“How you spend your days is how you spend your life” – Annie Dillard.
One of my favorite quotes rings true when contemplating how my personal progression has gone on the goals I set out to accomplish on this growth trip.
Thinking back and how I’ve spent my time, let’s take a look at some results.
Over the past 2 months here’s a breakdown of how time has been spent among my travel goals:
Wow cool interactive chart Brad! Did you embed that yourself in the body of this post and have issues styling it to render correctly? Why yes I did! I could have quickly created a pie chart in PPT and pasted it here, but now totally worth it for that sweet hover styling effect on the graph. Maybe not worth 2.5 extra hours of work but cool nonetheless.
While the chart needs some more styling TLC, I need to revert to the ol’ 80/20 Pareto Principle here: 80% complete, ship it! Not worth the time & effort to complete the 20% to make that chart look perfect at the detriment of finishing writing this article!
To understand the chart, I transformed my projects progress and time spent over the past 2 months and put them into the equivalent of a 40 hour work week. So you can easily see how I’ve been spending my time.
Note: this is just ‘working time’. I’ve spent more time traveling and exploring that’s not encompassed in this at all.
Looking at the data and comparing to my ‘Goals’ tab on my site it’s evident tradeoffs have occurred. In fact learning SQL and completing my data science textbook haven’t even been started in the past 2 months. The reason for this to me is both of those projects overlap with learning Spanish. As SQL and python respectively are computer languages, I simply haven’t had the working time to tackle all 3.
One reason for that stems with the language learning ‘project’ being a bigger undertaking than I originally imagined. My initial hypothesis was to start my trip in Medellin with 3 weeks of Spanish classes and that would give me the basis to talk and get around for the duration of my trip. At that time I thought I would transition to the other two ‘language’ projects.
Two things ended up happening that changed all that thinking:
1. As my Spanish proficiency increased so did my desired outcome from this trip. As things began to start making sense, as I began thinking in Spanish, and communicating to others successfully, I developed the need to become fluent. Now fluency isn’t something that will happen in a few months of traveling, but it’s raised my bar for what I will call success out of this trip.
2. Exterior influences – of all the projects I’m undertaking while traveling, obviously learning Spanish is the most applicable in my day to day. Due to these external forces, i.e. conversing everyday, it’s easiest to find time to work on this ‘goal’ each and every day.
Okay, that covers the language learning portion of things but what about the other goals?
It’s funny, heading into this trip I was unsure how I was going to share videos of the trip. In fact the 1st 2 YouTube videos were initially set to private as I had no intentions of others seeing them. But something happened where I became infatuated with creating video content. It’s something (like Karaoke!) I thought I would hate doing, and now try and find time to go shoot a video to upload. Maybe it’s the fact I’ve been solo traveling for too long, or that I can’t tell as many jokes in Spanish that I want, not sure yet. But whatever the reason, creating these videos has taken up a large chunk of project time that would otherwise go to A.) Writing site content B.) Building out this website C.) Building out Productivity Stack website.
The other 2 big projects I set out to incorporate into my life, daily priming and daily body workout, have been a lot more predictable in terms of adding them into my daily life. Read my last post on the difficulties and necessity of maintaining habits/rituals while traveling.
So with this data I’m able to sit back and say 2 things:
- Am I happy with the progress?
- And do I want to change the results
I can tell you I am extremely happy with my growth in learning Spanish. I am at a point of basic communication I would hope to get to in 5 months after 2 1/2 months.
But I want to move faster and accumulate more milestones in the other areas. So yes, these midterm results will be changing to better reflect what I want to accomplish for the 2nd half of the trip.
Tomorrow, I sit down for some reflection time. And with a blank sheet of paper simply write, “What is your highest perceived self for Bradley Rossman?” Hopefully out of this some positive strategies for pushing all of these goals forward comes to fruition.
-Bradley Rossman
Have thoughts? Email me at: bradleyrossman@gmail.com