Hack That Life Back

I love my job, and that’s the core of my current problem.

Work presents challenges, progress, and results that I can clearly see as a result of my own efforts. As a result work quickly transforms into a progress quest and that is counter productive to having a balanced life.

Here’s a concrete example of the impact. I define being home for a week as sleeping in my own bed 7 nights a week. This is a lot more conservative of a definition than when I was in professional services and would often spend Monday through Friday away at a customer site, but my impact is no longer measured in billable hours and I am no longer single so this feels more appropriate. By this definition, I was home 20 out of 52 weeks in 2017. On any given week last year I was more than 50% likely to be away from my life and home. 23 of those weeks involved work travel.

Rather than setting a numeric goal or specifying a drastic lifestyle or dietary change this new year, I set out to just make progress on the parts of my life other than work.

So far so good.

Carmel Beach

I try to remember to take the time on work trips to cycle down and enjoy the unique places the job takes me. It’s easy to race back to the airport, but there are a lot of great things to see and do and new coworkers with whom to spend some non-work time.

Elvis Birthday Fight Club 8

My wife is very cool. Cooler than me. She’s up for going and doing new interesting things in the city where we live and planning fun events gives more than work+sleep+food to look forward to.

Being More Active: I'm not a huge fan of Apple Health's visualization, except the little green dots that indicate I did an exercise activity.

I’m going to keep trying to find a way to build exercise and better food choices into my routine. It has to happen. I’m not setting specific goals but I have to find something that works.

An approximate recreation of a peloton bike

In the effort of continuing the above, I bought a home exercise bike and some ANT+ sensors as a hacked Peloton bike. I’ll write another post to explain my build.

Play More Games

I am hosting a monthly game night for a group of nerdy friends. At least one game is picked out ahead of time so I can make sure that one person knows the rules. It’s hard for adult friends to make it consistently so I will have to resist running a full RPG campaign or Legacy board game. The objective here is to collect friends together, not to maximize gaming, picture advertisement above aside.