001 Weekly Reflection: Habits, Health & Creativity
The first edition of my weekly reflection series on #BuildingInPublic, staying consistent, writing more and aspiring to be better.
27 November 2022
In the interest of #BuildingInPublic, staying consistent, writing more, aspiring to be better and hopefully inspiring others through transparency, I have decided to publish the weekly reflections that I have been usually doing privately for many years.
Don’t click away just yet, dear reader.
🛑 What these wont be:
- self-indulgent emotional vomits.
✅ What these will be:
- concise summaries of my past weeks performance and the learning to be implemented for the incoming week.
My weekly reflections include reviews on finances, relationships, health and habits. I also look over my daily journals to see where my head is at and take note of anything that needs to be addressed on Sundays.
For now, I’ll start this new practice with a public review of my creative habits and my physical health.
I hope this new format encourages more people to pursue their endeavours, vocations, general self-improvement and everything else I said in the first paragraph.
Right on. 👊
Content
- Habits review
- Health review
Habits
Create, Converse, Consume, Clarify
This past week I set the goal of writing and publishing 3 articles. I completed that goal and those articles are on my Medium account here. Technically, the 3rd article was actually a Thread. I was testing the crossposting feature of Typeshare.co which works really, really well.
I’ve actively reached out to a few people on the Modern Mastery server both on Discord and Twitter DMs. Actually managed to speak with someone too. Doing this actively helped foster a sense of belonging which may be the first time in my digital life where I’ve felt this.
This past week as part of my new intentional-consumption plan, I’ve reinstated my trial of Blinkist. They’ve really grown the platform since the last time I was using and I think it’s a mainstay for the time being. I’ve also looked into Feedbin which has a neat feature of collating your newsletters into a single RSS-like feed. I am very curious about this as my Mail account is getting ridiculous.
I’m struggling with the consumption to idea to creation pipeline though. When I get an idea, I’m not sure the best place to put it. Though I love the methodology of the 7 days to Genius, Notion just doesn’t cut it as a quick-entry, writing platform. The hunt continues.
Clarify self further is the tricky one. It shouldn’t be a daily habit to track, I think it’s more of a reflective question. Through the above conversations and continued work of content creation, that clarity of self does become more apparent. I like to keep it on my iPhone home screen anyway.
Learnings for this coming week:
Another 3 published articles; keep connecting with people on MM/TW; look into Drafts as writing platform; try reflect in the evenings.
Health
For the first time this entire year, I was able to go to a gym 3 times this week. Florence didn’t have a good gym (it opened at 9am and didn’t have air conditioning), Naples required a 20-minute car journey and we didn’t have a car a lot of the time — also we weren’t even in Naples a lot either. Milan has a good gym, that opens early and is 5-min walk from the apartment. Beautiful. I’ve learned this week that after work is a terrible time to train and mornings are a lot better. I have been dedicating my mornings to my writing time and so I must balance this for the coming week.
Since I usually front-load my days, my writing/workouts have taken precedence for the morning. My usually routine hasn’t been employed and so the morning meditations and gratitude sessions haven’t happened. If I can, I would love to move these two practices to the evening before bed.
Sleep has been extremely sporadic unfortunately. The apartment is too hot for me to sleep well in and the crusade against mosquitoes continues, even into late-November. I have purchased an electric big-killer so hopefully that will be a good solution to the problem.
Learnings for this coming week:
Intersperse morning workouts with morning writing; move meditation and gratitude practices to the evening routine; hope bug killer works for better sleep.
That’s it for the first edition! 🎉 If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I will build this format out further and hopefully turn it into a video series.
👏 If you found this article useful, please consider holding the CLAPS button until for as long as you like! It helps other people discover this article.👏
