Semiannual Report: A Personal Update

Semiannual Report: A Personal Update

If anybody out there is concerned, please don’t be. The title of the article and my lack of posting might suggest I’m going through some personal issues. But really I’m not. So don’t fret. 🙂

I can understand the concern though. When bloggers suddenly stop writing or seemingly fall off the face of the internet earth, people often wonder why. Speculation and thoughts can run wild! And there really are some dark things that can happen to people, so thoughts of deep concern is totally understandable. In one very unfortunate case, a physician blogger passed away.

One of my favorite physician bloggers of my generation (we are about the same age and started blogging roughly around the same time) stopped blogging completely. In fact, he also shut down his site. He went by the moniker Side Hustle Scrubs. I’m sure many of my readers are familiar with him. There is a thread on the White Coat Investor forum wondering what happened to him. He went from posting funny and creative content at an impressively frequent rate to shutting it all down. I was shocked too. His stuff always made me laugh! While most people in the WCI forum speculate that he disappeared due to negative reasons or personal issues, I take the opposite approach. I’m an optimist and I think he stopped blogging to pursue something meaningful and fulfilling. Either that or he is simply enjoying real life.

Anyway, enough about others. Let’s get personal. What’s going on in my life?

 

Blogging

Real talk. Let’s face it. Blogging takes up a lot of time. Maybe for some people, blogging is seamless and words just flow naturally. That doesn’t happen with me. It’s a lot of work. Highly successful bloggers will totally admit to this because it’s so true. The thing is, the work can be totally worth it.

But there is only so much time in the day.

My decreased frequency in blogging is not because I don’t have any time. All of us have the same amount of second, minutes, and hours in a day. We all have time. It’s really a matter of how we choose to use that time.

So I guess you can say that I’ve chosen to focus my time on other things. What are those things?

 

Family

They say kids grow up fast. I didn’t realize what this meant until I experienced being a parent myself. My daughter is constantly growing and changing all the time. She’s 16 months only now. It seems like she’s learning a new word every day. Earlier this month she started to walk. Yeah, I know it’s kind of on the late side, but I was a late walker too so it wasn’t too surprising to me. Plus, all of those months of crawling really developed her upper body strength. It’s quite impressive!

Her personality is evolving too. She’s really one of the most happy go lucky babies I know. I’m kind of the same way, so the apple doesn’t fall too far. She’s loud, boisterous, and laughs a lot. It’s funny and cute at the same time. When you look at her, you can tell that she is going to grow up to be someone who fully enjoys life. In fact, she’s already that person.

I know these days it’s all about my daughter. But I don’t want to take anything away from my wife though. She’s freakin’ awesome too.

Every moment I spend with my family is precious. It’s a time value and cherish.

 

Work

Last year, I cut my working hours to about 40 hours a week, or one full time equivalent (FTE). Recently, I’ve been working a little more, closer to 1.2 FTE or 48 hours a week. Part of this is because several of my partner colleagues take off to spend summer vacations with their kids. I fully understand this. Their kids are school-aged and they want to  go places while their kids are on summer break. I would want to do the same. Thus I am volunteering to work a little more to help out.

For me, every hour over a 40 hour work week is paid at premium rate. I’m not going to lie, the extra money is nice. But obviously it’s not something I plan to do indefinitely. I value time much more than money. It especially doesn’t make sense if you live relatively frugally (like we do) and feel that you have enough.

Once summer break ends and colleagues return from vacation, I’m cutting back on hours.

 

Vacation / Time Off

My wife and I have been accustomed to taking three or four major international trips a year. It’s a little different this year for obvious reasons, haha. Simply put, it’s not as easy with a baby.

However, we were able to go to Cabo San Lucas in March. It was a lot of fun. I’m not going to elaborate because it could be a topic for a future post. If I ever get around to it 😉

I have several trips lined up. First, I’m going to FinCon in Washington DC in September. Some time afterward, we are going on a family trip to France. And later in the winter we will be going to Hawaii.

It’s pretty typical for me to work additional hours during the summer (to pick up the slack from vacationing colleagues), then take vacation in the shoulder seasons. I find Spring and Fall travel to be much more enjoyable. Less tourists, cheaper prices, more enjoyable weather, to name a few.

 

Building Habits

Last year I wrote a post about resolutions and goals. But setting goals be empty.

This year, I decided to focus on building a single habit every day of each month. They say it takes at least 21-30 days to do something consistently every day in order for it to become a habit. That’s why I decided that each month would have a theme for a specific healthy habit I wanted to develop.

Here are the habits I decided to build each month.

January – Run every day

In 2018, I challenged myself and the family to buy nothing the entire year. For the most part, this was a success. We really didn’t buy any new material things. The items that we did buy were either necessary or in complete alignment with our essentialist values.

So in January I bought a new pair of running shoes. The old ones that I had were really worn down and running in them would hurt my knees. After putting on my new pair of shoes, I felt myself embody the identity of a runner.

Every day I ran. Sometimes it was for only 10 minutes before leaving for work. And if I didn’t have time in the morning, I would run in the afternoon. Either way, I made it a point to run every day.

It was kind of tough. I’m not a natural runner with great endurance. But I did it anyway. After January, did I continue to run every day? No. But I do on most days and I at least do something active (weight lifting, swimming, etc.) every day.

February – Meditate every day

This one was much easier for me. Last year I was introduced to the Headspace and Calm app which really helped me learn how to meditate. I just didn’t do it every day.

In February I committed myself to meditating daily. This is something I’ve kept up. Some days it is only a few moment (and a few breaths) of meditation, but it is still something.

Overall, meditation has really helped me focus and engage in the present moment.

March – Sleep 8 hours every night

I wrote about this earlier in the year. Sleep is important!

In March I made a commitment to sleep 8 hours a night every night. It felt amazing.

After learning how important and essential sleep is for our health, I continue to make sleep a huge priority.

April – Cutting internet and social media use

Last year I wrote about cutting cable and the benefits of not watching TV. It wasn’t hard for my wife and I because we weren’t watching a ton of TV anyway. In fact, we never watched TV, so having a cable was an ongoing subscription cost that made sense to cut.

Not watching TV is easy. But not using the internet is hard. It’s almost impossible in modern society. Knowing this, we compromised by limiting (not cutting out completely) our internet use. Simply put, we stopped using internet and social media after 8 PM. To do this, we put a timer on our WiFi router that completely turned it off at 8 PM.

By doing this, it significantly decreased our screen time. It also increased our face to face time between me and my wife, which is awesome. Cutting internet off at night also made it a lot easier to get to bed early. Social media (stimulation of fear, anxiety, FOMO, etc.) and blue screens (reduces your melatonin) can be significant contributor to insomnia. Another potential benefit of cutting our WiFi is reducing our exposure to EMF electromagnetic field radiation.

May – No alcohol

The whole month of May, I vowed to not drink alcohol. This wasn’t terribly hard because I’m not a huge drinker anyway. But every now and then (like once a month) I will go out for a drink with friends or family.

Some people have cut out alcohol completely. Cheesy Finance declared 2019 the year without a beer. Must be hard when you come from the home of Heineken! But seriously, I get it. Alcohol is a toxin/poison for the body. Besides the small amount of antioxidants and phytonutrients found in wine and beer, there are no health benefits. The risks totally outweigh the benefits.

I succeeded in not having alcohol in May. But it’s not something I committed to indefinitely. Maybe in the future. We’ll see.

June – Daily gratitude

I think daily gratitude is important. A sense of gratitude is a powerful positive emotion. When you have gratitude, there is little room for negative emotions such as sadness or regret. Such negative emotions can be counterproductive and unfortunately self-destructive. Daily affirmations of everything positive in your life is good for the soul.

Overall, I’m a positive person. And I have a lot of gratitude too. But in June, I made it a point to write down everything I am grateful for. I didn’t think writing things down would make that much of a difference, but it has. The act of writing and seeing grateful words on paper make it more real and tangible. It makes us appreciate this grateful moments even more.

This is will be a habit I hope to continue.

July – Daily reading

As a physician, we signed up for a career of life long learning. Because of this I’m always reading things. I’m constantly reading about patients. I try to read books and medical journals when I can.

I also try to read other things outside of medicine. This year, I’ve read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, How Not To Die, by Michael Greger, and Deep Work by Cal Newport. All are fantastic books. I plan to read more books on finance and productivity in the near future.

In July, however, I made it a point to read daily to my daughter. She currently loves reading books and try to emulate our words. Kids really do say the darndest things. Some of the things that come out of her mouth (I wouldn’t call them words) are downright hilarious. Reading to her and hearing her try to read is so much fun.

 

In Summary

As you can see, I’ve decreased my blogging frequency by quite a bit. But it’s not because of anything negative. Lately, my time has been spent with family, working a tad bit more, and building healthier habits.

Blogging and social media take up a lot of time. And often times it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s going on in real life.

I’m just trying to enjoy the real world and live my best life. 🙂

So now you are all up to date with what I’ve been doing. What are all you up to?