Author: brianjohnson

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Not Working Out is an Emergency – And Perhaps Others

I was looking through my workout results from the week and had a realization today. Any time I’m not consistently working out, I should consider it an emergency in need of immediate remediation.

I only took off something like 5 weeks of working out. Partially due to having COVID and generally being constantly sick, and partially due to traveling and not being able to find a gym that would let me sign up.

Regardless of the reasons, the results were dire. In taking 5 weeks off, I lost something like 5 months of strength gain.

Now, to be fair, there are some confounding factors. I was sick a lot and that likely contributed to a greatly increased rate of muscle loss. I didn’t eat nearly as much and barely moved for a while.

Additionally, there are three factors which all currently have an unknown impact on my strength:

  1. I’m in Mexico City at something like 7500′ of elevation. Thinner air might affect me greatly
  2. I’m in Mexico City, along with its pollution
  3. I recently recovered from COVID, and it’s entirely possible that it left me weaker than before (decreased lung capacity, etc)

For the first two, I’ll soon find out if they have any real impact on me once I return home. For #3, I may never know. I do know I’m regularly out of breath even when I’m not doing anything, though all three together could play a part in that.

But ultimately, in just a very short amount of time, my inactivity undid a monumental effort I put in to build strength in the preceding months.

In 5 months I probably spent something like 150 hours working out to achieve a certain level of strength, but it was the missed 35 hours of workouts here that undid it all.

Using those numbers, the missed workouts were more than 4 times as influential in terms of my results. That’s insane.

So if I find myself in another position where I’m not working out, I need to treat it like the emergency that it is and fix it immediately.

But this also got me thinking… With my workouts, my results are tangible and, conveniently, numerical. There’s no guesswork and nothing subjective. I can see when I do better or worse, and by how much.

As a result, it was very easy for me to identify that this is a major issue and that I need to go to great lengths to avoid it happening again.

But what about… You know, everything else?

I have lots of goals and lots of things I’m learning and developing. I often take large breaks from those as well. Could it be that taking time off is just as damaging for those, if not more?

And I’m thinking that the answer is: definitely.

So when I’m home and I take 3 months off from really practicing Spanish, I think it’s pretty likely that I’m doing massive damage to my progress.

Now it’s true that I think knowledge is a bit more indelible than muscle. In a year you’d likely lose 100% of the muscle you’ve gained from weight training. But you’re never going to forgot 100% of something you’ve learned well.

But even so, I think consistency with all things is perhaps even more important than we’re told.

I need to focus more in my life on consistency over time in all pursuits. Always keep moving forward!

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I Know How to Grow, I just Haven’t Done It

As I’m reading through old posts and considering my current position, I’m realizing that I probably know exactly how to grow my business and am just not doing it.

Case in point: working with one of my partner companies, they have a variety of websites they’d like us to host. Once they are over to us, we can begin billing for that hosting.

It’s up to me to make sure those sites get migrated. And I just haven’t been doing it.

This is the proverbial “low hanging fruit” and I just haven’t been pursuing it at all, despite the fact that I absolutely have.

Yes: it’s more exciting to talk to a new client and make a new sale. In this case, the sale is already done, and all that remains is the boring logistics of actually migrating the websites and setting up billing.

What this might be reflective of is the fact that I love the conceptual, the novel, and the big-picture. I don’t love details and implementation. But in this case, they are absolutely critical.

Reading through my posts, I also have countless ideas of how to expand my hosting operations. But I’ve barely implemented any of them.

Networking with owners of other website hosting companies would be a great start! So I think it’s time to finally get to that and other ideas.

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Pandemic Update

I’m pretty sure most of my most recent predictions have fallen completely flat. Unlike the infections curve…

The last time I wrote, I was confident that the vaccines would effectively end the pandemic, at least among highly-vaccinated populations.

I was completely wrong.

What I didn’t know was that the Delta variant was going to ruin everything. The anti-vax movement is also most likely much larger than I had believed.

As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID. At one point or another, everyone is going to get it no matter what they do. Perhaps they won’t have symptoms, but vaccinated or not, they will get it.

At the moment I’m still a little frustrated with the CDC and their messaging guidelines. For a long time now, I think their one and only goal has been to increase the vaccination numbers at any cost.

That may seem like a reasonable strategy, but the problem is they are doing it at the expense of the already-vaccinated and also tarnishing their reputation while they are at it.

They are still maintaining that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated are exceptionally rare.

They aren’t.

I trusted them on that and I wasn’t careful, and I got COVID. As did many who were at the same event, all vaccinated.

The data is now showing that the vaccines aren’t very effective against the Delta variant. They are still better than nothing, and most importantly they are still very effective at preventing serious illness.

But they should be giving us all the relevant information and they currently aren’t. They are still maintaining that it’s unlikely you’ll get COVID if you’re vaccinated and that simply isn’t true. Besides my own anecdotal evidence, there is now a large body of evidence showing that it confers something like a 30-40% protection.

Good, but not great.

And now we have the Omicron variant looming. We don’t know yet whether it’s worse than Delta but it appears to be spreading rapidly.

I truly believed that for my own intents and purposes, the pandemic was going to be over by this fall. Instead, it’s now surging globally and shows no signs of slowing down. Our vaccines helped for a little while but now it is too far mutated and can barely be slowed.

With all these things in mind, predictions are quite difficult but I’ll try to make some:

  • The virus will keep mutating and being a problem for years to come
  • I don’t think it will ever go away, it will just become endemic like the Flu
  • I think that it will slowly get less and less bad until it’s not something we think about or talk about, but that won’t happen until probably late 2023
  • I think we’ll have updated vaccines in the US by Summer or possibly Fall 2022 which will more effectively combat the newer variants
  • By the time it’s done, I think some pretty stark economic divides will be revealed in the US between places that were highly vaccinated and took it seriously and those that didn’t
  • History will not be kind to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers

I’m not sure I feel the least bit confident about anything else. Who knows what will happen.

I do think the country in general is going to go through a rough patch. People are going to get more and more angry and we’re going to have some pretty crazy events happen in the next several years.

I don’t quite believe civil war is possible for a number of reasons, but I think a reckoning of sorts is coming.

There’s never been a better time to learn another language and live abroad!

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My Productivity Has Multiplied Almost Overnight

I’m finally back on track.

I had a bit of a spell there were I was sick a bunch and got into some really bad habits of wasting time on social media and the internet and was generally overwhelmed and it sort of got a vicious cycle going.

And now I’m out of it!

It’s hard to say exactly to what extent I just forced myself to do better and to what extent I may just… Recovered. It’s possible I still had lingering effects from illness. It’s very difficult to say!

But I’ve just been focusing on improving a bit every day! And it’s worked.

The first thing I did was uninstall the Facebook app on my phone, which is something I’d strongly recommend everyone do and I keep up with in the future.

And then I just really focused on my to-do and knocking that out. I allowed small lapses were I lost focus but made sure to always go back to work soon.

Now I’ve completed all my pressing to-do items and am keeping up well with new tasks.

Additionally, I finally got around to joining a gym and have actually been going. I bought a guitar so I can practice here which is something I’ve been meaning to do since I got here.

I’m also reading again and rapidly improving my Spanish through social activity, watching Spanish media, and studying.

These are all things I wasn’t really doing at all two weeks ago (except speaking to people in person).

It could also simply be that I’ve gotten established and comfortable here. I have a routine, I know where everything is, I have a social circle, and just all around I am comfortable. That makes it easier to stay productive.

I’m not totally sure what the lesson here is yet. Maybe it’s that I need to develop a routine and get comfortable where I am. But I think more likely, I really just need to focus on productivity, eliminate pointless distractions, and generally just stick to my routines and habits despite being in a new place.

One last thought is that I tend to feel somewhat lost in a new city before I develop a social circle. Getting that social interaction starts to feel like a desperate need before long. That desperation can be quite motivating and succeeds in helping me actually meet people. But it also totally distracts me from everything else, which I need to be careful about.

That could probably be its own post so maybe I’ll expand on that another time.

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I’m Way Better at Revising Than Creating

I’ve known this for a long time, but I think that I’m way better at revising than I am at creating.

Or, at the very least, it is way less mentally and emotionally draining to revise than it is to create.

In context of work, this means that starting something from scratch is always super daunting to me. Whether it’s writing a proposal, researching and/or putting together something that I’ve never worked with before, or even building a website, it always feels like a massive burden to do the initial work.

However, once I’ve done that, it is usually very easy to tweak it or improve upon it. It doesn’t take much mental effort and it usually goes very quickly. What’s more, I am often much more able to take a step back and think critically about it and make required changes.

So what does this mean?

I think it means that I need to put a lot less pressure on myself when creating something new. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be good!

I’ve found that usually it’s better for me to just start with something and then work with it until it’s usable.

It feels sort of like loosely molding a lump of clay into the general shape until proceeding to add detail and turn it into art. Not that I’ve worked with clay much in the last 20 years…

Even recently, I’ve found that I’ve just put off certain types of work and they become huge roadblocks to getting anything done. They make me stressed and totally unproductive. And it’s because I’m putting off the incredibly mentally-draining task of creation.

But if I focus more on simply “throwing something together”, I think that would take a lot of the pressure off and make things easier.

I’ve sort of done this in the past with proposals. I’ve broken the process up into several steps. The first one is just to basically just read my notes and break off any actionable items into another document. And it helps tremendously!

I still feel the pressure to ultimately make an entire, good proposal all at once, though. And I need to stop that because it’s slowing me down.

I’m sure this applies elsewhere, too. Creation is hard. But you can always work your creation into something usable, and sometimes that’s way easier.

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I Mostly Only Like Activities That Feel Like Growth

I had an epiphany today. I was using my flashcard app and learning new Spanish vocabulary. And while it’s not “fun” in the classical sense, I like doing it and it feels good.

Why?

Because it feels like I’m growing myself. I’m doing better. I’m creating a future that is better. And I really like that.

I tend to like anything that feels like an investment in myself, my life, or even in others. I enjoy activities that feel like they’ll lead to exponential growth.

As sort of a side note, I remember as a kid always really loving RTS games where you gather resources and grow exponentially. While I can’t help but think now that maybe those games served to subconsciously inure me to unregulated capitalism and the concomitant exploitation and exhaustion of the natural world (lol), it also maybe instilled in me the love of growth and scale.

So that’s all great, but why is this particularly relevant at the moment?

Because I don’t really feel like I have that in my business at the moment. I sort of feel like I’m just keeping up and managing what I have without any real possibility of growth.

There are lots of reasons for this, some of them more relevant than others. Since the pandemic began, I haven’t really spent any time “on the business”. I haven’t been planning how I can grow and acting on those things.

Despite that, I have continued to grow. It’s important that I acknowledge that because I think it will help me change my mindset here.

But even so, it hasn’t been MY focus. It has not been where my head is at when I’m working. And whether it’s true or not, it sort of feels like I’m at a peak.

I don’t really intend to come up with a solution in this post, but I do just want to acknowledge this problem and put it on my own radar so that I can figure out a way forward that fixes it.

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I Need to Get My Act Together

It’s a bit of a perfect storm. I’ve been consistently uprooting myself to move somewhere new, I’m in a new city, I’m trying to meet lots of new people, and I’m possibly still recovering from COVID.

The results speak for themselves.

They are bad.

I’ve been incredibly unproductive in my time here in Mexico. When I first arrived I found out I had COVID. That completely wiped me out and drained me of all energy. Understandably, I didn’t get a lot done.

But I recovered. I picked up some bad habits of watching way too much YouTube and going on Facebook.

And now I feel like I’m barely working or accomplishing anything at all. I finally moved into a place that I’ll actually stay in for a while, and I love it. I have it all to myself and it’s a place that can actually feel stable for me. I’m hoping that helps.

It’s entirely possible that I have lingering effects from COVID still. Though I’ve been recovered for several weeks, I still feel like I have very little motivation to work or get anything done. And lately I’ve felt like it’s been sort of hard to “catch my breath” even though I’m not doing anything. Granted, as I write this I’m probably sitting at nearly 7500′, so the air actually is much thinner.

Regardless, I think I just need to focus on getting back on track. I need to get into a good routine where I’m productive. I need to stop watching YouTube videos and going on Facebook.

I’m in a great position where I can travel whenever I want while still doing okay financially, but I can’t get complacent. With just a little bit of effort I should be able to continue growing the business AND having fun.

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I’m Actually Way More Productive on the Treadmill

It’s maybe a little ridiculous, but I built a desk and mounted a monitor over my treadmill. It’s all wired in to my regular work desktop and I can easily switch between my regular desk and the treadmill.

You’d think that walking while working would be really distracting, but I think I’ve found the opposite. I tend to be much more focused and, more importantly, my focus stays on important things. I find I’m much less likely to drift into things like reading the news or wasting time elsewhere, and if I do, I don’t linger long.

My mom used to always say that when I was a kid, I always had to be doing two things at once. It was the only way I could effectively do anything. I probably should do some more research here, but two thoughts come to mind on this topic:

  1. That sounds like a likely ADHD symptom. I should probably investigate that.
  2. Studies have shown multitasking is actually not an effect method of productivity.

Given #2, I’m not really sure why this works. It’s possible that the studies investigated more of doing two difficult, cognitive tasks simultaneously vs. a low-level task like simply walking. Or perhaps I do have ADHD or something and the studies only apply to people who don’t.

I’m not really sure!

But if it works for me, I should keep doing it. And clearly the health benefits alone are worth it, so I should really focus on doing it consistently.

I just wanted to get my thoughts down and also leave this here as a reminder that I need to keep using it. Especially since I already have it and it’s all set up.

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We Fill Up Our Time Until We Have None

It’s an interesting dilemna. If we have extra time, we slowly fill it up until we no longer have time for anything that’s not critically important.

Worse still, if you don’t have any extra time then you probably are deeming lots of things as “unimportant” even though they are critical to your continued growth and development.

Case in point: I haven’t really read any books or studied much Spanish in a while. I’ve been “too busy”.

It’s so critical to be deliberate in the use of your time, and I think most people put so little effort into it. It’s no wonder why most people are constantly stressed and totally unproductive.

If you’re putting out fires all day, you’re going to be stressed.

I’ve definitely been guilty of this to a large extent lately, and I need to be really careful and intentional about everything so I can reclaim it.

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Update: A Totally New (But Familiar?) Place

Things have changed quite drastically since I last wrote.

A month and a half ago, we were very much in a slow period. I had no active projects and really not much going on.

And then, all at once, everything changed.

Several prospective clients finally pulled the trigger. Some major projects and opportunities started with two new business partners (one old, one new), leading to a huge amount of new work.

And lots of existing clients came at me with new tasks as well.

To handle all of this, I needed to take on some new contractors. I immediately posted some listings on Upwork.com and within about a week, hired three new developers in addition to the three I’ve been working with.

And I’ve been working with them for a few weeks now, and it’s actually going great. I’ve been assigning basically all work to a contractor now and having them handle things.

I feel like I’ve finally taken a step back and embraced the project manager role.

It’s weird because I sort of feel like I’ve been here before, yet it feels totally different. At the end of 2018 and very start of 2019, it felt like nothing could go wrong. We had been consistently and aggressively growing, we were booked for months out, I had a full time employee, and all was well.

And then it wasn’t.

I grossly underestimated the hours to complete a massive new project, which sucked all of my resources for what seemed like an eternity (and was literally like a year). It prevented me from finishing or starting other, paying projects and focusing on growing my business.

And then, likely as a direct result of that project, my employee resigned, followed shortly thereafter by one of my two contractors.

I was living abroad at the time and loving that experience while everything else sort of crashed down, as is well-documented in other posts. But from then on, I vowed to do things very differently.

And I have.

I’ve been growing my business in a more sustainable way that allows for me to live the life I want to live. But I’ve also focused more on the fundamentals of running the business and growing it properly.

Whereas at the end of 2018 it felt like I was venturing in to a mysterious new world without really having a sense of what’s happening, this time it feels like I’m sailing through familiar waters. The foundation of everything is much stronger and I’m armed with more experience and insight into where I want to go and how to get there.

I’m managing the existing projects effectively without feeling like I’m just putting out fires or jumping around all day. Back then I just felt like I was getting burnt out and constantly getting pulled one way or the other.

Now things are more relaxed and controlled, and even though we’re doing way more work than then and making more money, I feel like not nearly as much is required of me.

To be clear, I feel that my own personal output far exceeds what it was then. But it’s much more controlled and I’m doing the right things and as a result, I don’t need to spend as much time doing everything. And I’ve minimized the types of issues that require immediate and constant attention by simply doing things right and being proactive.

We’ll see what the future holds. Perhaps I learned nothing the first time I was in a similar situation. But I’m thinking things will be a lot better and that 2021 will be a banner year.