With the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. I believe that by focusing on fewer goals, I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than the sum of the results from doing many things.

I detailed my 2017 focus here (read that first if you want more context) & did a quarter year update & half year update as well. Here is how I’m progressing since then.

2017 Theme: Sabbath Year

2017 Challenge: Define & Launch A Sabbath Year

We launched the year on July 13th and are now three months in.

I’ve written some about the progression of my thought process, and I’m sure things will continue to change. There is more detail in the posts I’ll link below, but for now I want to sum up two thoughts I’ve had a lot lately:

1. It is really hard to have ‘sitting-in-a-hammock-reading’ type rest when you have three kids. My expectations were that I would have a lot more of that and in practice I have very little.
2. Though I don’t feel very relaxed in a traditional sense of the word, I do already feel reenergized to get back to my career. I’m a pretty good dad, but I really feel in the zone when I’m doing my day job. I don’t quite have what it takes to be a full time parent – I think I do better when I have other things to do as well. This is one place in my life where I think splitting attention is a very good thing.

More detailed posts I wrote throughout this quarter here:

• Sabbath Year – Day 1
• Sabbath Year – After One Month
• Sabbath Year – After Two Months
• Sabbath Year – After Three Months – Difficulty and Incorrect Expectations

2017 Habit: Time Outside With Family

The combination of nice weather and not having a job made being outside often very achievable.

In fact, my peak week hit 24.5 hours. Meaning I spent greater than one full day of that week outside. The average over the quarter was 16.5 hours, which is more than double the goal time of 7 hours. I only missed on one week and that was due to me being away from family for four days as I drove our van across the country. I might even have been able to hit the time in just 3 days if I hadn’t been so busy packing for said move.

While a 16.5 hour per week average seems great, and felt like a lot of outside time, that is still slightly less than 10% of the time in a week. That means I spent 90% of my time indoors. This is during nice weather, where I didn’t have a job and was trying to be outside a lot. It makes me think that most people probably spend 98-100% of their time indoors. That seems suboptimal for our species.

Here are some data about Q3.

For activities, the leaders from the first half of the year remain popular – parks, walks, & hanging out in our yard. A lot more activities were on the list though this quarter. It included over 50 different activities. I could probably group some of them a bit more, but for now here is the top portion of the list. You know its a good list when it includes things like ‘woods’, ‘raft’ & ‘pick blackberries’.

Looking at who within the family I spend outdoor time with – there were a few notable shifts.

First, all five of us outside together went from being a close second grouping to the clear leader. Not having work meant we could spend a lot more time as a family. Second, I spent a lot more time taking care of all 3 kids solo. I hadn’t done much of that prior to this quarter, so it is cool to see how I grew into it. That was made much easier by my youngest’s learning to love being in the carrier backpack, which meant she could go along for walks in the woods & park. Third, I spend a lot more time 1×1 with my wife outside. Prior to this quarter we had spent a grand total of one hour outside alone together – sad. This quarter we spent 15 hours. That included a lot of sitting on the front porch or around the fire pit after the kids went to bed.

For the last part of the update, here is a collage that includes pictures of a few of my favorite outdoor activities from Q3:

2017 Exemplar: Eric Liddell

After finishing a Liddell biography, I picked up a copy of the one book he wrote, a devotional about spiritual disciplines. Third quarter was fairly light on anything else in this area.