When you do things in the same way over and over again and expect different results, it’s called being crazy.
That’s how I feel about September—a crazy month.
In the last couple of years, September has been the month with the most disruptive changes in my daily flow.
Vacation is over, and with the new school year kicking off, everybody in the house wakes up earlier, throwing a wrench into my morning routine.
I’m not sure why I expected this time to be any different from last year—hence the craziness of the situation.
However, this year was a little more special, as my kid upgraded to elementary school, which means he has to wake up an hour earlier than he had to for kindergarten.
And this had a domino effect on everybody’s mornings.
Until last year, I could still pull up about two hours for myself in the morning, but this year I’ve barely managed to wake up in time to prepare breakfast before the rest of the family wakes up.
I officially declare September the Month of Disrupting Change. 🤷♂️
Hit my daily steps goal
Do at least 30 minutes of daily activity
My daily steps goal was 7.500 steps, and I had a success rate of 93%—28 out of 30 days, which I’m pretty satisfied with.
Considering I run 2-3 times every week, and I walk on average about 11.000 steps, I wanted to have a minimum threshold that I knew I could hit, however, high enough to have to push myself to reach it every day.
Regarding my second challenge, I only managed to achieve 30 minutes of daily activity for only half of the month—a 53% success rate.
In the first week, I had a full 7-day strike; however, after that, the school started, and I got 30 minutes of activities only on the days when I went for a run.
And that alone, considering my morning flow was seriously damaged, is a great success.
Objective: Finish an indoor Super Sprint Triathlon.
KR1: Swim 400m at an average pace of 2:30min/100m.
KR2: Bike 10km at an average speed of 25km/h.
KR3: Run 2.5km at an average pace of 5:00min/km.
KR4: Finish the Super Sprint Triathlon in under 50 minutes.
In September, there were no significant results to take me closer to my objective.
However, I had only one initiative and that was to make a decision on my well-being direction—become an Ironman finisher at the age of 40.
And this objective is the first milestone in that direction.
The biggest challenge was adapting to the new family schedule and finding time for running.
Despite not having my usual morning-me-time like before, I managed to squeeze in an hour between when school starts and when work starts.
That alone allowed me to run 13 times in September and keep my 2-3 runs per week schedule.
However, I failed to make any progress on my key results.
SMART Goal: Fill in the missing knowledge gaps to work effectively with AI by December 31st.
Milestones:
M0: Earn the DeFi career certificate on Coursera
M1: Complete the Generative AI for Everyone course
M2: Apply what I learned in my daily activities
M3: Teach what I learned in my community
Last month, I wrote that AI would be my focus for the next 3 months.
But disruptive changes did not happen only in my personal life. I also joined a new project at work, and this required me to shift my priorities from AI to DeFi.
Thus, to avoid creating a new objective altogether, I changed this one to include DeFi knowledge gathering.
Hence, the M0 on the top of the list. I know, I’m lazy. 😅
The newly added milestone is to earn the DeFi career certification on Coursera by the end of October, by taking the Decentralized Finance (DeFi): The Future of Finance Specialization courses by Campbell R. Harvey from Duke University.
This means that, by the end of October, I should complete:
M0: Earn the DeFi certificate
M1: Complete the Generative AI for Everyone course.
I’m writing this September update well past the middle of October, and I realise I haven’t made meaningful progress on most of these goals yet.
Still, there’s time to change that—if I can better align my intentions with my attention in the weeks ahead.
That wraps up my Open Goals update for September. Thanks for following along, and see you in the next issue.
—Alex
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