After the disaster that was March, I was fortunately able to do better with respect to this month’s goals. The overarching theme of April was getting my systems and habits back on track and making them more resilient, and as far as I can tell it has worked out.

Outcome of Goal 1 (Delineated Daily Schedule)

Overall I was surprised by what a significant quality-of-life improvement this goal led to. My work time felt more focused and productive, which meant I felt better about it and less stressed/guilty, which in turn made it even easier to focus. It certainly seemed like my subconscious got the picture about what the transitions were and what I was supposed to be doing in each of the segments. If anything this is probably just a testament to the badness of self-reinforcing cycles of stress and avoidance.

While the impact on weekdays was very positive, I had a more negative experience on weekends. I found myself often getting annoyed by how little time and flexibility it felt like I had, especially when I had other events and chores to do. I just had a hard time getting started on Saturday morning after a full work week, looking over my schedule for the day, and realizing I wouldn’t be able to “relax” for the equivalent of another full work day. In addition, forcing the “down” transition to be exercise and a shower really limited my options. I usually like to run in the evenings, but my plan meant that I have to run whenever I finish working for the day, which on weekends would be afternoon or first thing in the morning.

Despite these obstacles I did successfully achieve my adherence goals for the first 2 weeks, earning a satisfying reward. There was one point where a personal emergency prevented me from doing the usual downward transition, but there was never any doubt in my mind that it was the right decision. This is exactly the kind of scenario I had in mind when I added an escape clause for “if it’s obvious that I would have made an exception for a situation if I thought of it in advance, then I can treat it as an exception”.

I definitely would have convinced myself to loosen up the requirements if I didn’t have something on the line being tracked. After the halfway reward mark I decided to loosen the requirements on weekends, so that I can interleave relaxation and productive time without worrying about having a single transition (though I still stuck to the up transition). Forcing myself to stick to the full specified goal for the first half of the month made me get used to the new system enough to know which parts I could get used to, and which continued to feel counterproductive in practice - this is a setup I’ll likely repeat in the future.

In general I believe this should be considered a success on all counts, though I technically didn’t stick to the letter of the weekend-downward-transition requirement in the latter half of the month. I should probably add another escape clause of the form: “If after 2 weeks of trying some system I am confident it is not successfully promoting the goals it was designed to promote, then I can make adjustments for the second half of the month”. Subject to the usual conservative interpretation to avoid tempting myself into needlessly giving in to short-term discomfort, of course.

Outcome of Goal 2 (Re-Establish Habits)

This goal was surprisingly easier than the one above, despite nominally taking more time and effort. To me this is some notable evidence that habits don’t actually decay that quickly even if you stop doing them for a few weeks. I initially specified that this had its own separate reward system from the one above, but I all but forgot about that until afterwards. In my head all four subgoals were required in order to reach my 2-week target, and once I got past the first few days I had no problem continuing. In this regard my 70% prediction for doing proper productive meandering was probably overly pessimistic.

Though I technically achieved what I set out to achieve with this goal, my running frequency has taken a hit and isn’t where I’d like it to be. I’ve leaned far too heavily on the option I left for myself of just doing 15 minutes of random exercises and calling it a day. The most common failure mode is that I often want to join in social dinners, but I don’t have enough time to run beforehand and afterwards I feel too full to run until it is too late. I’m not exactly sure what to do here, but I’ll just call it out and consider making an explicit running consistency goal in May.

Outcome of Goal 3 (Catch Up on the Backlog)

This goal didn’t pan out at all. I caught up on the biggest most important item, but everything else remains on the backlog. I need to be less confident going forward about my ability to clear backlog items quickly, because I always seem to assume that no new tasks will pop up, which they always do.

Unlike the above 2 goals, this one didn’t have an implementation plan where I thought about what might go wrong and how to build habits and systems to avoid those failures. In the future I’ll avoid such barren goals and put in some more thought, even if the takeaway is just explicitly calling out “I don’t think this will cause any trouble”.

Other Takeaways

One weekend I finally got the chance to play video games for several consecutive hours for the first time in a while, which felt nice. The following day I felt unusually motivated to do things like write, which was a very positive development. Lots (most?) of my problems would be solved if I just intrinsically felt like doing the kinds of things I talk about here, so anything that promotes that is a plus. This probably indicates that my motivation systems usually don’t feel like I have enough play/relaxation time, which is something I should keep in mind. That being said, it’s unclear how much of that is just adapting to a new scheduling set-point, and how much is an unchanging constant. I’ve certainly had feelings in the past of “I am trying to spend too much time working”, but once I’ve actually gotten used to it and scheduled tasks that aren’t super aversive, it got much easier.