Designing a Well Lived Life: Checking In (June 2021)

Checking in for [June] for my "Designing a Well-Lived Life" blogging.
This is about making small changes during the year to make larger
changes.

This past month was rather busy. I've been helping my parents to move
into a smaller place, and much of my time on the weekends has been spent
helping them process, pack, and move things. It's also resulted in me
decluttering over here, which has been both exhilarating and tiring.
This has overshadowed much of my intentions for the past month and made
it difficult to really focus. I've been exhausted and crabby and loathe
to get up to do any more work. But, this is a practice ground and the
one thing I can do is keep trying and keep plugging away. Hence, that's
why I'm checking in this month.

• Work on my game projects at least three times a week: This was the
  first thing to go. I've not been getting up early (which is when I
  tend to work on these) so I haven't worked on them at all. By the
  time I'm done with work the last thing I want to do is more work, so
  I keep putting these off. What will help is if I decouple the time
  that I work on this and pull back from needing to be refreshed. Even
  if I can give these a little space they might prove less burdensome
  and more enjoyable. Definitely an area to work on.

• Meditation and mindfulness: This was also pushed aside. Even two
  minutes felt like a bridge-too-far. Need to reconnect with this
  practice each day and not feel burdened by just giving myself space.

• Work with less distractions and more focus on deeper work
  (Relentlessly prune bullshit): Mildly successful. There were periods
  where I was able to work without distractions but the more tired and
  exhausted I am the more I seek comfort in external sources
  (Mastodon, Youtube, BoardGameGeek, etc.) Pulling back on needing
  comfort may help here.

• Walk or ride the recumbent bike at least four times a week: My
  exercise this month was moving boxes, whether it was at my parents
  or at the post office (shipping off things to the Internet Archive).
  Not sure if I can claim this as mindfully exercising, but at least
  I'm moving, so calling this a win.

• Get further out of debt: Ho boy. I'm still making progress on our
  credit card debt and paying off bills, but I've also been finding
  myself purchasing more RPG games this past month. I need to curb
  that spending considerably, and hope that with the price increase at
  DriveThru RPG on premium color books that will be a slight
  disincentive to keep funneling my money into RPG books.

• Play more games: The next thing to get set aside was my desire to
  play any games. I've been reading a lot, and have a backlog of games
  that I would like to try out, but at the moment I'm not feeling the
  space to play any of them. We'll see if I can make some progress on
  this next month.

• Spend at least one night a week working on programming projects:
  Even with Coffee House Coders being once a week I've not done
  anything related to external programming projects. My headspace in
  this area is essentially moribund.

• Declutter and make our place more alive: Made some significant
  progress in this area out of necessity. With an influx of stuff
  coming in I have become way less patient to keep anything that isn't
  being used anytime soon. This has resulted in me listing a bunch of
  board games for sale/trade, donating books and 78rpm records, and
  just making space where I can. At the very least I can say that I've
  made some headway to removing some of the cruft that has been
  building up.

July is going to be an interesting month. I still have boxes of stuff to
ship out, and hopefully we can unload some of what we have taken on when
things settle, but for now despite my complaints I'm relishing the
progress that I have made with decluttering. If I can keep the mindset
that I don't have to think about things when I'm not the curator of them
then I think that will help me gain more energy in other spaces and help
me to reconnect with my projects and designs. Even so, I still need to
give those designs and projects space to thrive.

http://decafbad.net/2021/06/30/designing-a-well-lived-life-checking-in-june-2021/

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