February just finished and I officially lost my own challenge. As mentioned in the January review, I will try to back up this month’s review with some more numbers and data.
February definitely didn’t go as planned. I labeled January a shitshow. I’m not sure I would be that harsh about my February, even though on a lot of levels it has been worse.
I’ve definitely worked less and also lost a bunch of paper profits in the stock market. Thanks Corona virus! And on top of that I lost my challenge after I missed to write a blog post on Friday.
On the positive side, I’ve spent a ton of time with my family, had some great hikes and good times with new friends. This Saturday we met a few families of my daughter’s forest school for a wine tasting and lunch. And today, on Sunday, we did a short hiking route with friends with a picnic after.
My Fitbit tracked an average of 13,410 steps in January that increased to an average of 17,854 steps in February. I normally walk way much more when I’m with my family or the kids. So the step count is a great indication that I really spent more time with the family in February than I did in January.
Since I heavily restricted the apps that are allowed to send me notifications, my daily notification count more than halved to about 30 daily notifications – those are mainly from financial apps, Stripe, taxi and food delivery apps. However, not receiving any Facebook Messenger notifications also made me check it manually more often. I need to train myself into not doing that.
I’m also not sure if the weekly reviews work out for me. On the one hand I like them a lot, but on the other hand I always create a long list of things to do and I don’t follow through with most of them. I often add other tasks on the fly and end up ignoring the previously planned tasks.
My plan for March is to get back into listening to Brain.fm while working on 25-30 minute time increments. I will also need to get back into using Todoist to create a list of those small bite-sized tasks.
I haven’t been able to maintain my Inbox 0 throughout February, however, I have been able to have a few Tab 0 days. I’m back at 10-15 open tabs right now, but at least I’ve not got 5 windows of 30+ open tabs each any longer.
While I published 31 blog posts with 15,573 words (502 words average per post) in January, I only published 28 blog posts (missed one!) with 8,461 words (302 words average per post) in February. I think the only way to improve the word count, consistency and quality is by actually planning to write these blog posts during the day rather than at the end of the day. I am often completely knackered after an early wake-up with my daughter, an intense work day and a lot of family time in-between and after work. My unofficial aim would be to write about 500-1,000 words per day on average.
Financially, the stock market was crushing some of our finances and InvoiceBerry’s MRR growth rate wasn’t as planned, too. I’ve submitted the company’s quarterly VAT returns and caught up on some bookkeeping too. However, I haven’t sorted out some other important admin tasks. Those aren’t planned to be completed before June, but I might need to schedule them a bit earlier.
Travel-wise, I’ve bought tickets for a DCx event in London for the beginning of July, but I haven’t finalised all the trip details and bookings yet. We’ve also planned a bunch of other travel ideas to Barcelona, London, Tbilisi, Utrecht, Norway, Lithuania, Thailand and some travel within Spain. However, none of those ideas are properly planned nor booked yet.
All in all, I would have liked to see some more action and results in February. I feel like those are coming soon though. I’m very hopeful for March!
Happy Spring!