As an Activator, I'm able to get moving on stuff. I may never finish anything, but I can definitely get things moving. And I'm pretty good at pattern recognition, though perhaps not always recognizing my own patterns.
This morning it struck me that I get into these modes of rigorous exercise and then continue to build and build on that exercise until my life is revolving around exercise classes, hikes, swimming, and health things like massages and acupuncture to the extent I can manage. Eventually, this starts to break down as Ruffles, sour cream and onion dip, and fried chicken take over and begin their own process of accretion. More and more I get tired of that, and more and more it is difficult and painful to get back in some semblance of shape as I age.
Noticing how I start to feel better when I exercise, I begin thinking, "What else can I do?" and I add another thing. Or at least try to. I know this: movement throughout the day is key. However, after staying up late and waking up at ungodly hours of the morning to do a workout, I find myself too tired during the day to do more exercise. I can sit through the whole day and barely move. So I've decided to gamify the day--whatever I did the day before, my goal is to make that the new baseline, and my goal is either to meet or exceed it. If I walked for 1 mile on my treadmill desk and did 10 squats, I should do the same the next day and maybe to 20 squats. We'll see how that goes. [Note: only reading this over as I was about to post it reminded me I was doing this, so I guess it’s not going amazingly]
In contrast, with my writing, my goal has loosely been to "write for an hour a day Monday through Friday." I haven't been keeping that up, nor have I been ramping it up, though there are moments when I feel like I can do more. That comes from the notion that if I overdo the writing, I’ll burn myself out and stop for longer periods of time again.
I'm now thinking of ways I can both improve the overall time spent writing and improve the quality of the writing while I'm writing. That's where I'm at for now.
