First Week of 2023
With the start of the new year, I am currently working towards creating a weekly and daily schedule for myself. The holiday season is generally pretty disruptive towards my normal schedule because, in past years, I travel home and usually struggle to maintain the schedule I had before the holiday season. I didn’t travel home this year, so the week between Christmas and New Years was not disrupted as much, but vending at the holiday fairs definitely changed my schedule and I still didn’t really have one since I started working for myself full time. So now that I’m coming off of a couple of weeks where I didn’t really like the schedule and didn’t have much of a routine, I am working on figuring out a new system.
The first thing I’m working on is waking up earlier. I’ve gotten into the habit of waking up around 9, which feels late to me. My goal is to wake up at 6, so right now I’m working on trying to wake up around 7:30. I start my day with journaling and eating breakfast, studying Chinese for around 30 minutes (one of my personal goals this year is to study Chinese every day), embroider, and then lunch. After lunch, I paint until I go to work out around 4pm. Once I work out, I consider my “work day” over and I do more unstructured things. I want to have a longer “work day”, but I don’t want to push back my work out time because I’ve maintained working out around 4pm for almost a year and it’s a solid habit that I don’t want to change. So that’s how I’ve decided to try to wake up earlier to have more hours earlier in the day to paint.
This week’s check-in/update:
What I’m working on:
I finished the 5” embroidery hoop and decided to start a 9” one. I know that I had mentioned that I felt like I was starting too many projects and starting a new project right when I finish one doesn’t really change the number of projects I’m working on, but oh well.
For my knit sweater, I’ve moved onto the cuff of the sleeve. I’m almost done!
I’m almost done the second painting of the series of Highway One paintings that I want to work on. I need to work out a number of details and it’s really coming together.
Inputs
I finished listening to Upstream by Dan Heath on audiobook. The final chapters of the book talked about Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) and health care and I thought that was fun to hear about things I worked on at my old job without being really stressed about it.
I started listening to Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein, which is about “noise”, which I think can be interchanged with variability, in human judgment. The authors are using this book to bring more attention to noise/judgment because they find that not enough attention is paid to it compared to the amount of attention paid to bias in human judgment.
Outputs
I went on a ~4 mile hike this weekend, which was very refreshing. I hadn’t gone hiking in the wintertime in California until this weekend and it’s currently the rainy season, so it was nice to see a lot of green on a hike I had done before in the summertime.
