Jorg's Brain Log

Interesting week again! Printing my weekly schedule in the beginning of the week works big time. The other experiment of writing down what I did every 30 minutes was also a success, because now I know this doesn’t work!

I managed to fill in my time-sheets from Monday to Friday. And it was interesting. But! I don’t need to fill it in afterwards, but plan it beforehand! I’m still not planning the day itself, instead I’m flowing through it! So from Tuesday on I will also going to make a specific daily plan, next to the weekly I already have. After planning, I will fill in if I managed to do it like I planned it.

General

• Sleep – No more polyphasic for now. Maybe in the new year a Dymaxion cycle. Now I know I can do it, it’s already satisfying enough. I’m going to try to get back into my normal 4 hour night with a nap in the afternoon. Optimal: 1 to 5, but happy with anything that shifts up to 4 to 8.
• Eating – Eat 4 times per day. Minimum of 3 paleo meals. No snacks!
• Business Habit – Going into details this week! I need to specify more to make this work. Expect a seperate posts.
• Music – Make some music everyday

Writing

Small change this week. First of all I’ll put down my normal publishing schedule. Even if I write all the posts today, they will be published in the following schedule.

• Monday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Skills
• Tuesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, CIO
• Wednesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Appetite
• Thursday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Skills, Sharkbait
• Friday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, CIO
• Saturday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Appetite
• Sunday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain

That’s 24 posts in a normal schedule. It’s around 2-3 hours per day to write all these posts. 14-21 hours a week. Then there is the book that I write when I feel like it.

• Book

And lastly, with no urgency, but only if I have the above finished, the stuff I missed last week:

• iJorg x2
• CIO x2
• Skills
• Appetite x2

Sports

Focus on three things from now on. Running, Freediving and Fitness. Yes, Fitness is back into the schedule. I’m so happy, I’m so happy!

• Monday: Fitness
• Tuesday: Fitness
• Wednesday: run 35min/5-6k
• Thursday: Fitness, Pool Freediving
• Friday: Fitness
• Saturday: run 35min/5-k
• Sunday: run 60min/8-9k

Lesson learned this week: Catching up doesn’t work! If you’re behind, you already failed.

General

• Sleep – I stopped with the polyphasic sleep cycle. It was fun, but the 3 naps during day time aren’t always really convienent. I think I go back to a 4 hour sleep and a nap in the afternoon. Lets sleep on it.
• Eating – It was my last week of normal eating 4 times a day. Next week on I plan to slowly go back to the paleo diet.
• Business Habit – good productive week, but still missing something. Working on it.
• Music – In the first half of the week I did a lot of guitar playing, so that’s a good thing. Was fun and felt good..

Writing

Because I had some catching up to do from the week before, it was too much writing in the beginning of the week, which gave me a little bit of a burnout in the end.

• Monday: 2x iJorg, 3x Shark Freediving, 2x Brain, Skills, Appetite
• Tuesday: iJorg, 2x Shark Freediving
• Wednesday:
• Thursday: Shark Freediving
• Friday: 3x iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Sharkbait
• Saturday: Shark Freediving
• Sunday: Shark Freediving

21 posts this week. Because I had a lot of catching up to I actually had to write around 28 posts. That was too much. So if I had done the scheduled 22 it would be perfect! So no more catching up from now in the daily cycle! Didn’t write? Too bad!

Sports

More catching up to do! Because of sickness last week I had two extra runs to do. This doesn’t work like this. Missed something? Do it next time, but don’t put it extra in the schedule.

• Monday: run 5k/29:10 min
• Tuesday: run 40 min
• Wednesday: snowboarding
• Thursday: Pool Freediving
• Friday: -
• Saturday: -
• Sunday: -

It’s clear by now that printing out my schedule each week in advance works pretty great. I’m going to stick by it for the coming months, to keep track and see where I can make improvements.

Yesterday’s experiment of not doing any work on Sunday worked out pretty well. I think I will plan this as well for the coming time.

Furthermore, this week I’m doing another small experiment. I’m writing down what I’m doing every 30 minutes. Lets see what that brings me.

On Monday I have to do some catching up with the blogs, so there will be a big  list. Also for sports it was shit last week, and I want to make up as well.

General

• Sleep – my polyphasic sleep experiment..
• Eating – Focus on eating once between every sleep cycle, that’s 4 times each day
• Business Habit – Execute every work day! Maybe 1 hour of work, but oh so  valuable. More about this later.
• Music – Make some music everyday

Writing

• Monday: 2x iJorg, 3x Shark Freediving, 2x Brain, 2x CIO, Skills, Appetite
• Tuesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, CIO
• Wednesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Appetite
• Thursday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Skills, Sharkbait
• Friday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, CIO
• Saturday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Appetite
• Sunday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Book

Sports

• Monday: run 30min/5k
• Tuesday: run 40min/6k
• Wednesday: Pool Freediving
• Thursday: run 35min/5-6k, Pool Freediving
• Friday: -
• Saturday: run 35min/5-k
• Sunday: run 60min/8-9k

It has become clear that improvement needs time once again. You can’t build Rome in one day and when you think of it, it will never be finished neither.

The path of improvement is what drives me, not the end result. As soon as I reach a target I set a new one and try to reach that one.

I have a lot of plans, but I don’t plan a lot! I plan stuff that can be planned, I do stuff that needs to be done. And in the end it’s just about that feeling of accomplishment.

In that regards it was an interesting week! Some experiments made it even more interesting then usual.

General

• Sleep – was shit. Due to a small stomach virus I was so low on energy.
• Eating – this one was pretty okay. But I really have to plan to get back to my paleo food
• Business Habit – also pretty happy, but not like it should have been.
• Music – I made some music during the week, but it was mostly on my son’s keyboard, which was fun anyway.

Writing

Due to the fact that I kept my laptop out on Sunday, I have to make up for some lost writing on Monday. Plan is that have everything up again so that is 22 blog posts and some work on my book. Schedule looked like this:

• Monday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Skills
• Tuesday: no writing
• Wednesday: 3x iJorg, 3x Shark Freediving, Brain, Appetite
• Thursday: no writing
• Friday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Skills, Sharkbait
• Saturday: iJorg
• Sunday: no writing

As you can see I’m starting to get into pro-active writing. Working ahead of schedule. But unfortunatly I was behind schedule again end of the week. Let’s try to fix this for the coming week. Just bad planning.

Sports

Pool freediving and only one run this week. I planned to do 2 other runs in the weekend, but my stomach was not happy, so I decided to put them ahead of schedule. I have to make up for this the coming week!.

• Tuesday: -
• Wednesday: pool freediving
• Thursday: run 5k/29:15 min
• Friday: -
• Saturday: -
• Sunday: -

Let’s make a Super-week coming week!

Due to last weeks big success, I’m continuing my ‘plan the week’ routine. Lets see if I can make an even more succesfull week then last week now that I’m not sick anymore.

General

• Sleep – my polyphasic sleep experiment..
• Eating – Focus on eating once between every sleep cycle, that’s 4 times each day
• Business Habit – Execute every work day! Maybe 1 hour of work, but oh so  valuable. More about this later.
• Music – Make some music everyday

Writing

• Monday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Skills
• Tuesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, CIO
• Wednesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Appetite
• Thursday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Skills, Sharkbait
• Friday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, CIO
• Saturday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Appetite
• Sunday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Book

Sports

• Monday: -
• Tuesday: swim
• Wednesday: run 30min/5k
• Thursday: Pool Freediving
• Friday: -
• Saturday: run 30min/5k
• Sunday: run 40min/6k

Appointments

From this week on I also review my appointments for the whole week. This way I also exactly know what the busy and free days are. Because some of the appointments are personal and include other people, I’ll keep this list private and only put the number of appointments behind it and the total time (including travel)

• Monday: -
• Tuesday: 2 appointments / total time 2:00 hours
• Wednesday: -
• Thursday: 3 appointments / total time 10:00 hours
• Friday: 2 appointments / total time 3:30 hours
• Saturday: 2 appointments / total time 3:00 hours
• Sunday: -

Time to reflect back on the week and how everything went.

General

Because I was sick I had to cut the schedule somewhere and the best thing to do it was here. My sleep schedule has been on somewhat of a pause. Eating is still pretty okay, but when I’m hungry I eat. Business habit was shit. Because of my cold it was hard to breath and talk, but I managed to do some of it anyway. And music was also forgotten, besides a few sessions on the keyboard. Better next week!

Writing

I’m happy to report that I kept to my complete writing schedule. That is 22 blog posts and some work on my book. Schedule looked like this:

• Tuesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, CIO, Life Skills
• Wednesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Appetite
• Thursday: iJorg, Shark Freediving
• Friday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Life Skills
• Saturday: Shark Freediving, Brain
• Sunday: 2x iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, CIO, Sharkbait, Appetite, Book

Sports

Stretching stays a problem. I decided to first get indepth information, so that I can start with a good stretching schedule in December. For the rest it went pretty okay.

• Tuesday: -
• Wednesday: 5k / 28:30 min run
• Thursday: 1100 meter swim
• Friday: -
• Saturday: 5k / 28:57 min run
• Sunday: 8k / 52,19 min run

Conclusion

It was a good productive week, when I take in account that I was sick for some days. Writing and sports still went well. Biggest lesson learned is planning on paper really works for me. So from now on I plan my week every Sunday evening with the tasks and appointments ahead.

It’s Tuesday already. For me it’s the actual first real day of the week. Yesterday was sick-day together with my daughter. I’m glad I managed to push out a small run in the evening. Still, I’m not feeling myself 100%, but enough to get back on track.

So what’s in store for the coming week? Let’s see.

• Sleep – I’ll continue from today on with my polyphasic sleep experiment..
• Eating – Focus on eating once between every sleep cycle, that’s 4 times each day
• Business Habit – Execute every work day! Maybe 1 hour of work, but oh so  valuable. More about this later.
• Music – Make some music everyday
• Writing – See my writing schedule
• Sports – See my sports schedule

I thought a lot why sometimes I fail with my writing schedule and sports schedule. There is still too much procrastination going on with these 2. So I decided to become more precise and make a schedule for those 2. So here they are:

Writing Schedule (Tuesday – Sunday)

• 6x iJorg
• 6x Shark Freediving
• 3x Brain
• 2x Appetite
• 2x CIO
• 2x Life Skills
• 1x Sharkbait
• Book: complete chapters overview

Which translates into the following schedule:

• Tuesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, CIO, Life Skills
• Wednesday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Sharkbait, Appetite
• Thursday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Life Skills
• Friday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, CIO
• Saturday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Appetite
• Sunday: iJorg, Shark Freediving, Brain, Book

Sports Schedule

• Tuesday: stretching schedule (find new one)
• Wednesday: run 30min/5k
• Thursday: Pool Freediving
• Friday: stretching
• Saturday: run 30min/5k
• Sunday: run 50min/7-8k

What a week!  I must confess that due to the polyphasic sleep experiment things didn’t exactly went like planned. At times the extra burst of energy gave me a lot of productivity, while at other times, unforeseen energy drains like zombie hours took time away.

Also I’m a day late on closing my week. There is illness in the family and I’m involved as well this time. Thankfully not too much, but enough that on Sunday evening I decided to abort my running after 5 minutes. And while not feeling so well, I managed to do a late night run today.

So here in short, what went well and what didn’t:

Sleep

I wrote already enough about this one. The sleep experiment is a success. Only due to illness I aborted it now for a day or 2, but I’ll take it up again tomorrow.

Eating

With the new sleep cycle it was pretty easy to eat only during each waking period. Still I noticed extra hunger between 3pm and 9pm and had an extra snack now and then. I try to be stricter the coming week.

Business Habit

Okay, I managed to completely neglect this one. Maybe on a subconsciousness level I was not ready for this habit. So zero points here!

Music

Zero points here as well. The times I wanted to make some music, the family was asleep. Strange I only have this creative feeling between 10pm and 8am. Lets see if I can change this.

Writing

Writing went well, but not on schedule. I didn’t do daily posts for iJorg and Shark Freediving, but I was on catch-up modus again. Really have to change this way of working. Lets see how to improve.

Sports

Went okay. Did 3 runs and some pool freediving. I managed to do a stretching session, but that didn’t feel okay. I have to find a good stretching routine for this week. I thought about track & field and decided I’ll make this optional again.

Lets start planning the next week.

And here is the new planning overview for week 45 in 2009, or short 2009/w45. Let me see how I can tweak this in such a way that it becomes easier and easier to follow and log at the same time.

Daily

The things that have to be done daily and can’t be planned:

• Sleep
• Eat
• Read
• Business Habit
• Music
• Write: iJorg
• Write: Shark Freediving

The above things can be marked very easily by okay or not okay. Everyday is the same, I did it, or I did it not.

Weekly

My weekly stuff consists of the following points:

• Write: The Next Web / Appetite –  3 times a week
• Write: Jorg’s Brain log –  3 times a week
• Write: Life Skills – 2 times a week
• Write: Sharkbait –  1 time a week
• Write: Book
• Sports: Running – 3 times a week
• Sports: Stretching – 3 times a week
• Sports: Track & Field – 1 time a week
• Sports: Freediving pool – 1 time a week

The weekly writing stuff can be done whenever I feel the most creative. Sports is different and should be planned accordingly day to day. So it looks something like this:

• Monday: stretch
• Tuesday: run – 30 min / 5k
• Wednesday: stretch
• Thursday: Track&Field / Freediving pool
• Friday: run – 30 min / 5k
• Saturday: stretch
• Sunday: run – 30 min / 5k

Running

To be a little more specific on the running part: I want to be able to do 90 minute runs within 12 weeks time. That means around 14k. Around 8 weeks I should be around 10k.

For the coming 2 months, or 8,5 weeks, it’s time for my second milestone. During the last 8 weeks it was all about logging and scheduling my tasks and actions and slowly expanding it, to see what was possible. Now that I learned a great deal of stuff about about my inner workings, it’s time to do some big experiments. I’m not sure how it will end, but I’m sure I want to try these things out.

I’ve got several self-discipline topics that I want to train myself in:

• Sleep
• Eat
• Read
• Write
• Some business-stuff I will talk later about
• Sports
• Music

This is just from the top of my hat. I’ve been thinking about some additional stuff. But for now, this list is long enough. It’s already a pretty long list. Let’s discuss the points listed.

Sleep

During the last milestone schedule my primary objective was to become an early riser again. This worked fine when I was still working from an office. Getting out of bed each morning at 6 and going to bed at midnight was not problem. Only thing was that I couldn’t cut back on the hours I slept like I used too.

I’m going to try for a sleeping hack to reduce the hours of sleep necessary and still stay highly energized and focused. I’ll write a separate post about this one tomorrow.  In short, I’m going to have 4 waking moments per day, and the rest of day will be schedule accordingly.

Eat

The paleo diet worked pretty well for me. At a minimum I weighted around 112 a few months back, but then I stopped with it. I don’t really remember why, but I think it was the amount of work that had to be done with preparing paleo food. Point is, that I’m now back at 122 kilo’s and didn’t even notice it. Purely by the fact of having a wrong eating pattern again.

In the coming week I’m going to do 2 things. In the first 4 weeks I’m going  to adapt myself to eating 4 times per day after my 4 sleeping moments. So each meal will be around 6 hours apart. At this phase it doesn’t matter what I eat, it’s just about the number of meals and no snacking or anything between them.

The second 4 weeks will be to bring back the Paleo food. Replacing a meal each week will probably do the trick. I all depends how it goes and I’ll take this from week to week, but maybe I’ll start sooner with implementing paleo meals again. We will see.

Read

Books and new information are important to me. I’m addicted to books and information. But this point is more about serious reading, concentrated reading, in-depth reading, maybe even called studying.

I scan a lot of online news articles with the use of Google Reader. I do this several times per day to keep up with all the latest developments, but in the end these are all articles shorter then 1000 words. Books tell a whole other story.

Book reading should be at least one hour per day.

Write

In the past I already set a goal of 1000 words per day. I’ll continue with this, but I want to make it  even more clear to myself. Because  I write for several different blogs with really different topics, I sometimes find myself in an IT writing mood and then in Sport writing mood. If I let this happen naturally I sometimes write no sport items for a few days and suddenly write 4 in one day to make up for the loss of the last days.

This way I’m always running behind. So I’m going to make a list of blogs and put behind it how many times a week I have to write for them. the blogs I write for everyday are most important and should be done first everyday. And of course there is my book, but I’ll cover that in more detail later.

• iJorg – everyday
• Shark Freediving – everyday
• The Next Web / Appetite –  3 times a week
• Jorg’s Brain log –  3 times a week
• Life Skills – 2 times a week
• Sharkbait –  1 time a week
• Book – more detail on this later

Business Habits

I’m still working on defying some business habits that have to be made. Got a few, but because they are internal business stuff, it’s hard to put them out in the open like this. I will have to think how to share these, before writing them down. For now I just refer to it as Business Habit, because it consists for now out of 1 business habit.

Sports

Let’s make this simpler than it is. Everyday at least 30 minutes of sports. Got enough stuff to fill it with:

• Running – 3 times a week
• Stretching – 3 times a week
• Track & Field – 1 time a week
• Freediving pool – 1 time a week
• Freediving dry – optional
• Fitness – optional
• Snowboarding – optional
• Swimming – optional

Music

At the core of creativity for me is music. I’m not doing it enough on a regular basis. So again a simple rule. Make music for 30 minutes everyday. Again, enough instruments to choose from, especially now that my son has also started with keyboard. I’m going to pick up my keyboard, guitar and harmonica skills with this one.

Keeping track

The same as the last weeks I’ll keep track of these habits and how it goes. This time a little bit more detail and a day to day basis. Reviewing last week and planning the new week every Sunday evening should do the trick. Expect a post about this week pretty soon!