A problem I find myself stumped with often is that simple things feel hard to do. Very well, such is life. Last month I tried to write down all the things I found challenging, and then totaled up these “significant actions” to get an idea of my activity on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Here are the results:

November 2024: ~130 significant actions
Week 1 (11-4 to 11-10): 22 actions
Week 2 (11-11 to 11-17): 22 actions
Week 3 (11-18 to 11-24): 44 actions
Week 4 (11-25 to 11-30): 37 actions

The average activity level was around 4 per day. Daily actions peaked around 10-11 (4 times), and bottomed out at 0-1 (6 times). The actual tracking of activity was not completed accurately on several occasions, and there is a clear upswing in the 2nd half of the month as I focused harder on accurately charting everything I was doing.

Something I was hoping to accomplish from this exercise was to discover which activities are being done more frequently during the month to categorize as “easy” and which activities are being done less frequently during the month to categorize as “difficult”. This was successfully accomplished.

The next step is to arrange the tasks in order of ease, and start the day with easy things, followed by an attempt at a difficult thing if I am feeling the energy for it. This should create a smoother and more reliable experience of effort day-to-day, while also allowing me to feel more proud of myself for acting within the scope of these achievable goals.

For December, my intentions are threefold:

• Raise the floor of activities per day such that I am always doing at least 3 things per day.
• Limit total activities per day to 9 at the most, to prevent overexertion on high energy days followed by slumps of inactivity.
• Attempt to increase the frequency of “easy” activities from last month, with the eventual goal of transforming them into habits and removing them from the chart as I focus on more challenging activities.

By the end of the month, I am hoping to gain an increased understanding of how my activities per day impacts my daily mood, and how raising my daily minimum activity impacts my mood. At a minimum, I am looking forward to checking my weekly activity numbers to see if the effort put towards any particular activities has changed.