February Goal Progress: Week 2 Check In

I’m not going to sugar coat it: this was a really crappy weekend! I woke up on Friday with my voice about two octaves lower than my normal, and the cold continued to get worse throughout the weekend. I kept slowly canceling plans all weekend (including seeing Becky in Breck!), until by Sunday afternoon, I was sick enough to put a moratorium on seeing people altogether – I didn’t want to make anyone else sick.

I’m incredibly frustrated that this is the second weekend in three weeks that I’ve had this cold. I’ve heard from neighbors, friends, and coworkers that there’s something going around that takes four to six weeks to kick. Yikes! I am really not looking forward to more weekends of lying on the couch; I am ready for some social distraction to cheer me up.

On the bright side, I had long ago requested to work from home on Monday, so I didn’t have to change flights in order to stay home yesterday and work from my home office. On the dark side, that meant that this morning instead of Monday was my 3:30am wakeup call to commute to work… which is just the worst.

Because of my Monday morning flights, I normally make every effort to go to bed by 9pm on Sunday nights. Unfortunately, that still means I only get 6.5 hours of sleep to kick off my week, which is just not enough for me to function effectively. (Or to help heal this cold!) One of these days I will convince my clients that it is less productive for me to fly out at 6am than it would be to have me work remotely and fly out later in the day! I’m honestly not sure I should be going to the office at all this week, given how bad my cold is making me feel, but we have a really important meeting on Thursday and there’s some whiteboarding prep work that is tough to do over the phone.

Okay, enough whining! Upshot is that this morning I’m in flight and on my way to Dallas… so how about I revert to my normal morning flight activity of checking in on my monthly goal and setting an intention for the week?

Last week, I talked about wanting to find an app that would help with my goal of being off the grid when I’m driving. Enter: Drivemode. It was easy to set it up so that it turns on automatically whenever my car’s Bluetooth connects, which means I don’t have to remember to use it. Then, it offers easy access to my navigation and music apps, using a cool interface where I swipe and it says the name of the app out loud so I don’t have to look down at my phone to see what I’m selecting. It’s not voice controlled, but that means it’s actually great for when you’re listening to music or a podcast and don’t want to interrupt it for voice commands.

And crucially, Drivemode also has a setting to enable an auto-response to any calls or texts that come in while I’m driving! That last feature has been a bit buggy, but if I can get it to work consistently, it will be a gamechanger for me. There’s much less temptation for me to look at a call or text if I know that the person is aware that I’m driving and will get back to them soon – that means no feelings of guilt about a delayed response.

This week I drove a lot more than last week, so I feel like I’m now starting to reap the benefits of this challenge. And I am loving all the podcasts I’m listening to! Blocking calls/texts has been a great way to take time out from distractions and get to learn something while I’m driving. This week, I’ve mostly been catching up on back episodes of The Chalene Show, but I also sneaked in a few episodes of Jullien Gordon’s Relationship to Life… and that really got me thinking.

Specifically, I was listening to the episode on Relationship to Work, where Jullien talked about his experiences with workaholism. Workaholism is something I’ve always joked about myself having, knowing that I’m not even a little bit serious. Clearly I can’t be a workaholic – I’m not conscientious enough for that! I was the college student who procrastinated on term papers and crammed for tests, and so I labeled myself as an average student and nothing special.

And yet when I actually stop to think about it, I realize that I made the dean’s list at an Ivy League university… so clearly I was doing something right. For the first time, the examples of workaholism that Jullien used really resonated with me. It made me wonder if maybe I’ve thought for so long that I was immune to workaholism that I’m actually in denial about my workaholic tendencies. For example, I almost never take my vacation days, I frequently cancel evening plans to stay late at the office, and the idea of a sick day almost never occurs to me unless I’m literally unable to work a mouse/keyboard. Rather than thinking that I can’t possibly be a workaholic since I’m not burnt out, maybe I should explore my relationship to work (as the name of Jullien’s podcast suggests) and make sure I’m comfortable with it.

But this week is a big week for work, so I’m not going to think about that right now. (Classic workaholism? Maybe.) Instead – time to go pick up dinner and listen to more podcasts in the car 🙂