What sticks out most reflecting on these past 108 is how far I deviated from my Day 1 statement. I also didn’t complete what I set out to do! For the first few weeks, I was a machine! I stuck to my plan, every day I was making progress towards my 108-day goals it was great! What stopped me?

108 Days is a Long Time!

Honestly… I could have gotten my original goals done in 18 days. This made me start getting lazy as I approached completing it (I still have 80 days… what’s the rush?) I actually set the bar so low because of my tendency to set the bar too high!

What I think I would do if I did it over again was ask myself “how long will this take”. Then I could have perhaps created story points based on an estimated number of days I think it would take me to complete the task. Let’s take a look at my objectives from this past 108 days. I’ll use 6, 18, 36, 54 and 108 days for estimation.

• An in-person bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei (18 days)
• An online bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei (6 days)
• A guide for creating a bespoke management system for bipolar disorder (18 days)

Then I could have ordered them and made them my ONE thing for their period of time.

1. January 7th – An online bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei
2. January 25th – A guide for creating a bespoke management system for bipolar disorder
3. February 12th – An in-person bipolar support group for foreigners in Taipei

Wow… it feels good just looking at that! Then I would have created concrete deliverables in an organized fashion, I would have been able to make the necessary adjustments and I would have realized that I needed to create more objectives to fill in the extra time!

This is something to consider for next time.

Weak Language

One line from my day 1 statement was:

For this 108 each day I would like to create the following:

I thought that “would” might come back and bite me in the butt! The goal of that “would” was to give myself flexibility with the content production since I didn’t want to make the 108 days about content production. I wanted to make it about doing stuff. Since it was a “would” instead of a “will” I had a free pass to slack. No more “woulds” in my day one statements!

If something is every day, it will be every day. If something is “every now and then” I need to put parameters on that to know if I was successful or not. Like “Once a week” or “Once a month”.

Resource Management

I wanted to commit to something that I really couldn’t fully commit to the way that I wanted to. I wanted to totally throw myself into working on my bipolar service without distraction from anything else. That wasn’t realistic with the financial, time and energy resources I had at my disposal. I would have served myself better by focusing on capacity building.

Shifting Focus

I think this one is connected to resource management. If someone dropped a million dollars in my lap right now I’d know exactly what I’d want to do with it and my time. That clarity of vision might get me in trouble sometimes as it’s easy for me to put blinders on capacity building and immerse myself in vision full steam. This is great until the capacity leaks start to weaken my ability to focus because I need to divert personal mental resources towards capacity building activities. For this next round, I’ll make sure capacity building/maintaining is a major component.

Flow and Dream (Process and Goals)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about systems over the past year. First, it was inside of a job I was working remotely. Then I started to think about it in terms of myself. I ran into a post on Medium today about goals “Why setting big goals can make you miserable” which gets into the topic of systems. What appears to be happening is that I’m shifting from being overly focused on the dream (goals) and trying to balance it out more with the flow (process).

 

The image of a mountain has always been the focus of my goal setting. Like… have a big crazy vision and fight your way there! Don’t worry about the how! Focus on the what and why!

Well… while the dream, the goals, the what and why are important, they should really be there to serve the development of your flow/processes/systems.

 

 

I’ve spent the bulk of the last two decades focused on the dreams (that and a lot of taiji, Daoism, and Buddhism.) Ever evolving dreams. My dreams have somewhat plateaued… in a good way! What I mean is that they have a really clear theme… or foundation. Now I can focus on the process!

What it looks like is happening is that I’ll be doing 108 day process experiments… at least that’s what the next 108 looks like it will be dedicated to!

The way I’ve structured this system to is to define an objective on day one, issue status reports on day 108 and some days in between. Reflect and plan for a period of time (I should develop a system for this! Maybe do a fast, etc.) and then start the experiment over again.

My day one post will be up on May 1st. I’m excited about what it might be!