Happy new year. What spreadsheets should I start?

[flexagon]

We've had guests here, heisenbug's guy friends with whom we get together every year. This year's our turn to host, which I love, and we've all had presents and movies and -- most satisfying! -- finishing up a jigsaw puzzle of this painting, which we started last year and one of the friends meticulously packed up in such a way that we didn't lose our progress.

I begin to face the notion that it's a new year. I wrote my 2017 retrospective, the one I don't share with anyone, and there were good things in my personal life; I was surprised how many good things, given the world stage, and also surprised by which ones they were (work made the "good" list).

My system of tracking a few key capabilities to maintain at the gym worked really well. In the end, of the ten skills I was tracking, I did nine of them in December and the tenth is something I stopped on purpose. I'm overall pretty happy with the list, and am trying to decide what to increase the difficulty of and what to potentially add. In case you want to hear what I was tracking:

• Left split, 30 seconds -- done 42 times. I could consider only tracking a one-yoga-block oversplit, but I kind of want to increase comfort here. Maybe the same, or 45 seconds, and I put a little star by the entry if I touched an oversplit?


• Right split, 30 seconds -- done 32 times, this is my bad side.


• Pike, touching cheekbones to shins -- I was barely getting this last year, but now? 34 times later, this is consistent. Sometimes I touch my whole torso to my legs! I should probably work on holding it.


• Backbend, tapping my chest to the wall -- 14 times, and yeah, a tap is good enough for me here.It seems identical in difficulty to touching one of my feet to the back of my head, which is less shoulder intensive, and I wonder if I should (therefore) swap it out.


• Backbend kickover -- three times, all late in the year. This one's a bitch, so many things have to be okay in order to do it. I'll keep it.


• Pancake to floor -- 57 times. I think I could start counting a one-block over-pancake safely enough, given that I have a 2x/week practice here that serves me pretty well.


• Chinups -- 5 from a dead hang. 43 times. This frankly doesn't feel like enough pulling, and on many of those dates I did more than one set. I think I should increase this but haven't decided how.


• Pistol squats, 2 sets of 5 on both sides. 36 times. This is also easy, but possibly enough? I just don't want to lose my pistol. I could start to weight the 2nd set or something.


• Squats, 6 reps at 130lb. Haha no. 4 times. Basically I found that I started the year very close to this, and gained it easily and DESTROYED my back flexibility in the process, so I stopped. Good riddance.


• Turkish Get-Ups, 55lb on both sides. 18 times, with a big old gap between 6/30 and 12/30. There was an injury here -- my elbow was hurt, and/or I think the 55 specifically was hurting my left hand? I still love them and can do them, and I think they're great for shoulder stability, but maybe I'll stick to 50lb.

I also want to prioritize hedonism more. Or maybe that isn't quite so? The dictionary definition says "the pursuit of pleasure; sensual self-indulgence" and I don't want to spend so much time pursuing. Just the pleasure / sensual self-indulgence part will do fine. I'm considering tracking a few things in a spreadsheet (weekly, not daily) but I'm still thinking what that would mean. The idea isn't far off from radical self-care, in that I don't want to postpone joy or comfort this year. I want to spend money on physical-comfort things and replacement of worn-out things, to take time for reading and erotica, to sleep, and to snuggle. Must think more about this.

Does anyone else on my list track their self-care / pleasure / hedonism in any way and if so, what do you track?

Comments

[elbren]

I haven't been super consistent about it, but I have, at times, tracked
walks in the woods
excellent meals
and of course, books I've read & knitting I've done.

other things I enjoy but haven't tracked:
making music
making art (ok, guess my knitting counts maybe).

[flexagon]

Those are so interesting and great things to track! Thanks for the response. :-)

I have, on occasion, made an effort to lie outside on the grass once a week (preferably under a tree) but I wouldn't have thought to track walks in the woods. I haven't tracked books for a long time either, but I think I will track "fun reading" here under hedonism.

[mangosteen]

Things I've tracked:
- Books I want to read, and capsule reviews once I've read them
- Movies I want to see, and capsule reviews once I've seen them
- Places I've slept (it gives perspective on how often my butt is strapped to an aircraft seat)

Additional things that I'm likely to track in the new year:
- Hours spent practicing piano (the juncture of 'learning things' and 'making music')

[flexagon]

Those are fun things to track, thanks for the ideas! I'm likely to include at least some categories of reading in my tracking. I'm not too into movies, so I'm unlikely to track that unless something is good enough to make it under "other". And I definitely need an "other" category.

[fandomonymous]

Doing my makeup regularly is part of my self-care and I used to track how much I was using what I owned of it, with a goal of actually finishing products instead of letting them accumulate. I think I extended this to other self-care products, including the oatmeal treatment I use for baths and sheet masks and the like.

"Times I slept more than my normal hours in a day" might be worth tracking as well?

[flexagon]

Thanks, that's a very cool thing to track. Thank goodness eyeshadow lasts a very long time!

Extra sleep is a great idea.

[drwex]

I'm terrible at tracking such things. It's an interesting concept and I hope you journal how you do at it.

[flexagon]

Did you read the other comments on this post? Other people have had some neat suggestions.

Someone suggested off-thread that I simply write up weekly "hedonism snippets" of what I did that week, and keep that in a doc to let patterns emerge. But there are things I know I want to get consistent reminders about, so for now I'm going with a hybrid approach involving a spreadsheet. It will need to have an "Other" column. So far I've got reading, money spent on comfort/fun, physical pleasure things, and physical self-care things called out separately.

[drwex]

I had not read other comments, no. Spending money on myself is a Thing with me and kind of a live wire.