Tag: General

Reflection – The Cost of a Lack of Routine

I’ve posted a few times recently about how I’ve been incredibly slack on keeping up my (lack of) fitness habit.  The addition of teaching was enough for me to abandon fitness as a priority.  There are obvious costs associated with this, such as poorer health and eating habits, but there is also the financial cost that most people are aware of, and I don’t think I’ve really appreciated the magnitude of until now.

Since July, I’ve been paying for my membership to the gym without going.  This cost shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.  At various points since July, I’ve been aware that the fees were being applied to my credit card each month.  On reflection, I realized how much of a “death by 1,000 cuts” scenario this is.  During each month’s charge, I rationalized that the cost is fairly low.  Because it wasn’t breaking the bank, it was easier to excuse the bad habit.

Yet, it all adds up:

August – monthly fee $11.30
September – monthly fee $11.30
September – bi-annual equipment fee $20
October – monthly fee $11.30
November – monthly fee $11.30
December – monthly fee $11.30
 Total (CAD): $76.50

If you don’t include any interest accrued, I’ve spent a little over $75 to not go to the gym.  There are two ways of looking at it.  Either, $75 has been the cost of inaction (not going, or not cancelling my membership), or $75 has been what I spent to sit at home and do other things (opportunity cost).  Regardless of how I frame it, I’m out $75 with little to show or account for it.

I suppose the obvious next step is to create a solution to this problem.  With the new year and my birthday rapidly approaching, it makes sense to use this as an excuse to erase the bad history and start fresh.  I want to, however, learn from this experience.  It’s important that I reflect intentionally because otherwise I’ll be doomed to repeat the behaviour.

I don’t have a nifty solution to this at present.  I merely wish to make this observation public to hold myself accountable and get myself thinking about what I can do about it.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Odysseus’s Wifi

I have terrible self-control in certain areas of my life.  Chief among my vices is the habit of staying up late on the internet (YouTube is my drug of choice).  While I rationally know staying up late is bad for me, I act contrary to my best interests with each rationalization of “just one more video.”  Suddenly, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning and my lunch for work still hasn’t been made.

In an effort to combat my akrasia (Greek for “weak will”), I’m taking a leaf out of Odysseus’s book.  In the Odyssey by Homer, Odysseus is faced with sailing past some Sirens.  In antiquity, Sirens were dangerous mythological creatures who would lure sailors to their doom using their song.  Odysseus wanted to hear the Siren’s call, but knew he would be unable to resist their spell.  In a brilliant move, Odysseus had his crew stuff their ears with beeswax to block out the song, and Odysseus had himself lashed to the ships mast to prevent him from leaving the ship.

Odysseus and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper, c. 1909 – jigboxx.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9684835

The story of Odysseus is held up in modern behavioural economics and psychology as an exemplar of not only acknowledging that humans are notoriously bad at acting in their own best interest, but also in showing us that we can take steps to overcome our weaknesses.  Odysseus, rather than holding on to illusions that he will make good decisions in the future, instead opts to build systems of accountability that will save him from erroneous beliefs about the strength of his will.

Inspired by his story, I have adopted a new system to resist my own Siren’s call.  I hooked my wifi router up to an indoor vacation timer and set it so that every night at 11:45pm, my internet gets shut off.  The systems stays off while I’m at work and turns back on at 5:00pm as I’m getting home from work.

This is obviously not a fool-proof system.  I can still manually override the unit if I want to reconnect to the internet, and truthfully I have done just that when I wanted to finish creating my slide decks for class and upload them to the e-learning system the college uses.  So far, I have not overridden the system for personal reasons, so on that front, at least, it has been a success.  Another obvious problem is that while my internet is shut off, I can still distract myself with other screens, such as the television, my Gameboy, and most critically my phone.

Nevertheless, I rate this systems as a success in getting me off the computer earlier than normal.  In previous posts I discussed how I am waiting for the term to wind down so that I can begin to focus on other, less pressing tasks.  This is just a first step in getting me to make responsible decisions that are aligned with my goals and values.  Sometimes, we need to lash ourselves to the masthead to stop us from doing stupid stuff.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – Breathing Room

This term has been killer for me.  I say “term” as a reflection of my added teaching load I’ve had since September.  I’ve been musing recently that I think I finally hit my stretch/break point.  Balancing all of my separate obligations is finally starting to test my ability to keep all the balls in the air.  In sum, these are the priorities I can think of off the top of my head:

  • Full time job at the college
  • Part time job at the bar
  • Part time job teaching
  • Treasurer of the ethics board I sit on
  • Podcasting
  • Maintaining this blog
  • Daily art project
  • Monthly mutual-improvement group meetings
  • Maintaining a long distance relationship
  • 2016 reading challenge (42 book finished as of last night)

These are just the things I’m managing to keep in the air.  Of course, to make space for these things, I’ve had to slack on some other priorities, namely:

  • Sleep (I’m averaging about 5.5 hours per night)
  • Nutrition (scaled back for budget reasons)
  • Gym (I’ve had a hard time justifying going for myself when I should be working)
  • Video game time (yes, this is a weird one, but I want more guilt-free downtime)
  • Other social time with friends (I rarely see friends outside of work or meetings)

These aren’t meant to be humble-brags.  I’m not one that thinks of “busy” as a badge of honour.  I know that busy people are notoriously unreliable in my circles.  There is a saying that if you want something done, give it to a busy person.  This is perhaps true in some cases, but in my experience the vast number of busy people tend to be chronically flakey on showing up and late on deadlines for deliverables.

Thankfully, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.  As of writing, I will be delivering my last lecture this week, and by December 21st I will be done with all course work grading.  Shortly after that, I’ll be on holidays from the College until the new year.  I’ll still have shifts at the bar, but those are select evenings.

Other aspects will change as well.  Podcasting will go on a holiday hiatus; the daily art project ends  at the end of December; and the long distance relationship will move back to a local distance relationship.  I will finally have some breathing room.  I plan to use that time to reflect on my obligations and regroup.  My birthday is coming up, and I always take that time to reflect on the past year as well as my current state of affairs with an eye towards my future.  This will be a well-deserved holiday break, when I finally get some breathing room.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

My 2016 Reading List

2016 was a fairly productive year for me compared to 2015.  At the end of every year, I reflect on my life and sketch out a rough vision of how I want to tackle the new year.  Last year, I noted that I had read relatively few books (and completed even fewer).  Don’t get me wrong, I was reading a lot, but it was all online and typically blogs and articles.  My shallow reading was going strong, but my slow, in-depth reading with books was waning.

I felt a sense of shame at this realization – I had completed undergraduate and graduate studies in the Humanities, but my commitment to arts and letters was dismal at best.  I decided to use 2016 as a year to focus and develop myself.  Using a combination of physical and audio books I have, as of this post, read 41 books, which amounts to a hair under 13,000 pages of content.

See below for the complete list.  If I finish anything else before the end of 2016, I’ll ensure to issue an update.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Note – eagle-eyed readers will count 42 books on my list.  There is a book on my list that for personal reasons I’m not publicly disclosing.

Title Author Pages
Deep Work Cal Newport 304
The Way of the Superior Man David Deida 207
Intentional Living John C. Maxwell 288
The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg 416
The 4-Hour Work Week Timothy Ferriss 416
The Imperfect Board Member Jim Brown 224
Mate Tucker Max 384
The Art of Asking Amanda Palmer 352
The War of Art Steven Pressfield 190
The Way of Men Jack Donovan 192
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 272
Living in More Than One World Bruce Rosenstein 244
Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl 168
Start With Why Simon Sinek 256
Antifragile Nassim Taleb 544
Zero to One Peter Thiel 224
Level Up Your Life Steve Kamb 288
Quiet Susan Cain 368
The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal 288
The $100 Startup Chris Guillebeau 304
The 4-Hour Body Timothy Ferriss 592
Leaders Eat Last Simon Sinek 256
A Thousand Naked Strangers Kevin Hazzard 288
Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here Ryan Estrada 132
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey 432
Essentials of Human Anatomy & Physiology Elaine Marieb 656
Born To Run Christopher McDougall 304
No Fears, No Excuses Larry Smith 272
Doctored Sandeep Jauhar 288
Wisdom Stephen Hall 352
The 48 Laws of Power Robert Greene 496
Awaken the Giant Within Tony Robbins 544
Tribes Seth Godin 160
Smarter Faster Better Charles Duhigg 384
Purple Cow Seth Godin 244
Free Prize Inside Seth Godin 256
Ego Is The Enemy Ryan Holiday 256
I Will Teach You To Be Rich Ramit Sethi 266
Thinking Fast And Slow Daniel Kahnaman 512
Born For This Chris Guillebeau 320
Total Pages Read
13,487 (revised)

Addendum

After this post went up, I added two more books to my list to round out 2016:

Title Author Pages
God is not Great Christopher Hitchens 320
Left of Bang Patrick Van Horne and
Jason Riley		 228

Drones and Improving CPR Time

A friend of mine wrote a great piece last week on recent developments in making response times faster and more efficient through technology.  Drones can be outfitted with portable AED units and can be flown to the scene of a cardiac arrest to save precious minutes while advanced medical assistance is en route.   Check out Blair’s article here.

I also highly recommend visiting his blog for musings on medicine, journalism and anything else he’s got on his mind.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

Blog – Off and On the Wagon (Of Fitness)

Welp!  That streak didn’t last very long.  Last week I wrote how I proudly went to the gym the previous week, and how I was looking forward to trying to maintain that pace.  I’m sad to report that I did not go to the gym last week.  And it’s important that I stay transparent about this.  It’s been hard trying to find a balance these last few months.  When I wasn’t working three jobs, I found it relatively easy to go to the gym at least twice per week.  Now, I can’t manage going once.

I can’t blame the job fully on this.  Part of the reason for my poor performance is the lack of sleep.  I have poor discipline to go to bed at a reasonable time, so things tend to compound from there.  Poor sleep leads to decision fatigue, and then it becomes easy to excuse all sorts of bad habits – further bad sleep, poor nutrition, procrastination, etc.

These failures of mine have been harsh but incredibly instructive.  I’ve learned two important things about myself: I’ve learned where my limit is for how much I can juggle at any one time, and I learned a bit more about my priorities.  I learned that I need structures and rules in place if I have any chance of sticking to a plan for progress.  Present-Me is very bad at self-regulation and is prone to making all sorts of bad decisions.  Present-Me is short-sighted, lazy, and pleasure-seeking.  I want to prioritize health and fitness, but when it’s time to deliver, my priority tends to favour pleasurable activities (I’m looking at you, YouTube!).

A tired cliche is that the first step is to admit you have a problem.  In this case, I have a problem when it comes to managing myself.  Not sure where to turn from there, but at least we’ve drilled down to the bedrock.  Let’s see where I can take this.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Fitness Update (Small Milestones)

I finally returned to some non-zero fitness activity last week!  It’s not exactly awe-inspiring, but it’s better than what I’ve done in the past two months.  My last log entry for the gym was August 25th.  In August, I had two trips to the gym, and then nothing prior to that since before my trip to Scotland in July.  It’s a gross understatement to say that I fell off the wagon.

Last week, I forced myself to hit the gym for a light workout on Monday.  “Light” in this case means limiting myself to 60-80% of my previous set weights, and only committing to 3 sets of each exercise.  I knew I was going to have muscle soreness this week, so I went easy on myself in order to re-acclimate myself to lifting.  While I’ve lost some momentum compared to July, it was good to return to the gym.

My second round of exercise this week was a home-based round on the rowing machine at my girlfriend’s place.  I did a fairly leisurally row of a little over 5 kilometres in 30 minutes.  Again, I wasn’t looking to impress anyone, but merely to dip my toe back into the game and see what happened.

The real test will be whether I continue my progress into next week.  The hard part about overcoming weakness of the will is shrugging off the guilt you feel when you know you mess up.  The best remedy I’ve come up with is to forgive myself for my past mistakes (not going to the gym) and moving on to do better next time.  The only thing you can do is to reset the counter and start from scratch.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog – The Rewards of Grading

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend grading papers from my class.  It was their first foray into writing a philosophical essay for me, so it was an interesting indictment on whether I was effective in teaching for the first half of the course.  There were the natural ups and downs, but I suspect my grade curve falls in line with what is expected (I have two late papers yet to grade, so the jury is still out).

I jokingly grumbled about the extra work it takes to grade poor performances for me.

This isn’t to say that I look down on students who do poorly, nor do I want to make light of their performance.  For me, marking is an opportunity to help the student learn and develop.  When a student does well, I often feel less compelled to give a lot of feedback because there is little they could have done to do better.  I praise where it’s merited, but I don’t think the students are helped if I don’t offer something constructive to mull over.

Marking poor performance, on the other hand, takes significantly longer to finish for three reasons. First, as in the tweet above, when I’m dealing with plagiarism, I need to do more research to ensure it’s genuine cases of plagiarism versus sloppy citation practices.  I use the TurnItIn service to give a “sniff test” for the paper, but the majority of the cases of flagged plagiarism are merely properly cited references to the text.  Otherwise, I use context clues to determine where students might have plagiarized, such as changes in font, and changes in voice or phrasing the student uses in their writing.

The second biggest reason why it takes me so much longer to grade poor papers (and this will relate partially to my next point) is that I have to sufficiently document my reasons for awarding a poor mark.  This is to not only justify my decision to the student (and avoid seeming arbitrary), but it’s also to protect future me.  My annotations and comments help me in the potential case where a student wishes to talk to me about their mark.  After time has elapsed, I need memory aids to help me understand why I made the decisions I made while grading.

Finally, the most important reason why it takes me so much longer is that I have to identify instances where the student could have done better, and give them direction on how to improve.  It’s not enough to rely on quick notations to tell the student the problem (i.e. Awk or awkward phrasing, SP or spelling error, Citation Needed, Does not follow, etc.).  I have to take the next step to identify the problems and provide guidance for improvement.  This is why the process is so time consuming.  It’s an important process.  I remember how important that direction was when I was in school.  Without the time my profs took to help me through my papers, I doubt I would have won an essay prize in grad school.

Grading has its rewards, though.  Sometimes, you are amazed at the quality of the work that gets turned in, as happened in this tweet below.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

 

Blog – Break Week

I’ve finally hit week 8 for the course I’m teaching!  At the college I work at, many of the schools have adopted a 7:1:7 model of course delivery, including the School of Liberal Studies.  This means that the 15-week term is broken down into two seven week blocks and a break week in the middle.  It’s like a traditional reading week, except it’s a free pass for students.  They get a week to recharge, catch up, or enjoy a lull in their workload.  While this usually elicits a “kids these days” shake of the fist from people, I fully support the break week.  Many students are first-generation college kids, meaning they are coming from families that may or may not have had the academic support to help them through school.  The transition to college is a big leap, so a break week helps ensure the students have the support they need to succeed.  I prefer to set my students up for success, than to wear them down through a war of attrition.

This also means that I don’t teach this week, and *I* get a break, too!  As you’ve been reading the last few weeks, a break is exactly what I need.  This will give me a chance to prep, mark and feel slightly less pressure during the week.  This also means that I might *gasp* actually get out to the gym this week.  No promises, though.  But, here’s hoping…

Stay Awesome,

Ryan