For the last month or so of 2023 and all of 2024 so far I have been focussed on being consistent with my training. I started off with walking 10000 steps a day in November/December 2023 and it has grown to 15000 steps a day Monday to Friday and 12500 steps a day Saturday and Sundays + doing BMX sprints 3 X a week in January 2024.
I have been amazed at how just a simple change to my daily routine has helped so much already! I am much fitter and starting to get leaner and my asthma is so much better than it used to be and my back is much better than it used to be too! I have also started walking on a treadmill while I am working too so I am reducing the amount of time that I am sitting during the day which is a really healthy thing to do and has also helped my back issues a lot!
I am also a lot happier and way more relaxed than I was before I started consistently moving (walking) every day.
I have also noticed that moving more has meant that I am enjoying moving more and that I do not enjoy sitting in front of the TV as much as I did before! This has meant that I have started to study again and I have been learning all the skills that would be useful for my work that I never have time to do while I am working! I’m 2024 I have found that instead of finishing work and watching TV I have been studying for an hour or 2 a night and learning new skills and gaining some fulfilment from my spare time as well. I have also been documenting my new skills on my blog so I hope my consistently doing this over the year I can start to earn some money from the blog!
After seen such a small change in behaviour as walking 10000 causing so many positive and unexpected knock on habits forming I have decided to slowly build up the habits gradually for both physical fitness and BMX training as well as build on my restarting study and blogging to try and build up the amount of positive habits that I form as well as stop all the negative habits that I have built up over my lifetime that have led me to this point where I am 30 or so kgs overweight, stalled in my career and living paycheck to paycheck scraping to pay all the bills each month.
Fitness-wise I am starting to improve my life as I have already built the habit of walking every day as I have been doing it every day for the past 184 days so it’s pretty well established as a habit now. For the past 21 days I have been doing BMX sprints 3 days a week and I am feeling the benefits of doing them too as my legs are getting much stronger and I am getting way more BMX fit too. I have decided that I need to get up early and do my sprints before work on Tue, Thur and Sat Mornings then I can use my lunch time to ride the MTB 4 X a week for the next 3 weeks then when the track work is finished I will drop that to 2x during the week and once at the weekend and use this as my next habit to build. After that I need to add doing weight training 3 times a week in the evening.
To plan this more effectively I have purchased a 2024 diary with one page day so that I can plan and track my training over time. It will be here so I will plan the next month of training progress when it arrives and add this year’s training so far so that by the end of the year I will have a complete log of my training to reflect back on. I will still add my progress here to but I will use this blog as more of a training journal I can log my thoughts and feelings as well as what I did that day.
I plan to start being more strict with my daily time management and try to wake up at 5am every day and go to sleep about 10pm that way I can keep my life consistent and I can work out how much free time I have a day.
This means that I have the following schedule:
Wake UP = 5.00
Start Work = 6:30 – 12:00 = 5.5hrs
Lunch = 12-14:00
Work = 14:00-16:00 = 2 hours
Free time = 16:00-22:00
So that means that I have 1.5 hours free time before work, 2 hours at lunch and 6 hours after work for a total of 9.5 hors a day free time and only 7.5 hours wok time! Working this out really show just how much time I have been wasting on my phone and lunching out in front of the TV. This basically means that for the past at least 5 years since I separated from my ex wife and only see my son at weekend mainly that I have wasted roughly 47.5 hours a week on killing time! That is 2647.5 hours a year or 13,237.5 hours in 5 years!!!! That is 551 wasted days, 78 weeks, 18 months or 1.5 years!!!! Wasted in 5 years Monday to Friday!!!! so much for never having enough time to do anything!!!!
After getting over the shock of the amount of time I have wasted I decided to work out a daily schedule for my work weeks which is as follows:
5:00 – Wake up
5:00-6.30 – Walking or Sprints
12:00-14:00 – Ride MTB / BMX Track
16:00 -17:00 – Cook and Declutter/ tidy house
17:00-19:00 – IT Automation study and blogging
19:00-20:00 – eat and relax (reading)
20:00-21:00 – walk on treadmill and watch films/tv
21:00-22:00 – Read
22:00 – sleep
For now I am going leave the weekends less planned but I will make them more structured once I have my week days under control! To make it harder to procrastinate on my phone I have removed the YouTube, FaceBook and Instagram from my phone so it is harder to waste time on them 🙂 Working out before work and at lunch time seems to be working for me over the past couple of months so I will keep most of my focus on that for now as its easier to form habits that work for you! It also means that I have done 3 hours or more of exercise before I finish work so anything I do after work is a bonus 🙂 I have also been enjoying walking at 20:00 ish every night while watching films or tv shows to finish off my steps if needed so I plan to keep that up and I can swap that out for weight training 3 times a week too when I add it!
To start reading more I have bought a couple of books to read one is an automation book and the other book is Atomic Habits by James Clear which everyone online says is a lifechanging book! I bought Atomic habits on kindle so I am currently charging my kindle up as I haven’t used it for so long that I’m actually impressed that I found it 🙂
At home I urgently need to declutter my flat and also build the habit of tidying to keep it clean and clutter free once it is decluttered so I plan to start building little habits as I go to achieve that goal. First off I will restart making my bed as soon as I get up to 1 make the bed tidy and 2 make it less likely that I will go back to bed once I am up. It’s also a really easy habit to pick up and helps a lot.
I am also going to give myself 30 minutes a day to do my decluttering and cleaning so that little by little I will get rid of all of my unwanted stuff and also build the habit of keeping the house clean. This is an urgent habit I need to form as at the moment I do not have space to use as my gym so it is hampering me adding weight training to my training. I hope that my just giving myself 30 minutes a day over to decluttering and cleaning the flat will be clean and organised and stay that way! 30 minutes is not very much time a day but over a week it’s 3.5 hours, over a month it’s about 14 hours and over a year it’s 184 hours or just over 7.5 days!!!!!
This shows how making small changes a day quickly builds up to make a lot of difference. So from dedicating just 30 minutes a day or 1 TV show to decluttering and tidying the house instead I will spend just over a week cleaning and decluttering in a year which will make a massive difference.
I am also planning to dedicate 2 hours a day to study and working on my it automation projects and documenting it in my it blog that has been monetized for about 3 years but has so far only made just under £60 so far! I think that this is a really good use of time as it will make my work life better as I am automating all the time consuming repetitive tasks common tasks it will leave me free to get on with the more interesting development tasks that I never have time to get involve with! It should also lead to career progression and hopefully an increased salary to boot to make life better 🙂 Regularly adding to the blog should hopefully result in starting to make some money from the blog which will help and once I finish working on my automation stuff in a couple of months I will work on getting the blog earning more as well. I haven’t done any work to get the site highly ranked on google and I have a couple of pages ranked number 1 in a couple of searches with no work so hopefully with some work I can get a lot more pages ranked and get more money coming in from it! I like the idea of making money from a blog as it is mostly passive income once the blog is setup fully it only takes a few hours a week to keep income coming in! I am also looking at creating a companion YouTube channel later in the year once the blogs all setup with all of my new content and is ranking better and YouTube seems more lucrative one it is getting views and monetised than a blog is. Once reason for that is YouTube now forces users to watch ads before and during videos so its guaranteed income where as a user has to actually click on an ad on a blog to make money! There are a lot of Ai apps around no to convert text to videos so I may start doing that while I learn to make videos properly 🙂