25 days in the 100 days challenge

July 8, 2019 100 days

Wow, 25 days went by faster than I could ever have imagined. It feels like I was sitting in front of my computer yesterday hacking the words that brought me to the challenge into the keyboard.

So what can I tell you about the 25 days? So many, many lessons from which I could learn guaranteed and which will give me a lot of experiences for life.

I'm not going to go through time chronologically because I think it's just not as exciting as simply presenting the lessons from the days.

Oh yeah, if you didn't know what to do with it now and don't have a plan about what I'm talking about, read my 1st article, the Commitment, 100 Days Challenge, which is also pretty short, and then come back.

The first 25 days recapitulated

As expected, because I am human, just like everyone else, it took me some time to get used to the more or less new way of life. Although theoretically there weren't so many things a day that I had to reintegrate, it was still incredibly difficult to make them consistent.

My first 15 days were, in my opinion, a complete disaster. And due to my daily reflections, I can say exactly why.

I simply did not plan my days, as well as another point to which I will come shortly.

Not planning led me to realize quite late in the day that I didn't have time to do the things I wanted to do.

This has often led to me going to bed extremely frustrated and waking up just as unhappy.

The other point is that I set myself too imprecise goals, which partly allowed me to hide comfortably from things. Actually, I wanted to reduce this comfort, because it makes me feel bad.

After a week I noticed that I was somehow not on the right track and changed my strategy.

Planning is an essential activity

Almost everyone plans. Be it when to meet your friends next time or when you have the next meeting or the next deadline at work.

What I didn't realize at first, however, is that no matter what goal I had to achieve, in my case the goals I had defined, the way to get there usually has to be planned somehow.

As with every new thing I learn, when I came across the problem core, the lack of planning, I consumed a lot on the subject. From business blogs to YouTube Lifehack I believe everything was involved. At one point I came across the so-called time blocking method.

But before I explain this method to you, I collect together what I already used.

Before the start of the 100 days, I planned about so that I felt I had 10 appointments somewhere in the future and mostly only my current and next week, and sometimes not even these, in sight.

So I had the classic calendar and planner planning down, which in retrospect was somehow very alibi-like.

So what is time blocking? To keep me short time blocking, also called Timeboxing, means that I make myself an exact plan of my day, in which I explicitly block a time block for certain things, in which I will also work on it definitely.

More details on this topic will soon be published in a separate article, as I can tell you a little bit more about it.

With this method, I finally managed to add the activities that lead to my goals to my already very busy everyday life, without lying in bed at the end and not feeling okay again, because I didn't manage to do anything again.

This leads me directly to the next lesson.

Don't be so hard to yourself (at least not always)

Mistakes and setbacks are the most important means to grow and advance. I've always said that before, but I've never experienced how hard it is not to be mad at yourself when you have a goal that you've even publicly praised.

After a few days, this also had an effect on me again and I became aware of it again.

Even if you have not managed to meditate one day or to take an hour for yourself in any other way or to get to know a new person during the week, it is not so bad.

As long as you don't give up on your goal, you will achieve it, even if you don't manage to do what you set out to do.

Everybody has a bad day. In the same way that I had small setbacks, there were also a few larger setbacks where I just lay in my bed all day and could not move to anything. It felt incredibly wrong to just do nothing and just let myself be irradiated. But I think that's okay too, that you have a day when you can't get up and do something.

I don't want to say that nicely, but if your head and body just say no, then it's usually the reality that you need a day off.

It's damn hard to meet new people

I still can't get it right, it's difficult to just talk to a person and get in touch with them. One of those social inhibitions that I'm trying to get rid of is that we think it's hard or not okay to just make new contacts no matter where.

The best example that we are not born with this is small children. You can let go of my little sister at the beach and she comes back at the end of the day with 3 new friends and knows the whole community of her age.

This is a topic that I'm actively working on right now, so if you know more about why we are so shy towards completely new social contacts when we get older, feel free to write me or leave a comment here.

The inner flinch rules us

Of course, we're lazy. Our brain is set to consume as little energy as possible. That was also great in the Stone Age because it might have saved our lives. But we are clearly in the modern age and don't need this blockade anymore, which prevents us from doing things like running.

Conclusion

As long as I don't stop trying to improve myself, I will have improved my everyday life considerably at some point. I feel relatively comfortable with the routines and habits that I have built up and I am extremely excited about what is yet to come and what lessons I will learn.

Only 3/4 out of 100 days left.