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I'm fairly negligent of my quality of living-- I'll wear the same outfit for two weeks climbing and will sleep in my sleeping bag directly on the dirt because I don't care enough to change clothes or to unroll and inflate a sleeping pad. I also typically buy used clothes and gear because I know I don't care enough to merit buying it new-- I figure I'll just lose it, break it or get it dirty anyway.  

But I'm incredibly obsessive about my writing  (and also about super adorable stationary, ughhh I love cute stationary).

For the past 10 years (holy moly, did I just write that?), I've kept a scheduler/diary of some sort. In the first year, it was just a calendar which I filled in with special events and good days. Over time, this has morphed with increasing detail.

Each day on the monthly calendar (in photo), I write the biggest one or two things I did that day (e.g. "Yosemite: Nutcracker" or "Dinner w/ so + so". In addition, I make various notes in the corner of each day-- I write the number of mile I ran in a square, the number of miles cycled in a circle, a star if I climbed, a water droplet if I was on my period, a plus sign if I didn't eat meat that day, a triangle if I did my stretches, and so on. There's an entire legend in my mind of what all the different symbols and shorthand I've used over the years. 

Then, on the weekly schedule pages, I write a full paragraph or two recapping what I did for every single day. This usually takes 5-15 minutes per day. 

And, in addition to that, I have various other obsessions I track which vary year to year. In previous years, it was calories or finances or both. This year, my obsession is a simple (?) table I created for tracking my work on my goals for this year.  

The table is very straight forward. The week number is listed across the top from 1 - 52. Going down, I list the concrete goals I want to accomplish every week/month. A few of these include climbing 4x a week, cycling 4x a week, eating meat less than 2x a week, reading 2 books a month, practicing creativity in some artistic fashion once a week, calling my parents once a week and spending less than xyz dollars a month.

If I succeeded at the goal for that week/month, I get to color in the box. 

Some goals are higher priority than others, and some I expect to accomplish more than others. My goal to spend less than xyz dollars a month, for example, is more of a guideline than a strict rule. I don't punish myself for failing to reach it, but it serves as a way to keep myself in check and aware of my spending.

In contrast, my climbing goal is much stricter and I hope to achieve it every week as much as reasonably possible.

To be honest, I'm not sure at what point this compulsion goes from being useful to just being excessive. I end up staring at my notebook for about 20 minutes a day on average just filling all of this out!

On one hand, I feel like keeping track of all these things helps me focus on my goals and also helps me better understand myself, as it forces me to take time to reflect on life.

On the other hand, I wonder if this also holds me back-- if I'm spending too much time thinking about life rather than living. 

Always this discourse, back and forth, back and forth. Do I strive for greater efficiency and burn a path toward a desired end result, or do I focus more on acceptance and float along in peace?

I ask myself this a lot but I never come to a good answer.

Anyway, here are two shitty graphs recapping some of my metrics from 2016 (sorry team-- after spending a few hours translating my notes into Excel, I couldn't make charts that were less offensively colored/formatted... it's 1am...). 

("Aren't there wearables like FitBits these days that track all these numbers for you?"
Yes.
"Or phone apps that can measure--"
Yes.
"So why not--"
No.)

In the first graph, the first bar represents # miles cycled that month, the second bar represents # miles run, and the third is # days spent climbing. In the second graph, the first bar represents # days spent climbing indoors and the second bar is # days spent climbing outdoors.

Total miles cycled is 1181, miles run is 455 and days climbed is 133. 

A few interesting notes.

1. I don't climb as often as I actually think I do
   If you asked me how often I climb, I would say 3-5 times a week, which would be 12-20 times a month. But in reality, I only hit 12 or more times a month 6 times with the max being 16 times, or just over every other day. So during these higher-efficiency months, I'm really just getting 3-4 times a week, which really isn't great for someone who should be training.
   
   So why the discrepancy?
   
   My two main goals last year were 1) to get really good at trad climbing and 2) to spend more time with friends. As a result, I ended up spending most of my climbing time focused on the outdoors. May, July and December saw my highest outdoor counts at 11, 13 and 9 respectively. In May, I spent every weekend in Yosemite, in July I spent 2 weeks in Squamish, and in December I spent 2 weeks in Joshua Tree. I think these long, intensive pushes for outdoor time skewed my perception of how much climbing I actually got in regularly. December, you'll notice, has 0 indoor dates-- I decided that December would be the start of my 4 month recovery attempt at some longstanding injuries, meaning I ended my gym membership-- though I still took my yearly Joshua Tree trip at the end of December. 
   
   I actually had a feeling this was something going on, which is why this year, I started keeping a weekly record. As described in the first few paragraphs, I give myself a check mark for each week I hit my goal of 4 days climbing/week. It allows me to quickly see how many successful I really am in my goals, rather than how successful I think I am.
    
2. Maybe data is stupid and I should just do things because I think I can
   In mid-April, I did a 30some mile ultramarathon. In my memories, I trained super hard for it, running 30+ miles a week leading up to it.
   
   Looking back on my notes, it turns out this is a complete lie.  
   
   In all of March, I only ran 70 miles, which comes out to less than 20/week. The most miles I ran in a week before the ultramarathon had been just 30. The most miles I had run in a single day had been 14.
   
   And yet I finished the run anyway.
   
   So maybe the lesson here is I shouldn't analyze my performance and think about whether I'm 'ready' to do something or not. Maybe all this planning isn't as important as I think it is. 
   
   Maybe the lesson is that I'm ready when I believe I'm ready, because evidently as long as I can run 14 miles, then the remaining 16+ miles are just adrenaline and willpower.
    
3. Just kidding, I don't really believe that romantic BS; train hard if you plan on climbing hard though belief is definitely super important too
   Running and climbing are not actually comparable things. The worst case scenario if I try to run harder than I physically can is I blow out a knee.
   
   In contrast, worst case scenario if I try to climb harder than I physically can is a lot worse than just blowing out a knee.
   
   As with all things in life, it's a fine balance.
   
   As with all things I write, there's never actually a satisfying conclusion.