out any more, but the actual work itself interferes with how much energy I have left for writing anything else. If I already write 50000 words a month, every month, there just isn’t enough energy to double that amount.

This might have been only part of the reason why this challenge failed. The other main part was that the NaNoWriMo approach is very stressful. If you fall behind it gets harder and harder to reach the finish line. All you can think of is the amount of text you have to produce. Every time inspiration or energy fails, your goal gets a little bit further away and the feeling of failure drags me down. This leads to all kinds of physical symptoms (headaches, tension, insomnia…yes I’m very sensible to that kind of thing) and inhibits further progress so that the goal gets farther and farther out of reach. It is really a downward spiral.

What have I learned from this challenge? I learned that writing fiction as a hobby is a very energy robbing activity. It is isolating in the sense that I cannot do it while doing anything else, like talking to my wife or watching tv or anything. I have to isolate myself, concentrate hard to get into a mood of inspiration and then use this one or two hours to really get along. During writing, my emotion is spiraling up and down. Sometimes I feel like watching a movie in my head and can only barley keep up with writing down what I see. At those times I feel like a big creator, it lifts me up, I feel invincible. But then comes a phase where I doubt everything, my whole existence is at stake, everything I do or think or believe is questioned and deconstructed till there is nothing left but blackness and depression. These ups and downs transcend into everyday life, influence my physical well-being and my relations to others. It would be really neat to have my own novel in hands, but really seeing and feeling the costs of the creative process was new and this is the main part of what I learned. Often in life we all want to have one thing or the other but most often we can only fathom the costs to reach these goals. To try and do it, gave me a clearer picture and I noticed that having the manuscript was not worth the cost at the moment and hence I decided to stop.

Will I finish the novel? Yes. I’m still motivated to do this and blame at least some part of the tedious process to choosing the wrong approach for myself. I thought about two different approaches that I will try during a future challenge. One approach consists of writing every day but without looking at the wordcount. This might be less stressful and lead to less text but also to less negative symptoms. Another approach would be to split the remaining story down into plot parts and distribute the parts over the course of 30 days like I did with the crochet challenge. So far I have already planned my next few challenges so trying to write again will not be scheduled until somewhere next summer at the earliest.

What is always uplifting for me, is writing these summaries. Pondering about my past project, analyzing and planning future projects gives me great pleasure and motivation and this alone is reason enough to continue with these challenges.

30 Days: Crochet - Aftermath

So the first challenge is completed and now I have to summarize what I gained from it. First of all the facts: I made 16 finished project pieces and 2 almost finished ones. The Plan was to make 19 different projects but the asparagus was just not possible to make with the instructions and my skill level at the time. Of course some individual projects like the olives consisted only of two very little pieces, while the almost finished burger had several quite different and larger pieces.

Of course if someone reads this blog who is really good at crochet he/she will probably think that I am pretty pathetic because of the overall achievement of this challenge. I don’t know any people around who are good at crochet so I have no measure if I do ok or suck completely.

But the crochet itself was only the means to an end, namely to find a way to get anything done of the millions of things I want to do in my life. My overall problem is that I’m interested in so many things but never find the time to do any of them. Multitasking is a bitch because actually the more things you do in parallel the less things you get finished at all. If you are like me and want to learn three languages, while directing a movie, writing a book, knitting a scarf and learn to play piano during a week where you also have to train for a triathlon and in between go to the office to actually earn some money, then you probably know the feeling that you try to multitask to manage everything but end up in a total stasis and at the end of the week all you have done is hung out in front of the computer and checked your numerous news-feeds.

If you read the „about this blog“ part you probably know already that finishing things or sometimes even starting on any projects is really tough for me. So one thing I learned during this month is that breaking a goal down into manageable pieces and setting a finish line of 30 days is a good way to focus on only one thing at a time. And as you can see it actually worked for me. I was able to get most of the things done that I wanted to make and so finally can enjoy the success instead of the stale feeling of continued failure. I think especially the finish line is an important feature for me. Breaking down a goal into manageable steps is one thing but without a finish line I would again get the feeling that I won’t have time to make all the other things that interest me and therefore drop into stasis again. But so I know I only have to focus for 30 days and then I’m free for the next project.

An important lecture for me was to stop multitasking! This helped me at work, too. If you work on one thing then work on that thing and nothing else. There will be enough time for other things once you have finished. Another thing for me was to stop being a perfectionist. It is ok to plan ahead the course for a challenge but if you are unable to stick to it or unable to finish every single step you still need to keep going and don’t give up. Better get some things done than none at all. I know this is not any knew knowledge and I start to sound like a fortune cookie but really experiencing that these things work is exciting and uplifting.

At least I won’t start on such things as „live in the moment“ because I don’t believe that this is working for anyone. Maybe it works if you have no fear of ever failing at anything but who actually is so enlightened that he can say this from him/herself. Planning is essential for any project but you have to find the right balance of planning and margin for error.

During the challenge I also experienced that sometimes I’m actually scared of completion. Everything is going well during the planning phase, the beginning and during most of the work but as soon as the end of a piece is in sight I get the urge to stop and pause, almost fearing to cross the finish line. To overcome this feeling several times during this month also helped me because it seems to overwhelm me less frequent. Maybe I’m starting to like the active productive life I always wanted to have but so far were unable to realize in many aspects.

Before someone gets a wrong idea I usually am quite able to manage a lot of things in everyday life and by the average standards of society I think I’m rather at the successful end of the scale but when it comes to  my personal projects and interests I tend to be very critical and these projects are the part about which I'm talking in this blog. So as a summarizing sentence I have to say that I’m very happy with the outcome of my first challenge. I managed to create stuff, to learn something about myself, found a way to tackle projects and also improved some aspects of my work-life. So now I will start to plan my next challenge.