Free Day Time Management, or My List of Lists

Days off are precious. I'm sure you've experienced both the joy of getting a lot done in a day and the disappointment that comes after precious free time is frittered away. Though lots of issues factor into it, one of the biggest difference-makers in a day is: preparing a to-do list the night before.

I keep my to-do lists on the "Reminders" app on my iPhone, for several reasons. You always have the lists with you, you can move items between lists and up and down within a list, you can set alerts, and you can share lists. Here is my current list of to-do lists:

The top three lists are what I use 80% of the time. I used to have a "Today," "Soon," and "Sometime" system, which I had read was supposed to optimize my prioritization of tasks. But I found that the few items in the "Sometime" list would languish for years without any action, so I eventually realized it was pointless and deleted it. In its place, I expanded the "Soon" list to those which I need a computer (or smartphone) to accomplish ("Soon- computer") and those which are more physical in nature ("Soon- physical"). This innovation has made it so much easier to prioritize tasks. If I plan to be in front of the computer the next day, I'll move a lot of the "Soon- computer" tasks over to "Today," whereas if I'm going to be outside or bustling around the house, I'll shift over the more urgent and important tasks from "Soon- physical." Here's what my "Today" list looked like last night after I set it up for the morning:

Arranging the items in the order I plan to do them is a big help. I also get a nice little rush after I finish a task and swipe left, erasing the task for all eternity. After roughly adhering to my plan this morning, I've already knocked out most of the top half of the list, and it's only 11AM! 

I also occasionally look down the list of lists to my "House- spring" list, which has gradually grown over the course of the long Boone winter. I have several other lists where I can dump creative ideas, new goals, short-term purchases like cheese, and long-term items like a wetsuit. These are nice because you don't have to worry about remembering and possibly forgetting the things you will need to know months down the road.

Now it's time to offer a few caveats: 

1. Phones have the downside of being a distractor if you are in a focused block of time ("FBOT" in the get things done ["GTD"] lingo). We should place our phone in airplane mode if we really want to get something done with complete focus.
2. An excessive focus on to-do lists can result in a transactional view of relationships and a lack of presence / momentary awareness / mindfulness. Although it is crippling to not have a plan, obsessively dwelling on our personal docket will hobble our experience of joy.
3. Do not let the satisfaction of setting up a perfect to-do list interfere with the actual doing! Be aware that humans get a hit of dopamine when we imagine the completion of a task, and this can result in less drive to get off our keister and actually do the thing.

So fire up that phone, make some lists... then put it away, get busy, and say yes to life!

Gardening Update

I confess that the garden was a mess last year. I never finished fencing it, had trouble keeping it weeded, and Lula got in and ate most of the acorn squash while we were away on a trip. That being said, the soil test I sent off in the spring was reassuring, I had some good harvests, and I planted some Austrian winter peas in the fall to enrich the soil. I've also added our homemade compost (which never fully composted, but that's another issue), finished the fence, and have Mindy's assurances that she will be lending a hand now that her flower gardens are mostly planted (though a woman's flower garden is never finished, right mom and Mindy?). So things are looking up! With her help, I may actually be able to keep the crabgrass from taking over. Here's a photo of how things stand at the moment:

March 18, 2019: Weeded, fenced, with walkways partially cardboarded. Almost ready for planting!

Another major improvement: the cold frame, which is a box in which you can start seedlings in the late winter and move plants into in the fall. I've found that Boone's 6-month growing season is just a little too short to get a good harvest for many crops, and the cold frame seems to be the best solution for that issue. Row covers would get blown away within weeks, and starting seeds indoors is way too painstaking. I built my cold frame out of plywood with a plexiglass top angled to catch the most sun. It looks right at home burrowed into the south-facing slope between the driveway and the garden: 

My homemade cold frame, ideally situated on a south-facing slope, protected from the wind, and dug into the earth.

I sowed seeds in the cold frame the last day of February, and they weathered the subsequent cold snap just fine. Proof of concept! Here they are today, growing like mad (most of them at least):

Less than 3 weeks after planting, my cold frame is popping.

 My next improvement will need to be rebuilding the raised beds. The big downside of building these puppies out of wood is that you shouldn't use pressure-treated wood for growing food, and non-pressure treated wood only lasts 4 or 5 years in the elements. I'm guessing our predecessors built these boxes 4 years ago, and they are literally falling apart. I'm leaning towards building the next generation out of cinder blocks, which would be easy and last forever. Mindy had a great idea of fencing in the whole area to keep the dogs out of it, which would probably up our yield by 100%... although we would no longer have the joy of watching Lula "The Carrot Picker" do her thing.

My 4 year old raised beds are starting to fall apart... with Lula terrorizing Pepper in the background, as always.

Mindy and I also had a nice time pruning some of the fruit trees together, and are looking forward to seeing a few apples, pears, apricots, and plums come in over the next year or two. Though things grow slower here in the high country, it's worth the wait! Thanks for reading-- I've got to go water my seedlings now!

Triathlon Training Update

I've been doing some pretty serious triathlon training over the last two months. I actually overtrained early in February and ended up having to take a few days off to recover, but have been stronger than ever since. This graph is the fruit of my desire to see objectively how much harder I've been working. Though not all of the lines will keep going up as precipitously as they have recently, it is nice to see some movement in the right direction.

Runs:
One thing you'll notice is that my running gradually ramped up until last month, then drastically jumped from 16 miles to 34 miles. Though that's still not very much (less than 10 miles per week), I'm starting to build my base for the upcoming season, and feeling much better on runs than I did just six weeks ago. My longer runs are getting longer, my pace is quickening, and just last week, I started doing interval workouts, which I'll slowly intensify over the coming months. The major issue I'm encountering is calf tightness, so I've been spending a few minutes most days rolling out my calves on a dumbbell handle to keep them loose. I have also been integrating runs with either bikes, swims, or other workouts, which are called "brick" workouts, since these sessions build strength and endurance so effectively-- and since your legs feel like bricks when you start to run after biking. Here's once brick workout I plan to start working into my routine once it starts to warm up outside. The run is probably the most important component of the triathlon, and it's where I hope to make up some ground after what will no doubt be average swim and bike legs.

Bikes:
Biking in the winter in Boone is a challenge. Only one day of out 10 ends up being 1) at least 40 degrees, which is my cutoff to avoid hypothermia and frostbite, and 2) a day I'm not working or otherwise occupied. All I've been able to manage over the winter is to maintain a base level of biking fitness. If I had access to a stationary bike or a bike trainer stand, I would be putting in more miles, but that's not an investment I've made yet. I will be putting my primary focus on bicycling and brick workouts over the next few months, and will ratchet up my interval work and distances on my long rides. Long-term, I do get nervous thinking about the risk of a major crash, but I'm doing all I can to be a safe rider.

Swims:
Because the weather has been so cold over the last month, I added a few swim sessions that would have otherwise been biking sessions, and ended up setting personal records in the mile swim twice in the course of a week (36:15 then 35:45). I have settled into a pattern of alternating my custom ladder workout (200m-150m-100m-50m-100m-150m-200m-150m-100m-50m with 75 second breaks) with short, high intensity intervals of 25 to 50 meters (often using a modified "head-up" freestyle stroke which isolates my shoulders and builds shoulder strength), distance swims of 1-1.5 miles, and ancillary work like backstroke with flippers and breaststroke. I've obviously been putting in enough time in the pool to make some significant gains this year, which has been a welcome surprise! I occasionally feel a twinge in a rotator cuff, and swimming surprisingly contributes to my aforementioned calf soreness, but I haven't been dealt any major physical setbacks in the pool. I hope to keep my momentum going over the coming months, but don't anticipate increasing my swimming frequency given time and energy constraints.

Other workouts:
To evolve into a good triathlete, I am going to need stronger shoulders for the swim and stronger legs for the bike (and run). I have been focusing my efforts on exercises like pull-ups, squats, and powercleans, with the occasional dumbbell snatch or thruster workout to round things out. I limit my recovery periods, so my workouts are mostly metabolic conditioning sessions of the type popularized by Crossfit. Since my workouts tend to be less than 30 minutes, I often pair them with a run. One exercise I particularly value is the "man-maker," (which I taught my college friends on a recent get-together), which consists of one-armed dumbbell rows, a push-up, a squat clean, shoulder press, and lunges. I like to do 3 or 4 sets of 15 with a 30-pound dumbbell, which is more reps that I was able to a year or two ago... so I am getting stronger! And just as important, I do a little MovNat mobility work every morning, and a whole MovNat workout or yoga session from time to time to stay supple.

Races:
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be free to do the Lake James or Watauga Lake triathlons this year, but I am planning to do the Huntersville Sprint on 4/28, the Smiley Sprint in Clemmons on 6/9, the Lake Logan International (a longer race) on 8/4, and finish out with the Lake Lure Sprint on 8/10. If all goes well this season, I may be looking at some half-ironman events next year... but I don't want to jinx it. For now, I'm content with entering triathlons as motivation to train harder and get stronger, although it would be nice to be a competitive triathlete and an ironman one day. Or perhaps I'll find something else to motivate me in the future. For now, the triathlon is the thing.




To those of you who couldn't view the graph above, here it is in a different format: