2020's habits

 Pandemic forty-first Thursday

I've got a good line going in New Year's Resolutions, ever since I instituted some rules about them: they can't be "don'ts" and there should be three:

  • one new daily habit
  •  one thing that requires a time investment, but then it's done
  •  one thing just to make me happy

 This year was full of new habits. Besides the pandemic-related homebodyness, I was on leave from the university for much of the year and I was put onto an NHS diabetes prevention programme. Lots of new habits and investments. Here's what's different from 2019:

 

Health-related

  • Zoom exercise classes (Zumba, Bolly X), a minimum of 3x per week (but usually 4 or 5). This has been great. I especially love that I can start to get ready for class 10 minutes before and have no time investment after. It's also demonstrated the value of practice! Nine months of these and now when the internet cuts out, I can usually keep the routine going till it cuts in again. I hope there will be the option to continue these after gyms re-open, etc.
  • Photographing everything I eat for the app, which has meant that I'm succeeding better at...
  • Eating my 5-a-day enabled by having yoghurt and fruit for nearly every breakfast and soup or salad for most lunches.
  • Nuts I'm buying big ol' bags of shelled Brazil nuts and they are ace.
  • Weighing myself weekly
  • I do not consider this a good habit, but I have started drinking sodas with aspartame. 

 

Family/friends

  • 20 minutes' reading time After dinner, we sit down as a family and each read our own books for twenty minutes, on a timer. The 20-minutes thing was a suggestion from school. We have two rules for G: it has to be a new-to-her book and it can't be a comic book. She'll willingly do re-reading and comics on her own. I brought her back my Agatha Christies from the US, which went down OK.
  • Zoom quizzes I've been running them for friends, getting much better at setting good rounds. We've also used it as a means to choose charities to donate to.
  • Talking to my dad a lot more often/regularly.
  • Weekly chat with Celeste, including goal-setting and accountability (could go under 'work-ish')
  • Hanging out with friends on Zoom. I'd rather do this in person, but what I'm really liking is when I have a friend on the screen while we're both doing something else. (Was great for wrapping Christmas presents.) It takes me back to being a teenager (or a dorm resident) and just hanging out with no goal or expenditure.

 

Efficiency and sanity

  • Boots online Like most, I'm doing more online shopping, but I'm especially liking doing it at Boots (drug store), which is new for me. In the beforetimes, I was always going to such shops because I needed one or two things. Now I save up a big list of things we need and they come in satisfyingly well-packed boxes.
  • Laptop-free weekend day Usually Saturdays. Gets me to do other things, like sewing or organizing.
  • Saturday morning house-cleaning when we don't have our usual Friday-morning cleaner.
  • Keeping the camera off in webinars and doing stitchwork or other manual things while I listen.
  • NYT Crosswords and Spelling Bee each day, which replaces more mindless games I had been playing. A great thing about them is that when you've done the day's puzzles, they stay done till tomorrow, and so they've reduced my 'game' time.
  • Not sure if this belongs here or in 'family', but I've also been consciously taking a backseat on a lot of household stuff. Phil has been project-manager for our building project (including the mortgage stuff) and doing all of the cooking and a lot of the housework and I've been very grateful for that.

 

Work-ish

  • Social-media/games blocking  Screentime on the phone blocking games/social/email/news/YouTube 9-5 on weekdays; Freedom on the laptop blocking socials 9-12:40, 2-4
  • Blogging Sundays
  • (Interestingly, I have nothing to say about book-writing here. My attempts to insert new habits have mostly failed. I am liking using Scapple to organise my thoughts sometimes.)

 

Community-related

  • Recycling food waste Someone on the next road got a heat composter, and now she's taking our food waste. We're in a trial period, but I hope it lasts. If not, I hope we find another way to make use of our coffee grounds and potato peels.
  • Adding 'charity' to my weekly goals list It replaced litter-picking, which I didn't feel good about doing in the early pandemic days (and I get trigger-thumb from the picker if I do it too much). I make sure to do some one-off donation each week (or an act for a charity, when opportunities arise)
  • Collecting egg boxes The neighbours bring me theirs, we collect ours, and then we pass them on to a food bank that needs them.

 

Things I'm working on that could be better

  • Stretching daily. It's best when I try to do it first thing in the morning, but (a) I'm bad at mornings and (b) it can be hard to find the space for it (as well as the time). I got really bad at this in autumn, when my hip was feeling all better, and predictably it's feeling worse for that.
  • Turning off lights that don't need to be on (some rooms more natural than others).
  • Putting dishes in the dishwasher and not the sink.
  • Drinking herbal tea instead of milky coffee in the afternoon.
  • I've added "sleep 7 hours" to my goals-rewards list, but it's too early to say if it's going to work.

 

My life is now about to change a lot from how it has been during most of the pandemic.

  • I'm taking leave of absence from my grant in order to go back to the university and teach for three months, because of some crisisy things going on there. I'll be teaching end-of-Jan through March and having to learn all the things to learn about (a) pandemic teaching, (b) systems in our new school, (c) new tech systems at work.
  • From mid-Feb for three months our house will be a building site. We'll have to pack up most of the ground floor and mostly live on the top floor. This will mean I'll need to go to the University to work.
  • I officially become Editor of Dictionaries tomorrow. I've been doing some work on it already, but I'm in at the deep end now.

 

I'm looking at all these habits and thinking: many if not most of them can survive these changes to my life. The blogging will probably have to become less frequent. The hobbies will get less attention. I will have to take care not to be lured into lattes and snacks at work.

But new habits, new resolutions? I don't think I have the energy for any now. I don't really have the need. I'll know better when I am back to uni working.