I did it!

Day 30 of my 500 Words experiment is here, and I managed not to screw it up. (See Day #1 here). I’m absolutely amazed at what I’ve been able to do in just 30 days, inspired by such a seemingly small change in my morning routine.

I went from feeling like the usual “I don’t have enough time in the day” to checking off a couple major goals in my life, and coming to a major realization about how my psyche works: not making progress on any personal goals in my life actually creates a significant stress, but subconsciously. It wasn’t until I started making great progress that I noticed the relief I was feeling. Off the top of my head, here are some bullets on what I was able to accomplish:

• Wrote 25,000 words in under a month. That’s halfway to nanowrimo.org!
• Installed WordPress, a few plugins, an FTP server on my site
• Learned things about how my brain works I didn’t know before
• Discovered a new & better way to deal with conflict/arguments and discover new solutions (write to organize your thoughts)
• Customized the UI and code of the default theme to my purposes
• Changed the code to use my own images
• Finished an entire site redesign
• Got 20,000+ views on a blog post
• Got some good experience scaling under load on Rackspace Cloud
• Helped some friends get jobs or interviews
• Finally finished unpacking
• Hosted a 15-person steak night dinner at my newly-unpacked place
• Started eating healthier
• Went from buying almost all my lunches and dinners to making almost all of them myself
• Got back to posting reliably on my hobby recruiting blog
• Still saw my girlfriend, my friends, watched plenty of my favorite shows
• Still stayed up on things at work
• Still feel basically as tired as I did previously

Certainly you can’t just write 500 words, sit back, relax and wait for the productivity to roll in. But I think it’s difficult to start achieving this goal and not end up snowballing that “producer momentum” into more areas of your life. For a detailed write-up of why I think the experiment worked, see this Week 1 Recap.

So now the question is: where do I go from here? Do I keep writing in the mornings? That hour in the morning sure would be useful. Do I eliminate the “every day” rule? The “no-internet” rule?

At a higher level, most of my 30-day experiments have been “additive,” in that they add something into my daily routine. (Start biking to work every day; start going to sleep at 11; start waking up early & writing 500 words). I can’t keep integrating more and more “additive” 30-day experiments into my normal life: I’ll run out of time in the day. But there must be a way to integrate this into my life in a good way. Some ideas that come to mind: keep the early wake-up time and the “no-internet” rules, but only write every other day. The other half of the time, I’ll work on other goals, do errands, or go to work early; and when I do write, I’ll make goals for the other days as well.

I’m starting to get excited about next month’s 30 days experiment! My friend Koffi and I are going to go through this book on technical interview coding questions, one question a day, on some topic (e.g. Arrays/strings, trees, hash tables). Then, at the end of the week, we’ll compare approaches on the problems we both did, and interview each other on problems we didn’t do.

Tuesday goals:

• Groceries Went to Courtney’s in the morning, got back in time to put everything away, empty the dishwasher, and still make my usual smoothie breakfast
• Hang up art Didn’t get to this one, not even a little bit, as a deadline for work got in the way.

Wednesday:

• Hang up art