September Challenge Update [October 2019]
For my September 2019’s Challenge, I challenged myself to sleep everyday by 11 pm and stop working at home after 8:30 pm. The point of these challenges were
- I will be able to get rid of the morning brain fog by having adequate sleep.
- I will have more time to spend with my son after I get home from work.
- This challenge will force me to finish all my work during my work hours in the office, so I don’t have to work when I get home
Due to time and situation constraint, I gave myself the 2 Days Rule by Matt D’Avella.
I am here to report that I HAVE FAILED at this challenge. Instead, what I gained is a learning experience.
What Happened?
The first half of the month started well enough and I had hope that I will be able to pass this challenge. At the end of the month though, there are days where I go 5 days without doing this challenge and I slept even later than my usual time.
After some introspection, I realize there are actually a few reasons why I failed this challenge.
Unrealistic Challenge to my Work Schedule
In order for me to shape the habits of sleeping early and not working at home, unknowingly, I created 2 challenges who combined together is harder to pass than if I were to do the challenges separately (Sum of the whole part and all that).
In my original post, I discussed why I used the 2 Days; I realize now, I was thinking too linear, as in if I don’t work on Night 1, I’ll just make it up on the second night, hence the 2 Days trick. However, what I forgot to consider is that, I am not actually making up the work on Night 2, rather on the second morning, hence swamping me with even more work during my work time. When Night 2 comes, I am actually more behind on my work load, and I end up going to sleep even later than usual trying to catch up, which snowballs into having more brain fog the next day, which means less work done, and the snowball grows bigger.
Combined with the work travel and the family travel that I had planned for September, I can say that September was a very tiring month for me, an exact opposite of result that I had hoped.
Unrealistic Challenge to my Work Situation
I mentioned in my original challenge post that I am in the process of growing my company and I want to distance myself from doing routine secretarial or administrative work in the company. I wanted to free myself from these tasks so I can focus more on long term tasks (marketing strategy, Standard Operating Procedure development, and such)
Around the end of August, I hired 2 more employees that I tasked to help me with administration. New employees equal to time spent training and time spent doing some of the administrative work myself.
What I usually do is once I trained my employees or taught them my S.O.P, I let them do the tasks themselves without me interrupting or even checking up on them.
After a few days, in what I call “Fixing Mode”, I will go through their works and note where they have problems with the tasks or the S.O.P and start fixing whatever needs to be fixed. This way, I hope that I can continuously improve my training method and my S.O.P which will allow me greater degree of freedom when running the company.
This has worked out for me so far because my employees learn faster and at the same time I am forced to develop my S.O.P. The drawback is, sometimes they will mess up really bad and I have to fix it for them before I let them try again
So, during September, as I was going through these challenges, I was also training the 2 new admins, while also creating and maintaining new administrative files for my developing S.O.P.
What’s Next?
I did fail these challenges but that does not mean that I will stop trying completely. During these challenges, when I actually did not work at home,
- I get to run around my kitchen table with my son pretending I am on a horse while he was on a Zoo-Zoo Tain.
- I get to sit on the couch with my wife eating an ice cream bar talking about random stuffs.
- I get to have a really boring night where my son and wife was already asleep by 8:30 pm
Whether I had a boring night or a nice talk with my wife or a play session with my son, I know it’s healthier than if I were consumed with my work all the time. So, the challenges may have ended, but I will still try to complete it in the coming months, maybe this time one challenge at a time.
