I Had a RWR Day!

So I have a pretty solid* metric for what constitutes a good** day***. 

There are some caveats though:

* "solid" means, the best I have found so far for myself.

** "good" means a day when I can at least go to bed at the end of it without that gnawing feeling that I wasted yet another day in this life. So it is not a metric that one would use for measuring the best days of one’s life. It is a metric for measuring the boring, forgettable ones, which are the ones that make up the bulk of our lives.

*** "day" here applies basically to weekday workdays. Those unspectacular periods of 24 hours when what we’re supposed to be doing is paying the rent and earning grocery money. Those days when we have to wedge our lives in around our vocation.

So all that being said, here is my very simple, but solid metric for what constitutes a good day:

It is a day when I can manage to run, write, and read. All in one day!

I’m sure that does not sound like much to some people and I’m sure that to others it sounds like an absolute horror show of a day. 

For me a Run Write Read (RWR) day ends up being rather fulfilling. This is in part because it is actually REALLY HARD TO DO! You try it!

Partly it is a matter of scheduling. All three of those things are better when one can devote some real time to them, but to make the math easy, let’s just say that each one of those takes or should take an hour. So we are talking about a day where I can muster 3 free hours. 

That shouldn’t be that hard. On the weekday workdays I’m describing, I sleep 8 hours, I work 8 hours, but those 8 hours really cost me about 9 total out of my day, leaving 7 other hours. I spend 2 of those hours in the mornings before work drawing my silly comic (@standard_kink) and writing these blog posts and doing a little bit of yoga. Now I have 5 hours left. In the evenings cooking and eating dinner usually takes about an hour. So I have 4 hours left in a day. That’s if I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. And all of this assumes that my job stays in its box (which we have allocated about 9 hours to).

You can begin to see how the hours slip away and how fitting 3 hour-long endeavors into those remaining 4 hours can quickly become difficult. And I don’t even have kids or anything. God bless though of you who do; I don’t know how you manage to accomplish anything.

All that being said, scheduling is only the first difficulty. The second is the truly difficult one: getting myself to do these things. I think that Quarantine really took a big bite out of my ability to motivate myself. It has been a very real challenge. I think we all did whatever we needed to to get ourselves through all that and that’s okay. Napping on the couch listening to podcasts, half watching movies with the sound turned down while munching on kettle chips, that was all totally fine under those circumstances. But not anymore! Now I’m trying to break the habits of the lazy napping-ness that go me through Quarantine. Here’s the thing about habits though, you don’t just break them, you have to bury them and then replace them.

I’m working on that, but I’m not very good at it yet.

However, yesterday (Monday 7-19-21) was a Run Write Read (RWR) Day! How cool is that?!

The thing I always realize at the end of a RWR Day is how not impossible they are. Every time I pull it off, I always end up thinking to myself, “I could do this all the damn time!” and that might even be true. Maybe some people do it everyday, but who wants to hang out with someone who has that kind of discipline?

What I do want, is to have more RWR Day. Doesn’t have to be every day (I’m often proud of myself when I can manage ONE of those things in a day), but it should be MORE of the days.

That’s what I’m working on now: more better days. 

Like I said, these are not the days that you’ll end up telling your grandkids about; these aren’t fall-in-love-at-first-sight days, win-the-lottery, or make-a-new-friend days. These are all the other days. I’m trying to make those days better.

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