When I began my activity project, I expected to quickly run into a “wall” of difficulty and after establishing a baseline at that wall, working from there to steadily improve.

Instead, over the last 4 months, I’ve seen continuous improvement in activity numbers. Its surprising, and prompts me to reconsider my expectations for what seems to be within reach for this year. What might it mean?

Monthly Activity
November: 130
December: 182 (+52)
January: 212 (+30)
February: 259 (+47)

A few explanations come to mind. First, that seasonal affective disorder, combined with stress around the holidays, might bring my activity levels down every year around this time, and I happened to start tracking the month that things begin to improve. I think this is unlikely, since seasonal affective disorder should continue from December into January, and also because there are major holidays there as well.

Another guess is that leaving work at my former job freed up a lot of mental energy, and the goals I had set for myself of getting more comfortable doing household chores, learning how to apply to jobs, and studying computer science are finally starting to be reached.

A third idea is that by visualizing all the different tasks I’m working on I can perform them more effectively. I feel that this might be a solid reason. Benefit from organizational structure is something I’ve been seeking for a long time, and it pleases me to have found my own way to it using the activity chart.

Now in the first week of March I’ve done 88 activities. This is 4x better than I was managing to do in November, and based on the continued growth line I’m quite shocked that I may continue to do even better so quickly. When I started this project I was expecting the primary difficulty to be making improvement, and instead now I find myself wondering if I should be slowing down or conserving my energy. My therapist is cautioning me about burnout, but my own feelings are conflicted. I feel eager to continue improving, and simultaneously anxious and worn out from all the work being done currently. My mood has been mostly positive and neutral as well, even though I’ve felt “bad” recently, I find that on high activity days the negative feelings don’t seem to bring me below neutral. I wonder if that’s because my pride in doing more things counteracts the potential self criticism.

I’m excited to see how my efforts go in March, and to evaluate the results. I have some predictions for possible outcomes:

1 – I continue improving, by a similar metric from previous months. This might demonstrate that the system is still bringing more and more benefit, or that my reserves are not yet depleted.

2 – I maintain the same amount of activity as last month, or only improve (or decrease) marginally. This would be a success of the goal to find a baseline of activity, and then I could start to tweak my activity levels to see if any particular pattern of activity would be easier or harder to maintain.

3 – Activity levels decrease significantly from last month. This might demonstrate environmental influence, or a dramatic lack of perception of my own stress levels handling activity. I would reevaluate my activities and take a slower approach the following month to give myself room to recover.

Something I notice missing from the potentials listed above is emotional change. I would hope that my emotional state continues to stay roughly the same as it has been since February, with lots of great and good days, and more neutral than bad days. Seeing a significant decrease in mood, regardless of the activity level outcomes, would be cause to focus on what thoughts are causing this negativity, and understanding how to process them and understand what needs to be done to relieve those feelings, if at all. A significant increase, on the other hand, would be excellent, because coinciding with any potential activity outcome an increase in mood is an indicator that what I’m doing is affecting me positively.