A lot has changed since the beginning of the month, and as I continue to work towards the current set of goals I think we are getting close to a baseline. This week, my partner and I both had covid, my partner’s grandparent passed away, and I also received a job offer to start on the 31st. It’s been quite the whirlwind of events.

Even so, my mood has remained neutral throughout, and I made an effort not to discount low activity days as a result of illness, clearly I needed the rest and therefore it was time well spent. As things begin to stabilize again, I want to stay focused on achievable goals, and evaluate how the current goals have been going.

• Job Search – send the same amount of applications this month as in February, approximately 14 per week. I didn’t send any applications this week, and after receiving the job offer I feel this goal is less urgent now. If I can I’d still like to complete it, but it depends on how the remaining days go.
• Practicing Coding – work on a Travel Simulator and incorporate coding into my recreational activities. I’ve been working on it, and definitely had some progress here. In the near future I may be pivoting towards getting some CompSci certifications, so I feel good about the effort put in so far and continuing to tinker with the project.
• Plan 2 healthy breakfasts, 1 healthy lunch, and 1 healthy dinner that can be prepped and stored in mason jars in the fridge. So far, I’ve created the 2 breakfasts (plain kefir with chia seeds, and oatmeal with banana) and successfully meal prepped both. This week I’ve been eating turkey with sliced green apple and sharp white cheddar for lunch, and hopefully can work that into a meal-preppable format soon. Dinner is still being worked on, the previous beef bowl became difficult to eat over and over again, and this week both portions went to waste in the fridge. Update to this goal is I want to incorporate more greens, I have frozen broccoli and string beans that might be useful, or I could bring back the 3 sisters (corn, beans, and roasted squash) to add as well.
• Continue to meditate regularly – 20x in march. this one has been particularly difficult, and at this point I’d need to mediate almost every night to accomplish it. The difficulty approaching meditation suggests I ought to tweak the approach, or workshop the way that I’m meditating to something more achievable like lowering the time.
• Continue walking – 3x per week. So far this goal has been going well. I enjoy the exercise and it feels good to stretch my legs as the weather improves.
• Continue laundry system – 3x per week. Also going well, no adjustments required.
• Maintain the current difficulty classifications – attempt to do the very hard things once per week. Aside from food shopping this one has been going well also, its understandable that I’d have difficulty with being sick and going out, so no sweat.
• Write down gratitudes every evening – assign mood and trigger to positive and negative mood results. This has been going well, with some understandable interruptions while sick. I think that reflecting on the positive and negative indicators will be useful to see what’s normally bringing my mood up or down.
• Brush my teeth every morning. Been doing this.

Even in spite of the productivity hit being sick has caused, I’m still doing a really good job meeting these goals, and I’m feeling good about changing things up once my new job starts. I have an idea to incorporate new activities around work, but haven’t ironed out what that will look like yet. Things like:

• waking up early (before 8am)
• getting out of bed with enough time to get ready for work
• leaving the house with enough time to drive to work
• studying for a certification exam
• other work tasks (etc.)

I look forwards to learning about how the activity chart will be interacting with my new job. Last post I didn’t anticipate finding a job as a possible result, and I think its a good thing to come up with adaptations to my plans given a surprising outcome like this.

Given my excitement, and the previous experiences with how work demands lots of effort, I think it will be prudent after this month to focus down on minute goals again while I determine how much effort work will require. It will be good to give myself more space to adjust to this change and evaluate the impact of work before I set additional goals.