Category: Experiments (Page 1 of 2)

December is a giving month, a time when many of us donate our money and our talents, when many of us celebrate by exchanging gifts. This December, I’m gifting myself presence. No, that’s not a typo. Continue reading

My goal for the past month was to spend at least an hour a day “creating.” I left that intentionally vague, but stipulated the creating couldn’t be tied to my day job or specifically for this blog. How did it go?

Well, an hour doesn’t sound like much time until I look at the clock and see it’s 30 minutes past bedtime and I haven’t “created” anything. I definitely didn’t come anywhere near keeping up with my daily goal, but I did make some progress on one idea I had. Continue reading

If you’ll recall, this month I set a goal to spend an hour a day “creating” things that had nothing to do with my job or this blog.

Otherwise, I tried to leave the definition pretty open to allow for exploration of lots of areas, if the muse so directed me. Now that we’re about halfway through the month, how am I doing?

Well … not so great. Continue reading

This is the second month of my 30-day experiments series. Last month, I began a daily journaling experiment to see whether I would get as much out of the exercise as so many high-performers I had heard on podcasts or read in articles. The results were positive.

For at least the first several of these experiments I’m going to add something to my life rather than restrict something. I don’t want them to feel like some kind of diet or deprivation or punishment. That’s not going to get me excited about the challenge. Continue reading

For the month of October, I began an experiment of daily journaling. Journaling comes up over and over again in podcasts with high-performing people and in blog posts on productivity.

You might think a writer would naturally gravitate to journaling, but I’ve never felt the urge to pick up that habit. Then I listened to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Phil Keoghan and decided I had to start journaling and see what happened.

In my mid-point check-in, I was happy with the progress. I had stuck with my writing schedule — right before bed or first thing in the morning while the previous day was still fresh — and I documented some interesting events that I wanted to remember with some clarity. What happened after that? Continue reading