Tag: 2016 Theme

Yearly Focus

2016 Focus: End Of Year Review

At the beginning of 2016 I wrote about my focus for the year. I’ve posted a few updates throughout the year but want to take some time now to do a final review. 2016 Goal: Write 50 Blog Posts Self Grade: 10/10 I was able to, thanks to a heroic effort in December, meet my goal of writing 50 blog posts. Here is a chart I found interesting. Blog posts per week vs miles run per week. While I got most of my running in during the first half of the year, I did the bulk of my blog posting towards the end. Though I hit the target number, this isn’t an ideal way to do it. Part of my reason for setting goals like this is to set a habit that I view as positive. I believed that if I focused on writing posts for a year, I would get

My Thinking On Various Topics

Steps I’m Taking To Get Sick Less

In 2016 I set a new record – the worst kind – I got sick more than I ever had before in a year. A total of six instances that averaged about a week each. 40 days in which I was ill enough to skip running, some of which I was bad enough to call in sick to work or at least work a partial day. This was an outlier year – my typical year involves one cold that knocks me out for about a week. Though I usually try to fight off colds without intervention from a doctor, this year I gave in a number of times and got on meds. On the third trip I asked my doctor what was up and he calmly explained that the combination of kids, an open office and public transportation and marathon training were doing me in. So armed with that information, and since

My Thinking On Various Topics

Measuring My Health

This year I set out to think about the topic of health – what it meant and how to achieve/maintain it. It should come to no surprise to anyone that knows me or reads this blog that my first goal was to figure out how to measure it. How to turn an abstract concept into a concrete number. Here are my thoughts. The Old Way I used to think of my health on a given day as a percentage. 100% was full health – defined by my normal self when I had no ailments. If I got sick or injured I would think of myself as operating at some lesser degree – almost like how you would measure the output of a factory. 100% means all machines are working at their expected capacity – if anything goes wrong then you measure the difference as a percentage. I have frequently used terms like

Yearly Focus

2016 Focus: Mid Year Update

With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. Now that the year is half way through (maybe a bit more) I want to check in on how things are going. 2016 Focus At a macro level I am doing ok so far, probably as well as I will do. I have realized that I spread myself a bit too thin with these items this year though. Introducing a new one certainly exacerbated that. Having four items of focus is simply too many. Some of them have overlap, such as running & health – but others take me in a completely different direction. One of the things I’ve learned and will change for my focus next year is to have the theme be a central item that the goal, challenge & exemplar all tie back to. For example if health

Yearly Focus

Health: Finding My Limits

When optimizing, the goal is always to maximize the output for a specific investment of inputs. Those inputs are typically things like money, time, effort, materials, space, etc. We want to get more bang for our buck, results for time put in, etc. No optimization problem operates in a vacuum though. There are always constraints – limits that keep the equation from scaling linearly forever. These might be hard constraints that stop you in your tracks. Perhaps the constraint is the number of available outputs. If you’ve already trained enough to win a race, you can’t double-win it. Or perhaps they are soft constraints. that create strange non-linear scale, either in a positive or negative manner. Perhaps the first 100 units of output can be achieved at a ratio of 1:1 input to output, but the next 100 require 3:2 input to output. This means that over time you have diminishing

Yearly Focus

2016 Focus: Goal, Theme, Challenge & Exemplar

With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I’ve enjoyed this activity as it has slowly evolved over the past four years. It helps me strive to complete things that I think are important or interesting but more importantly it give me focus by allowing me to say ‘no’ to other things. Categories Here are definitions for the four categories of efforts I undertake. Goal – Something I want to accomplish that is measurable and relatively continual. e.g. exercise X times per week or decrease sugar consumption by X percent. These are often habits I want to build into my life an my hope is that by doing it for a year, it will stick. Theme – A central topic for the year – something I can spend time thinking about and take a few concrete efforts towards. e.g. living in community or freedom. These