'The List' Week 3

Photo credit to Tony Hand On Unsplash

1)      Always be learning a new skill – Podcasting, Greek

2)      Improve my current home – No money

3)     Maintain weight or weigh less next year at this time – Eating has been great.  No alcohol this week. Weight has not moved much.

4)    Continuously read – Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut

5)    Create content relating to this journey whenever it feels authentic and necessary – Created 2 more podcasts, a blog and ‘The List’ update

6)    Improve health – Exercise and movement 6 days this week and it is feeling ‘wrong’ when I don’t get out

7)   Simplify belongings – Purging and organizing.  This was delayed a bit because of the audit

8)    Earn enough money to be comfortable and reduce unnecessary expenses – I did get into the job hunt and applied for a job.  We also tackled our monthly expenses like a beast.  Cellphone, extended health etc all renegotiated or eliminated

9)    Make writing a habit – Daily Journal and blog. This has been very easy

10)  Seek out all kinds of social opportunities – Didn’t do a great job of this this week

So rather than address each one of these individually, I will do it as a narrative.

This was a decent week.  There were periods of real difficulty where I was overcome with stress, grief and anger, but I managed to keep at it.  The dry erase board where I have the routine tasks became my safe haven when concentrating on ‘The List’ became too much.  What I found was on the days I did not have the strength to make positive, progressive decisions, I just went to the board and checked off the easy stuff.

In difficult times, you do not rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your systems – James Clear

It is hard to explain, but the fact being on this journey keeps me mindful that I am on the journey.  It’s not like I wander day to day and get to the end of the day and wonder what happened.  The journey gives me the structure I need to move the needle forward, even if imperceptibly.

A lot of the things I do are low lift.  I like learning Greek, so practicing is not demanding for me.  What is difficult are things like (10) where I must make a real effort to seek out social opportunities. I live in a place where this is difficult.  It’s not like NYC or Toronto where you can just try a bunch of things.  Here you have to find something to try, and that can be difficult.  I am going to a bigger city this week to go to a film festival, but (10) is definitely a list goal that will require more effort.

In terms of the books, I have a mastermind that I virtually attend every Monday and we normally read business books, inspirational books or self improvement books.  The challenge this week was to suggest a book we would never consider reading on our own.  It was also an exercise in reading for the love of reading.  So thats how we ended up with: Kurt Vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions.' All the ‘gurus’ out there are spouting the same stuff, so reading outside of those genres might just inspire new ideas and thoughts.

I did not do a great job of improving my income this week, but I did a great job paring down monthly expenses, and that’s a win.  I started renegotiating all of my monthly contracts, as well as eliminating the ones I no longer want/need.  This is a tedious and lengthy process, but one worth keeping at.  Consider tackling one or two a week.  It is a bit of effort, but a great way to stop feeling crushed by expenses.  Cellphone, extended health and business insurance were all done this week, so next week will be cable, streaming services and home and car insurance.  It’s a pain….

Simplifying the belongings should maybe be changed to simplifying life in general? When you reduce the amount of moving parts in your life, whether it’s getting rid of your monthly expenses, selling what you don’t need or just decluttering, all of it has an incredibly positive impact on your life.  I might change this goal.

One things I will say, is that (5) - Creating content - has been a piece of cake.  In other businesses, I created content because there had to be a certain cadence for social media and building your audience etc.  But in this journey, making content has been easy because I am on the journey and it comes naturally.  I guess that’s what it is.

When you find the thing in life you are good at, the effort it takes to create should feel like a more natural extension of yourself.  Not that it’s always easy or painless, but that it’s a much lighter lift than fighting against your natural talents.

So that’s it for this week.  I had good days, I had bad days, but they were all days that taught me things and did not completely derail me from my goals.  Some things I cannot do right now, like improve my home, but I can start planning those things, pricing them out etc, and then making a plan to execute.

One thing I will say is that there were not any changes to ‘The List’ this week.  The goals were much more dialed in and didn’t need as much change or tweaking.  I do see some improvements coming, but once you change goals or change their wording, it makes sense to try then for a couple of weeks before changing them again.  It’s too hard to always hit a moving target.

Keep at it and see you next week.

© Intentionally Unfocused 2025