2024W17: Changing My Daily Routine

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At the end of February, I came home from a trip and sprained my shoulder lugging my suitcase off the baggage carousel at the airport. It’s most likely because I haven’t really exercised since last fall… long story why, but obviously the result is not-very-intentional movement and decreased strength and being close to finishing another decade. Here we are.

Last week I started exercising again and remembered that three short workouts a week is a good rhythm for me; that Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday is better than Monday-Wednesday-Friday because I only have to schedule later meeting start times on two business days a week; and I need to take at least one long walk each week to stay in touch with subtle shifts of season and my changing neighborhood.

I’m also changing up my morning routine as a whole. I have written three pages every morning for about a year now, but in 2024 I’ve noticed I have no time or mental space to draw. So I’m skipping morning pages for now and instead drawing in my sketchbook each morning a series of little vignettes that document my thoughts and ideas. It allows me to listen to a podcast or watch a video while I am drawing — for some reason, I can’t do those things while writing.

Surprisingly (or not?) I experienced inspiration from the video I watched while drawing my morning, and developed it out throughout the day and actually published a finished product on Instagram. Unfortunately, I also procrastinated on replying to emails, so I seek balance of course.

AND I have decided to write and develop content for three hours each day that I work from home. I have ambitious plans for content development this year and I need more discipline around this. Also, I’m customizing a workshop for an event four weeks away. Typical me writes and edits until the day before an event, and then I try to cram in all the practice the night before and morning of. If I can get three hours a day in, I should complete the writing and practice well within two weeks. Which sounds amazing to me.

Wish me luck! These seem like they should be small changes, but they feel enormous. I wish you all a great week. <3

Inspiration and completion on the same day. Imagine that.

2024W9: A Last-Minute Week 9 Post

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I wrote something and decided not to publish it. I’ve written this instead.

Some years ago, a KW associate started a great Facebook group for all KW associates to share their notes, which was perfect for those of us who suffer from FR FOMO. I was getting into sketch noting and shared my notes there, and I loved being able to read other people’s notes from the sessions I could not attend. It was a very active group! But during the pandemic, things in the FB group got messy and late last year it was mainly full of spam.

My first Week 9 post was a call to use that FB group, and link to it. But I’ve changed my mind, and changed the post. Because in retrospect, other ways of sharing notes have popped up in the past 5 years. And they seem to be meeting people’s needs better. We can get so caught up in forcing something that might organically have met its end.

So my lesson this week is: sometimes things we build have their season, and it’s OK to let them go when they are past their usefulness. File this one under my annual mantra “Bless and Release.”

KWFR24 Las Vegas Restaurant Recs from Trusted Locals

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Did you know I went to high school in Las Vegas? And my parents lived there from that decade all the way until 2020. So I have contacts there. I know people… 🤨🥸🙃

And those people know local restaurants, both on and off the beaten path (the strip). If you’re also heading to Vegas for the KWFR24, here are links to restaurants less likely to be frequented by the other 10,000 convention-goers. Please note I have not personally eaten at any of these places, but people I know and trust have recommended them. Be sure to check the restaurant sites for info on reservations, to confirm address, etc.

Lamaii (Thai)

4480 Spring Mountain Road, Suite 700
Las Vegas NV 89102

Main St. Provisions (New American w seafood + steak)

1214 S. Main Street
Las Vegas NV 89104

Cleaver (Steak + seafood)

3900 Paradise Road, Ste. D1
Las Vegas NV 89169

Weera Thai (… Thai)

7337 Rainbow Blvd. Ste. 101
Las Vegas NV 89139

Sparrow + Wolf (New American)

4480 Spring Mountain Rd Ste 100
Las Vegas NV 89102

Al Solito Posto (Italian)

420 S Rampart Blvd
Las Vegas NV 89145

Elia Authentic Greek Taverna (Greek)

8615 W Sahara Ave
Las Vegas NV 89117

Graze Kitchen (Vegan comfort food)

7355 S Buffalo Dr Ste 2
Las Vegas NV 89113

Tarantino’s Vegan (… Vegan)

7960 S Rainbow Blvd Ste 8000G
Las Vegas NV 89139

Unwanted Filter.

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How was your Christmas? Ours was very low-key and laid back. No one told me that once a 12-year-old turns 13, sleep is more important than presents. And the teen woke up kind of cranky! At noon! It was like we had our own personal Grinch.

I’d started reading the Anna Kendrick memoir, Scrappy Little Nobody, on Christmas Eve. And despite carrying it around the house with me the next day, I had no desire to read it. That’s not like me — memoirs are my reading equivalent of a bag of Kettle brand salt and cracked black pepper chips: guilty pleasure, consumed in record time. She’s not a bad writer. There are some funny moments. Maybe my reading tastes are changing, and fun and frivolous tales of young privilege are simply not enjoyable to me anymore. 

But more likely, the past 6 weeks I've felt like I’m living the same life with a filter over it. A filter I'd never choose BTW, that never seems flattering on anyone else's Instagram pics, either — and I’m still living my life with this unwanted filter laid over it, and I keep messing with the RGB settings to try to get things to feel just right. Anna Kendrick’s book may have delighted me on Nov 7, but today, it is not reading right. So I’ll get back to Dark Money, which hits a little close to home and should be on all our required reading lists anyway.

On Goal Setting: Results vs. Process

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I had a daily writing goal in 2015, and I hit it! I wrote 365 days last year. But this is my first post in three months, so clearly I had no blogging goal, haha. Maybe I need one! (Note to self…)

Late last year, I had a couple of epiphanies about goals. The first is that I’d become a one-year goal setting and goal achieving ninja. I’d successfully set and hit one-year goals for several years. BUT I was achieving a succession of one-year goals without any long-term plan. My friend Colette suggested a book called Five: Where Will You Be Five Years From Today? I completed all the exercises over three morning writing sessions and walked away with a concrete vision of what I want to see in five years. Big wake up call: my son will be in his final year of secondary school in five years. Better be sure I’m raising the man I want to see in 2021!

The second epiphany is that I’m in a good place overall, both personally and professionally, and it didn’t happen overnight. This has become a bit of an obsession. I traced back healthy eating, for instance. I am not claiming to be the cleanest eater in the world, but I bet I’m doing pretty good compared to the average American. It began in 2002, when I got pregnant. It was the first time in my life I remember questioning what I ate, considering that my personal nutritional choices would also affect the baby growing inside me. I cut out all caffeine during my pregnancy, and began eating organic produce. After my son was born and began eating solid foods, I bought organic for him and conventional for my husband and me, and asked myself one day, “Why would you want only the best for him, but not for yourself?” I am sure we spend far more than most 3-person households on food, and it’s about quality, not quantity. We forgo other luxuries because food quality is a high priority for us.

I’m happy we have healthy eating habits, and each year since 2002, we’ve made some adjustments that at the time didn’t seem major, but as an accumulation of habits, lead to really positive outcomes.

One memorable story I've heard about goal setting was from a teacher who insisted that a 25-pound weight loss goal he’d set in January, and had not happened yet by December 1 of that year, would not have happened had he not written it down. After Thanksgiving, he buckled down, disciplined himself for the following month, worked out like a fiend, and by December 31 he’d hit his goal.

Yay for him, but what I remember most is that the next year that weight came back! To my knowledge, the number on his scale has continued to go up and down over the years, because he has always focused solely on the result goal, and not on a process goal.

So I’ve been looking at goal setting very differently. Instead of focusing on an just an achievement, I’m mostly focusing on behaviors, habits, and rituals that can lead to an outcome I want.

Now that I’ve written that, it seems silly and self-explanatory. But business people can get carried away with end results ("Just bullet point it for me!"), totally ignoring the means. And the means are what lifestyle, and quality of life, are all about.

How are your 2016 goals coming along? Are you more of an end result goal setter, or a process goal setter, or both? 

Process vs. Product Goals

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It's about that time of year. Not quite Q4, but late enough in the year to think about my progress against my annual goals. The good news is that I'm doing great. I'm on track. But, for the first time in years, my big goal this year was not a product goal, but a process goal.

I didn't do it on purpose. But I'm reading a lot this year that challenges the current business mindset that an annual goal is the sum total of your year's efforts. If I did that, I might have set a goal to write a book this year.

But I've published before, and there was never big romance in that for me anyway. I just wanted to get better at writing. In fact, I want to be great at it. I'd like to be as confident in my writing as I am in my speaking. I'm not tied down to any specific form that my writing will take. So instead of setting a goal to write or publish a book, for instance, my goal was to write every day this year.

Every day.

After a couple of months creating the daily writing habit (about 66 days, and I wasn't even trying), I took a writing class. Having specific feedback from my teacher as well as other students helped me increase the quality of my writing dramatically. I read several books and followed their great writing prompts, found a dedicated writing partner / peer reviewer, and am ironically exploring an opportunity to write for book publication again. Not because I've been focused on getting published again. But because, instead of obsessing over the outcome ("product"), I've focused on the everyday work of writing ("process").

I've written every single day this year, and because much of my writing has been by hand, in a notebook, the best I can do is estimate my word count. In the first eight months of the year, I've written somewhere almost 160,000 words. The rough equivalent of three novels, if you're looking for a benchmark.

Would my year be going differently if I'd set an annual goal of "52 blog posts of 1,000 words each," or "write a book?" Hard to say. And there are probably goals that are clearest as end result goals. But I am completely happy with and excited about my results from focusing this year on process instead of product.