Habits (stay clean)

At my age - a prime 36 years old - the difficulty in traveling is the breaking of my daily routine at home. Like James Clear, I am big on habits and consistency. Traveling does make a stop to that stuff. Take for example: when I am away from home for long periods, I can’t take the usual supplements. Another example: I can’t workout when I’m traveling. Is the temporary pause detrimental? Probably not. But it just feels weird, you know?

What’s also weird is being in hotels. Most of them - expensive or otherwise - do not match up to my standards of cleanliness. Especially so for hotels in America. The western culture of not taking off your shoes indoors means accommodations here in the States have a higher baseline of dirtiness. You can vacuum that carpet all you want, housekeeping. Doesn’t change the fact that many shoes have walked over that surface.

Things are slightly better in Asia, with our culture of taking shoes off before entering an abode. Even then, the level of cleanliness scales linearly with the amount-per-night cost of the hotel (in my experience, anyways). The only experience that lived up to my admittedly high standards is the ryokan around the Mount Fuji area in Japan. That cost $250 a night in 2019 money. Read: that is expensive for me.

If I am to stay in an accommodation for at least a few days, what I do is clean the floors myself (when possible). That might sound insane to you, but the peace of mind is worth it. Plus, I get to enjoy actually clean floors. Can’t beat that!

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Prestige phone.

Make it easy to start

The thing about creating consistent habits is to make them as easy as possible start doing. Keep it simple and make it convenient to begin. You’re less likely to start if doing that thing takes some setting up. The best way is to make it so that you can just jump right in. That means putting that smartphone away.

Recently, I launch the goal to learn the piano, which entails creating a habit of playing the keyboard every single day. With the aim to make it super easy to get started, I actually spent more money than necessary to create an actual piano station, if you will. Everything is in place, plugged in, and ready to rock. I just have to sit down, put on headphones, and press on the power.

The original idea was to plug the piano into my MacBook Pro to connect with the learning app. However, this involved moving the piano to my desk every single time, along with power and the sustain pedal. While this isn’t exactly cumbersome - takes a few minutes, that’s all - I want to eliminate this hurdle so that I would be more inclined to start playing.

As with most things in life, this means throwing money at the problem. In order to have a piano station, I had to buy another chair, and more importantly, an iPad. The tablet will be permanently plugged into the keyboard, with the Piano Marvel app a few taps of the finger away. Seems a bit overkill to buy an iPad just for this, though I’m sure I can find other uses for it (hello, Kindle app).

I’m still waiting on the chair to arrive, plus other bits and bobs to complete the setup. I think next week is when I can finally start this piano journey in earnest. Can’t wait!

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But first, a firmware upgrade!

What's the topic?

This is one of those mornings I really don’t know what to write about, but the show must go on. I try hard to not skip any scheduled writing days, because like missing a workout, the regret of having done so afterwards is rather unpleasant. Nothing should stop me from putting down the few hundred words on this page every day; except for Fridays, and the weekend.

With nothing to write about, I instead picked up a book and read for about an hour. I thought perhaps doing another task first would allow the time for inspiration to hit me and I’d have something to write about. Well, that completely failed on this day, and here I am rambling about particularly nothing just to fill up the word count.

But the show must go on.

The next time I put words to this page, I would have moved to my new spot closer to work, living the solitary independent life for the very first time. I am looking forward to this big life change with humbled anticipation, though with a few days still remaining at what I can now refer as “my parents’ home”, I am trying hard to not fast-forward time with the excitement of the future. It would be too easy to take these next days off and sort of lounge around until it’s time to move.

In those moments, I remind myself the core of what I do, which is plastered on the landing page of this very website: writer, photographer, car enthusiast, reader, traveler. So long as I am doing any one of those five things at a given time, (not so much traveling going on these days, sadly) I can confidently say I am being productive. Not to say one shouldn’t have hours of pure leisure, but for those with a tendency towards laziness like myself, reminders and affirmations are helpful tools to keep me on track.

Until next time, friends.

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Broken or not?