2019 Monthly Experiments Recap: What Stuck and What Stunk
Admit it. After savoring the twists and turns of my January, February, and March Monthly Experiment Recaps, only to be stood up at the altar from then on, you assumed I threw in the towel and wimped out on the project starting with sugar-free April. I’m happy to share that nothing could be further from the truth! Several months didn’t merit standalone posts so I stored up my thoughts for an extended full-year summary. Without further ado, here are the highlights and lowlights of my 2019 monthly experiments:
What stuck
Logging out of Twitter in January:
Until my month-long break to start 2019, Twitter primarily served three purposes in my life:
#1. Exposing me to snarky comments/takes that I disagreed with, thus putting me in a crummy mood.
#2. Exposing me to even snarkier comments/takes that I agreed with, often related to the snarky comments/takes that I disagreed with, thus putting me in a superior, snooty mood.
#3. Exposing me to hilarious GIFs, memes, and one-liners.
#1 and #2 are equally bad. #3 is fantastic but can be found elsewhere. Based on this rigorous analysis, I decided not to log back into Twitter after 12/31/18.
I think there are numerous beneficial ways to use Twitter (building your business, creating/expanding an online community, and breaking news in real time, to name a few) but my relationship with it was corrosive and so I kicked it to the curb.
The cream of the crop from New Foods February:
One year ago, I simply couldn’t imagine the following sentence coming out of my mouth, sans threat of violence: “That was a particularly good avocado, babe. Talk about a perfect breakfast!” Well adios Horrendously Picky Eater Jesse Wilson and say hello to my new best pal Well Below Average Comfort Level with Culinary Exploration Jesse Wilson! When he’s feeling particularly bold, he will actually order SALMON IN A RESTAURANT!
I was thrilled that two of the healthiest new foods I tried in February turned out to be my favorites. Also, to my surprise, I did a complete 180 on cherry tomatoes and they’re now my #1 salad staple.
J/k, I almost ralphed when my wife asked me to help her fix a tomato/mozzarella/basil appetizer.
High intensity intervals (May) and early AM cardio (September):
The biggest game-changer of the year was combining high intensity interval training (HIIT) with a workout first thing in the morning. HIIT provides similar cardiovascular benefits as a 30-45 minute workout in a fraction of the time. My May routine was a three-minute warm-up on a rower, followed by six 30 second bursts of all-out effort, broken up by one-minute rest periods.
In September, I started every morning with 30 minutes of cardio (at least initially… see “What Stunk” below for evidence of my stupidity). Unexpectedly, my sleep quality improved significantly: +12% on a somewhat hokey app’s “Sleep Score”. While I’m not fully sold on the app’s accuracy, I had a year of baseline ratings and they rose almost immediately once the morning workouts started. On 10/1 we bought a rower, parked it in our basement, and a new component of my morning routine was born.
I’m counting down the days until I get to channel my inner Martin Lawrence when greeting a sweaty teenager at our front door.
Grocery shopping and laundry (July):
Of these two previously unchartered territories, grocery shopping proved to be much rougher terrain. To be clear, I simply executed the plan that my wife put together. I did not meaningfully contribute to meal planning or meal preparation but rather drove to the store and wandered the aisles like a lost child in a foreign country’s library, as my quasi-live stream of my first few trips can attest.
Sorting laundry and keeping the washer/dryer/up-from-the-basement assembly line going actually meshed nicely with my process optimization tendencies but re-sorting into individual groups and folding was the pits. As the piles of freshly cleaned clothes metastasized across our living room chairs/ottoman/floor, I couldn’t help but wallow in existential dread: “The sole purpose of this work I am doing is to provide the opportunity to do the exact same work again next week. And the next week. Until I’m dead.” Fortunately, I snapped out of that funk by channeling Tony Robbins’s trenchant advice about not getting too far into your own head: “Sometimes you think you have to figure out your life’s purpose, but you really just need some macadamia nuts and a cold fucking shower.”
Recognizing the absurdity of Molly continuing to shoulder this load by herself, our new Sunday routine includes some sort of split between these two critical domestic tasks. I won’t claim that we are at, or even really approaching 50/50 for this work but even 30/70 is approximately a 60-fold improvement over the pre-July 2019 version of the world.
What stunk
Pretty much failing to check email only twice/day (June):
Even for a productivity junkie like me, reading about inbox/email management strategies can be painfully boring. However, I was itching to try what seemed to be the expert consensus among the true positive outliers in the efficiency experts community (ladies, I’m afraid you’re 15 years too late, I’m taken): Throw off the shackles of continuous connectedness to my inbox and only check email twice/day at pre-scheduled times! By eliminating the constant interruptions that rob me of my precious focus, I would be able to tap into the hallowed mindset that is “Flow” on demand!
I looked forward to spending the last 1/2 of the year spreading the gospel of solitary AM and PM email checks across my organization, helping the masses to break free of their self-imposed mindless inbox reactivity.
Well as it turns out, this process is completely incompatible with success at my job. A lot of my work involves communicating with various groups and linking key stakeholders together which is pretty damn hard to do without email. Yes, I was interrupted less frequently during periods of planned focus but a gnawing sense of dread gradually built as each email-free block neared its end and I braced for what I would find when I fired Outlook back up. Sometimes the sticker shock of the mountain of new messages waiting for me at 11:00 triggered a metric shit-ton more anxiety than I would have felt if I paid moderate attention to triaging emails as they trickled in across the morning.
Although this experiment crashed and burned many times over, the month wasn’t a total waste because I learned an important lesson: Just because there is broad consensus among “experts” about the right way to do something, you are the only one who can learn what works for you. The experts’ suggestion that is correct 95% of the time is still dead-ass wrong for 16.5 million people in this country (which is the population of New York City, LA, Chicago and Philadelphia combined). The only way you can learn with certainty if something works for your life at this moment is to try it out.
Completely failing to volunteer (August):
My plan was to volunteer for 2-4 hours/week in August. At month-end, my grand total volunteer hours was a big, fat zero. This was the only month when I completely failed to show up and the only month I reflect on with shame.
Some months certainly taxed my will more than others. Getting up 30 minutes earlier every day and heading outside to exercise, rain or shine, wasn’t a walk in the park (even though sometimes I was literally walking in the park). Cutting out added sugar was tough although less terrible than I anticipated. But the absolute low point of the project was being faced with incontrovertible proof of the extent of my self-centeredness.
Like most people, I immediately cooked up a smorgasbord of excuses and rationalizations for why things fell flat: all the interesting placements required extended training or background checks, most of the weekday evening slots were booked months out, I would require so much instruction to do X that I would be a net negative, etc.
But ultimately, I just chose not to make volunteering a high priority and so it was crowded out by other things.
Being a moron and running for 30 minutes/day on concrete after not running a step since college (September):
Day #1’s run was tough but worth it – my son and I woke up early on our last day in Traverse City, ran 15 minutes out on the Old Mission Peninsula, then turned around and ran back. I would even say that it was less of a slog for me than for him.
Runs on Day #2 and #3 weren’t as nice because the Dairy Queen on the corner of Packard and Stadium couldn’t really compete with sun-dappled Lake Michigan, view-wise.
Day #4’s run was tough because my shins started to ache about halfway through, but I pushed through. No stopping this fitness train, baby!
Day #5’s run…two minutes in…holy shit…what have I done to myself?!?
As anyone who knows the slightest thing about running will tell you, easing into running after a 15 year hiatus by literally pounding the literal pavement for 3-4 miles every morning is an inspired means of cultivating those shin splits you’ve always read so much about. It was two weeks before I could walk pain-free and Day #5 was my final run of the month. I still woke up at 5:00 every morning to get outdoor exercise but it consisted of power-walking to the park around the corner and banging out sets of pull-ups, push-ups, step-ups, and body weight squats.
Reading nothing new (October):
Given my long-standing habit of daily reading, I expected this month to be challenging. But my hope was that a month free of “input” would lead to an uptick in “output”. Whether that be multiple new blogposts/ideas for future posts, meaningful progress on a side hustle, or just a general surge in creative juices, I was excited to turn my sure-to-be copious amounts of surplus mental horsepower loose on the world.
Instead, I basically just turned into a grumpy, anti-social dickhead for a few weeks. I greatly underestimated how critical reading was to managing my mood and to helping me wind down after stressful situations. As the end of the month neared, it just felt like punishment for punishment’s sake.
Although it can be painful, it’s healthy to occasionally take a clear-eyed look at your vices and crutches to make sure they aren’t taking more than their fair share of your most important resources. If you can’t come up with anything, your DadBod has successfully pulled the wool over your eyes.
Looking back on a year’s worth of mini-resolutions, I firmly believe that if 100 random people did the same 12 month-long experiments and plotted them on a scale from glorious to garbage, no two lists would be the same. Had you played along from home, maybe you would have put me to shame by volunteering your ass off in August but abandoned HIIT after your first flirtation with your maximum heart rate.
The value in a project like this is that it allows you to try out a bunch of new habits without feeling one iota of negativity about yourself if you don’t maintain them. None of the experiments had the psychic weight of a (likely soon to be failed) New Year’s Resolution. When things got tough, my mantra was “only X more days” not “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep this up, why did I even bother trying?” That second internal monologue is what DadBods learn on the afternoon of their first day of basic training (the morning is primarily full of ice-breakers and paperwork).
If you are willing to try your own series of experiments, I encourage you to pick habits that are designed to be impossible to maintain, thus completely obliterating the possibility of negative feelings when you throw in the towel. If your experience is like mine, you’ll find that a few of the new behaviors contain a nugget of something that makes sense to add to your life.
Don’t expect to recognize the gems right away. Even new habits that ended up as part of my permanent routine felt clunky and foreign at first. But the survivors fell into somewhat of a groove by the end of their month. If something still feels like wearing two left shoes after 30 days of consistent effort, it probably isn’t for you.
As for what I have planned in 2020, allow me to describe it via an up and coming file sharing website I think is really going to take off this year: