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Excuse Tracker. No Excuses.

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I’ve been making a fuck ton of excuses as of late, which I admitted on Facebook and stirred a good amount of discussion. I may be borderline depressed I think, but I think I can salvage this through journalling and more reflection which I have very seldom done on a week to week basis.will lam excuses
 
I figure I should make it as visceral and visual as possible. To the point where I wince. I’ve tried to be aspirational in the past and plan around being forward looking, innovative, etc. But when I look back at what I set out to achieve over the last say, 10 years or so, I don’t have much to show. Lots of tough learnings, but, lots of lumps and bruises, and nothing substantial or meaty that I’ve made significant progress in and stuck to through the years.

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2012 – A Brief Year in Review

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This is my last review of the year! It’s certainly been a year full of more downs than ups, but has certainly ended off with a strong finish due to taking on a lot of upfront short term pain for long term gain.

It’s been interesting to see how my year has evolved where my areas of focus have been whittled down from 5-6 areas (which wasn’t really sustainable) down to 3 areas. It used to include “Productivity” and “SEO/Career”, but I found those redundant as the goals tied to Career were closely related to “Learning”. Productivity was an area that was getting a bit redundant as I was more or less writing about the same stuff over and over, and didn’t feel it was a valuable exercise as I had RescueTime running the background at all times. One thing to note, is that having moved back to iOS after picking up an iPhone 5, I’ll be losing much more granular data on the smart phone level, which I will sorely miss. Perhaps that will merit a blog post in and of itself.

Financial Freedom – It’s been a lot more relaxed this past month in terms of how closely I’m monitoring the purse strings due to the holiday season and boxing week 🙂 I’ll be around a manageable “low few thousands” mark in terms of outstanding debt, which was forecasted and accounted for.

Milestones to work towards: pay off the rest of my credit card debt and finally have savings! And finally create a stream of passive income.

Fitness Phenomenon – I went to Muay Thai this past week for the first time in ages after Gabe had nagged and bugged me and finally reeled me in with a free class. Of course, I got my ass kicked, as it was weird doing wide arm push-ups with boxing gloves on. I was wincing in pain like a little girl because my poor shins hurt, but it was great nonetheless. A great cardio exercise overall. I’ll take up Muay-Thai classes in the future, but for now, I’ll stick to Crossfit until I get the swing of things in the new year. I should probably vary the styles of push-ups I do instead of doing exclusively military hands-removed push ups.

What I’ve done – worked on improving form and briefly touched upon Olympic weightlifting and found a love for it. Finished Murph in 1:01:14 back in August 2012.

Fitness Milestones: Be a lot more vigilant in terms of what I eat. Going to the gym 4 times a week regularly (up from 3) and putting a strong emphasis on strength rather than metabolic conditioning in the WODs. Can’t wait to start digging into Starting Strength! Make the Crossfit Toronto competition team by June 2013.

Learning – this is something I’ll have to aggressively pursue and narrow the scope during the new year. This past year has been mainly SEO/Inbound Marketing due to working at Powered by Search, but for the new year, I want to have a broader outlook in terms of online marketing. Specifically, I’ll be learning about “Growth” – be it lifecycle email marketing, growth hacking, technical marketing, SEO, Content Marketing – anything and everything related to growth, programming (for automation) and data analysis would be within my scope of learning for 2013.

What I’ve done: finished my last course at Ryerson University! 🙂 While I didn’t continue with Corporate tax, I chose the path of least resistance and made the switch to Ethics in Finance and am thankful for it.

Milestones for learning – finish Udemy Excel course, finish Udemy Growth Hacking course, learn Adwords, finish and keep up to date with DistilledU, learn how to build a simple Rails app, learn the ins and outs of WordPress.

Some other areas I’d like to add would be “Travelling” to expand my horizons so-to-speak, but I’m not sure if I’ll be doing that frequently enough to be able to write about it. A safer statement would be to visit two continents outside of North America. I think I should be half way there by March’ish due to the Startup Weekend/Startup Digest Worldwide meetup in Rio De Janeiro, but we’ll see.

Anyway, 2012 was a challenging year, but onwards and upwards for a stellar 2013!

Weekly Review – Sept 16, 2012

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It’s been a few weeks that I’ve posted a weekly review.  I’ve kept up in my Moleskine journal, but I was a bit lazy in transferring it to the blog and editing out more private details.  In any case, here’s this past week’s review.

Financial Freedom – definitely a step back due to a variety of factors.  Just have to leave the credit card at home…

Fitness Phenomenon – I went to Crossfit 4 times this past week, so going to the gym to get a workout isn’t really an issue.  The bigger issue stems from focusing on having a healthier nutrition plan.  I was toying around with the idea of trying Leangains approach along with Paleo, but that might too much to tackle so soon.  I’ll just try out a “Paleo’ish” diet that strips out white carbs and still have fruits in it.  Additionally, cutting out beer is a must do in order to cut through the last bit of fat.

Learning – I’ve rounded out my schedule to pave the way for my Ethics in Finance course now that I’ve switched out of Corporate Tax.  Right now, I’ve begun the process of inputting my refined notes into my Wiki.  All I need to continue focusing on is the habit of reviewing my Wiki during random pockets of time in the coming weeks.

Weekly Review – August 26, 2012

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Financial Freedom – things are steady and still progressing.  There’s not much to say other than I’m hyper-cognizant of my cash flows.

Fitness Phenomenon – went to Crossfit 3 times this week, which was good, although I could have pushed for 4 times, but I had to help out with family stuff which got in the way.  One of the aspects that I’m feeling particularly weak in is my running in between the mid-to-later rounds in my WODs.  I’m thinking running at an intensity of 70% would be reasonable, but I’m always feeling pretty burnt out by the last running component of my WOD and I’m running at about 20-30% intensity and I’m feeling pretty spent by then.

I’d like to try some tempo running where I’m running at 80% intensity for a predetermined distance, and then I rest for 1 minute and then go again until I hit a total amount I’m comfortable with, say 5 km.  I’m curious to see if it yields any performance gains for any future WODs.

Adobe Illustrator – I haven’t been as vigilant for one reason another because shit happens.  I know I’ve probably been saying this time and time again, but I just need to continually check in every day even if it’s 5 minutes to review what I’ve learned or to try something out really quickly.  Even though I’ve got a lot on my plate, I want to cultivate this skillset as it’s fun and quite useful.

SEO/Career – I’ve been learning regex (regular expressions) the past few days for a client of mine to due proper redirects.  I didn’t realize it would be such an involved process in terms of pulling in data from .xml files, importing into Excel, cleaning up the data, using concatenate to piece together strings from different columns in order to get the proper strings in order for the .htaccess rewrite rule.  It’s a bit confusing, but anything that’s foreign can be confusing at first.  While this is one of the many steps of becoming an Advanced SEO, understanding this stuff is crucially important in becoming a better SEO and ultimately delivering value to my clients.

 

Weekly Review – Sunday, August 19, 2012

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Lots of stress points coming in from different directions, but after a good amount of time to digest it, I’m better able to cope with it.  I realize that the pressure is coming from within myself and the deadlines I set for myself.

With school coming over the horizon in a few short weeks, I have to have my game face on and attack it with everything I’ve got.  I finished Cal Newport’s book “How to Become a Straight-A Student” to get myself re-acquainted with the mindset.  I just have to register for the damn course, which has been the most ass-backward sign up process I’ve ever come across.

Family life should be a bit better now that renovations are done.  It’s just a matter of re-arranging shit.  With other family obligations coming up now, I’ve got to be a little more resourceful and only time will tell as to how things will work out (as cliche as it sounds).

I’ll just have to push-back my timeline unless I get a windfall of a cash infusion.  Patience is definitely a virtue in terms of overcoming this obstacle.

Financial Freedom – things are on track.  Just have keep spend less than I make and pay down a high percentage of my pay cheque.  Once I don’t have it, that’s it. No more fun time lol.

Fitness Phenomenon – while I went to Crossfit Toronto 3 days straight, I feel that my running fitness is really lacking.  I don’t think I should feel winded during my runs.  My endurance sucks and I’m just huffing and puffing during the last round when I’m running for time.  I should start running longer distances for speed.

SEO/Career – learning every day, as usual.  Client load is getting a bit more challenging.  I just have to be smarter with how I work, utilizing Parkinson’s Law and the 80/20 rule.  Things will be looking up.

Adobe Illustrator – I only checked in once last week.  Argh! It’s tough having a tricky schedule with work.