This is a series of weekly answers to the question “This week will be good if…", with results from the following week. Inspired by this write-up by Matt Webb, this article about the why of weeknotes, and the weeknot.es community on Medium. My version of it here is a simple weekly summary of my time spent in my creative rickshaw (aka independent creative projects with the goal of becoming financially sustainable). The data about “how the previous week went” and “how this week began” comes from taking Gyroscope’s “Mood Score” test as I write this each week. Each week also gets an animal or other emoji that begins with incrementing letters of the alphabet.

May 2019 - present, newest to oldest: 🐭, 🤹‍👍👍👎, 🦎👍👍👎👎, 🐠👍👍, 🐘👍👍👍, 🦆👎👌👎, 🐊👍👍👎, 🐗👍👍👍, 🐜👍👎👍

08.19.2019: Week of the Mouse 🐭

This week will be good if:

I come up with some good op-ed ideas to pitch newspapers about the book.

I get my average sleep per night back above 6 hours.

I ride the Peloton at least 3 times.

07.29.2019: Week of the Juggler 🤹

This week will be good if:

I turn in my “first pass” manuscript feeling good about where it is.

• 👍 Yup, this all worked out and I feel pretty …

This is my 11th year of yearly birthday reflections. Here are the previous 10:

• 39: Make wiggle room
• 38: Cultivate quality time
• 37: More kiloslogs
• 36: Talk it out
• 35: Love the struggle
• 34: Cultivating the core
• 33: Frugal to the max
• 32: No problem
• 31: Double down
• 30: Higher highs and lower lows

Life by weeks

Every week of my life is represented as a colored box on busterbenson.com. The last green box is this week. The last white box is where (very roughly) my life is predicted to end. And there are 100 rows since my life goal is to ride a bike on my 100th birthday.

From busterbenson.com Life moves fast, but it also moves slow. Every year (if I’m lucky) I get a new row. In the last few months, I’ve heard from a half dozen friends who are going through such difficult times (cancer, mental illness, unpredictable health incidents, etc) and right now especially, each box of this chart feels all the more tangible.

Today I turn 40. My father died when he was 41. This year, Niko is 6 and a new baby will be added to our family in a couple months.

Life is still just getting started. And yet, it is also at a point where the end doesn’t feel so far away.

We're all in this together. 👶🎢☠

— buster@xoxo.zone (@buster) April 26, 2016

Here’s a neat simulation of when my life might end, according to data from the CDC. A 2% chance of dying in the next 10 years, 9% chance in the next 20 years, and somewhere a bit over a 90% chance that I won’t make it to 100.

But how will I die? At …

This is my 10th year of yearly birthday reflections. Here are the previous 9:

• 38: Cultivate quality time
• 37: More kiloslogs
• 36: Talk it out
• 35: Love the struggle
• 34: Cultivating the core
• 33: Frugal to the max
• 32: No problem
• 31: Double down
• 30: Higher highs and lower lows

It is also the 7th anniversary of my 8:36pm project (see the story here). This year I took a photo at 8:36pm on only 310 out of the 365 days, missing 55, for a fairly low 85% success rate. Over the 7 years in all I’ve taken a photo on 2,402 of the 2,562 days, for an overall success rate of 94%.

Life by weeks

Life moves fast, but it also moves slow. I have a chart on busterbenson.com which maps out my life by weeks: every square is a week of my life, and every row is a year.

I look for events that are significant enough to leave a mark on this chart (I sometimes refer to this life change list which comes from a list of things that are known to alter the quality of your life). Things of the scale like getting married, having a kid, moving, starting a new job, reaching a big personal goal, etc. Last year, only 1 thing met this criteria, which was buying a house in September. (Changing jobs happened slightly after my birthday… this post is a couple weeks late.)

The black dot at the bottom of the chart, in August of 2052, is around where I’m expected to die at the age of 76 if I life a perfectly average life. All that white space is a blank slate for the rest of my life… it’s good to stare at it frequently. …

This is one of my favorite phrases coined by Alan Watts, who I’ve been immersing myself in over the last few months.

The idea of the element of irreducible rascality is that there is no perfect system. There’s no ultimate stability in anything: physical, logical, emotional, or spiritual. At the bottom of every hole, at the end of every train of thought, and behind even the most powerful structures, is a little rascal that will undo it all. It’s the exception to every rule, including this one.

All things fall apart.

If the universe is balanced on the top of a turtle’s back, and that turtle is balanced on top of another turtle’s back, and the turtles go all the way down, then the element of irreducible rascality is at the bottom, holding nothing, standing on nothing.

The element of irreducible rascality created the first creator, and nothing created it.

It’s the paradox that ties together the two ends of infinity.

When you think you’ve figured it out, it throws in a new wrench. It has infinite wrenches.

Does the set of all sets that don’t include itself include itself?

Did you stop kicking the king of Jupiter?

Mu.

Quack.

I find strange comfort in the element of irreducible rascality. The groundlessness of all things. The merging of cause and effect, particle and wave, light and shadow.

It is the antidote to one-upmansip and the friend of craftsmanship.

The element of irreducible rascality will subvert any desire for permanence, stability, of certainty.

In its place is an …

These are notes on my coaching experiment that’s taking place on Lift. The program is called Look before you Lift and Batch 2 will be opening up soon.

Batch 1 date: 11/13/2014 - 11/19/2014
Number of coachees: 9

Program description:

This is a 1-week guided self-reflection program that can be used before you get started on your other Lift goals or after you’ve lapsed from something that worked for a while. I hope to help you reveal the hidden obstacles that trip you up whenever you attempt to change your behavior in a way that sticks.

With a short casual semi-structured chat every day, we’ll talk and learn about old and new obstacles in your life, understand what keeps them there, what they’re blocking, and how they’re connected together.

By the end of a week I hope to help you have at least one new idea for a new Lift goal that has a high chance of succeeding and improving the quality of your life.

First question is: Which 1-3 of these things could you use more of today? energy, clarity, human connection, productivity, fun, none, or other. We’ll build from there.

And of course, if it doesn’t work out for any reason, I’ll refund the full cost.

Results:

After a week of casual conversation with 9 people, here are some results

• 2/9 dropped out before getting very far and I never heard from them again
• 3/9 made some progress but didn’t complete my end-of-week survey
• 4/9 completed my end-of-week survey

Of those 4 who completed …