For the last several days, I’ve been thinking about revamping some of my habits going into August. After mulling several possibilities, I’ve settled on the following habits for the upcoming month.
Mindfulness
Practice 10 minutes daily. I’ve switched from guided meditations to simple silent meditation for the last several days and I’m enjoying the change. For this coming month, I’m not going make any hard and fast rules. I’ll gladly jump back and forth between guided and silent mindfulness meditation as the fancy strikes me.
Blogging
Today is day 91 of a 100 day blogging challenge. So I’ll be blogging daily for a little more than the first full week of the month. Beyond that, I want to blog at least once a week. If you do the math, that means that I need to publish at least 12 blog posts in the month of August, so that is my goal.
Exercise
This month I’m going to have three separate exercise goals:
- Burpees: I’ve joined a new challenge alongside my colleagues: August burpees. My personal goal will be to do a minimum of 10 burpees each day and a total of at least 500 burpees in the month.
- Bodyweight exercise workouts: In addition to the daily burpees, I plan to do my regular bodyweight exercise workouts every work day for a total of 20 times in the month.
- Cardio workouts: I also want to do 30 minutes of cardio at least 5 times each week. My cardio workouts may consist of running, swimming, or spinning.
This sounds like a lot of exercise, but it’s really what I’ve already been doing for the last month. All I’m really adding are the burpees, which I expect to really only take about a minute extra at the end of my daily bodyweight workout.
Read
As in the past, I’m sticking with my daily goal of 10 minutes of reading each day (at a minimum). I’m still working on The Room Where it Happened by John Bolton. I’m about halfway through. I’m not loving it. It’s interesting in some ways, but I don’t find it particularly inspiring or edifying. It feels about like the literary equivalent of watching a train wreck. However, I’m halfway through, so I’m going to slog the rest of the way through. I’m going to have to read something really interesting to recover though.
Dropping the Shutdown
One habit I am dropping next month is the daily shutdown I’ve been trying to maintain for the last two months. It’s just not working for me. I need to spend some more time mulling ways to be more productive, but the shutdown as I’ve been doing it just isn’t working for me.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash