I didn’t post a June review. Which is weird because I thought that I got quite a bit done in June. And now it’s already August! I thought it makes sense to give an overview of how June went and the plans I have in mind for August. So here goes:
June 2020
June being the last month of Q2 saw me scrambling to meet all my Q2 goals. It was a lot of fun, though and I got a LOT of stuff done. Here’s what I accomplished:
- Completed Steve Pavlina’s Stature course. That must’ve taken me 100+ hours overall…but it was worth it. All the self-reflection and journaling helped me understand what sort of a person I am and wanted to become. I might create a separate post on it to share more details.
- Dove into writing short stories. Wrote 17 short stories in all.
- Read/listened to 7 books.
- Participated in a goal-crafting intensive workshop conducted by Complice. It was a great experience and taught me a lot about how to set goals.
- Set my Q3 goals! I’ve loved working on them this quarter as I will share soon.
- Connected deeply with friends. I truly think that I have the most amazing social circle and feel fortunate to know these human beings so deeply.
- Did the 7-day going with the flow exploration.
July 2020
The theme I chose for July was fiction writing. As a part of #theyearofme project, I wanted to explore something I’ve always wanted to do – write a novel. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. Writing fiction takes a lot out of me! But by the end of July I had finished writing more than 15,000 words in my novel. Not bad!
Here’s a quick review of July:
- Started working on my children’s novel. I think it will be a 40,000 or 50,000-word book. Right now I’m at 16000+ words.
- Strangely, what I found was that working on only the novel and learning fiction writing wasn’t satisfying. I found myself putting a lot of pressure on writing the novel and that wasn’t helping me with the creative process. When I dug further, I realised that the business person in me was itching to dive into creating income streams. So I decided to honour that and am now in an exploration mode! I’m currently working through the Authority Self-publishing course.
- Read/listened to five books: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, The War of Art, Finite and Infinite Games, As a Man Thinketh, and On Writing.
- Got some other important things sorted such as legal documents and investments.
August exploration
This one was a no brainer. In July, I allowed my sleep schedule to go completely out of whack. My diet isn’t the best either. I’m not exercising as much as I’d have liked to. So my plan for August is to get back to the basics. The broad theme is self-care but more specifically, I’m talking about all the basic but critical things that help a body function well such as sleep, diet, and exercise (in that order). Here’s what I’m going to do focus on the for the next 30 days:
Sleep
- Turn off devices no later than 12:30 am
- Be in bed by 1 am max
- Consume 0 caffeine
Diet
- Have one green juice or smoothie a day
- Have a fruit bowl with seeds and nuts for breakfast
- Have a salad every day
- Drink 1L of water
Exercise
- Exercise for at least 30 minutes 6 times a week
- Go out for a run at least 3 times a week
It’s so easy to ignore the body. But when it goes out of whack, life sucks. I spent days and days in zombie mode in July. It wasn’t fun. It’s time to put things back in order. It’s time to go back to the basics.