Spending my time more consciously

The past couple of months have been really busy and stressful, both at work and at home and that left me feeling burned out on the things I like to spend my downtime on: riding my bike, running, reading, building side projects.

Not that I didn't have any time for those, I just ended up spent on the couch more evenings than I'd like to do, doing much of nothing in particular. To then beat myself up about sitting around all evening doing nothing. That might sound familiar to some of you 🙂.

Since the first months of 2023 are looking equally exciting and stressful (finishing our house and then I'm moving in with my girlfriend), I'm going to try to get back to some basics and see where that takes me.

The most important thing I (can) do to improve my overall state of mind and my mental health is sports. Right now that mostly translates to riding my bike, be it indoors on rollers or outside when the weather gets better. But I would love to add some running back into the mix.

As a first "mini" goal, I want to join a 200km ride with some friends in early March, that gives me 2 months to build up my shape again.

I've build and I maintain a bunch of Craft CMS plugins and most of them are in sort of a maintenance-only-mode.

I have some improvements in mind for a couple of them that could really take them to the next level so I want to get back into building out new ideas instead of just patching minor issues.

I was taking about all this with my girlfriend and that prompted her getting me a planner/journal for Christmas 🙂 (which I may write something about once I start using it).

Off course I'm not going to be time-blocking every 5 minutes of my free time, but having a tool that I can use to look ahead (yes, any calendar does this as well, I know 😉) and to reflect on the days past, will hopefully help me to get a little bit more structure in my weeks.