Keith McArthur's Blog, page 21

My Father’s Day Pledge 2017

Today I share one of the most important pieces I have written — My Father’s Day Pledge from 2011 — along with an update for 2017. Bryson, now 10, is in the middle of the group selfie that accompanies this piece. My son Connor, now a teenager, is on the left. That’s me on the right.

My son Bryson is a gift. His blue eyes and smile light up the world for everyone around him.

He is also disabled.

After years of tests and zero results all we know is that he has a rare but undiagnosed genetic disorder. Almost five, he can’t play hockey or video games or hide and seek or all the other things that five year olds are supposed to do. He can’t even walk or talk or crawl.

But he makes progress every day. Today’s big achievement was that he used a regular sippy cup by himself for the first time instead of drinking milk from a bottle. These are the moments that make me as proud as I would be if he had just scored the game winning soccer goal.

Most importantly, Bryson is happy. And innocent. He’s never had a time out or been sent to the principal’s office or done anything mean to another human being. He is simply incapable.

There are phases of mourning that you go through when you learn that your child is disabled. I’ve been through them all.

I’ve arrived in a place where I feel okay about it, mostly. But once in a while something happens that reminds me that this world is not kind to those who  are different.

Tonight we took our two boys out for dinner to a new Thai/Japanese restaurant that opened around the corner. It’s all-you-can-taste: You order what you want from the menu and they bring it to your table. We brought a thermos of food for Bryson as it’s hard to find food he can eat in restaurants.

We ordered our first round of food and it came quickly — Tom Yum soup, mango salad, sushi, green curry, coconut shrimp, and spicy octopus. The food was hot and fresh and delicious.

We ordered our next round. Mango chicken came quickly. But 30 minutes later we were still waiting for more sushi and barbeque ribs. We  asked our waiter to check on the order.

Despite the wait, the kids were in good spirits. My seven-year-old son Connor was passing the time by inventing a new variation on Pokemon which he called Connormon. And Bryson was communicating with us from his wheelchair the only way he knows how — through songful, deep-throated vocalizations.

Another 15 minutes later we asked to speak  to a manager, who explained to us that the owners were trying to save on staffing costs and there weren’t enough people on duty to service the busy restaurant.

I asked to speak to the person in charge. A few minutes later, a woman dropped by our table.  Naturally, I assumed she was there to hear my complaint. She wasn’t.

“You need to tell your son to be quiet,” she said, pointing at Bryson. “Other guests are complaining that they can’t enjoy their meals in peace.”

We were flabbergasted. We pointed out what we thought was obvious — that Bryson has severe mental and physical disabilities and that we can’t just tell him to be quiet.

“It’s more than one table that has complained,” said the woman in charge, before agreeing to expedite our order and put it in take-out containers.

Fifteen minutes later the food arrived, along with the bill, which the waiter had discounted by 10 per cent. I paid the bill and did something I’ve never done before — I declined to tip.

Before leaving I set out to find the most senior person in the restaurant. I told my story — not just about the food delay but also about the request that we shut up our disabled son — to a man who apologized profusely and offered to credit the entire meal. He also agreed to my request that the restaurant itself pay our waiter a $15 tip. For this reason, I’ll refrain from naming the restaurant here.

We live and love Bryson’s differences every single day. Nights like this one remind me that there are people who can’t accept difference for a single meal.

As Father’s Day approaches, my pledge to Bryson is to be by his side to protect him from the judgments of this world until the day I die.

My single greatest fear in the world is that there will be nobody to protect him after my wife and I are gone.

I published this post six years on keithmcarthur.ca, and I’m sharing it here ahead of Father’s Day 2017.

A few updates since 2011.

Bryson is turning 11 in August. And after years of tests, he was finally diagnosed with a rare genetic condition called GRIN1 in 2015. He can’t walk yet, but he can make choices for himself by pressing buttons on communications devices. He is a huge fan of the Toronto Blue Jays but I haven’t been able to take him to games this year because of my recent surgery.

Something happened recently which reminded us all of this terrible incident from seven years ago.

Laura’s mom Kathy was staying over to help out with Bryson while I was in hospital recovering from my kidney transplant. One evening they took Connor and Bryson for dinner at Windfield’s, a local diner.

Towards the end of their meal, the owner stopped by their table to let them know that another table had complained about Bryson’s noise. But this time things were different.

The owner told them Bryson was welcome in the restaurant, but they were not.

They left.

I’m grateful for people like the owner of Windfield’s, who will stick up for people who can’t stick up for themselves.

But when Donald Trump mocks a disabled reporter or the Toronto Police mock a woman with Down Syndrome, I am reminded that Bryson’s  life will never be easy.

For this reason, I take my Father’s Day Pledge as solemnly today as I did in 2011.

Do Fatty Foods Make You Fat?

In a study published last year, a team of Boston-area researchers studied the eating habits of more than 18,000 women to better understand the relationship between high-fat diets and obesity.

The study, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, compared women who ate high-fat dairy with those who consumed dairy with reduced fat.

If you guessed that the high-fat consumers were more overweight you’re mistaken. In fact, women who ate higher fat dairy were less likely to put on weight than those who ate lower fat.

But this is just one study. So let’s also look at a survey of research study published in 2012. It surveyed 16 studies and came to the same conclusion. In 11 of those studies, people who ate less whole-fat dairy were more likely to be overweight.

The evidence that we need to be less worried about fat has been laid out in excellent reporting in books by Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories) and Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise). These authors point out that the rise in North American obesity rates coincided with a shift in eating habits away from diets high in proteins and fats (think bacon and eggs) towards diets high in carbohydrates (think sugary, processed breakfast cereal).

The evidence is compelling that we need to be less worried about reducing fats in our diets and more focused on reducing sugars and processed carbohydrates.

But most of us don’t believe it, as evidenced by our shopping habits. Most of us will choose a low-fat, high-sugar yogurt over a high-fat, low-sugar variety.

Why? Partly because we use the same word — fat — for a micro-nutrient in food and for a roundly-shaped human body. And then there’s the well-established fact that a gram of fat contains more calories than a gram of protein or a gram of carbohydrate.

But that doesn’t mean we process the calories in the same way.

In her excellent 2013 blog post, Margaret Floyd explains why fat does not trigger the hormones that create fat storage the way sugar and carbs do.

When you eat something sweet, your blood sugar levels increase too quickly, and your pancreas secretes the hormone insulin to take the excess sugar out of your blood. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. It stores that extra sugar first as glycogen, and then as triglycerides (fat) once glycogen stores are full.

 

Consuming fat with sugar actually slows down the sugar spike, Floyd writes, which explains why you can pack on more pounds from lower-fat desserts.

Not only that, but fats satiate you in a way sugars never will.

…[E]ating fat makes you fuller sooner and longer. Eating sugar leads to a sugar crash which makes you hungrier sooner and in a position to crave more sugar. A vicious cycle indeed.

The bottom line, Floyd notes, is that eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Eating sugar makes you fat.

So does this mean it’s okay to gorge on Ben and Jerry’s and double-creme brie? No — eating right is all about moderation.

Instead, it means you need to pay less attention to the fat content and more to the sugar and carbohydrate content in your foods. And it means that the low-fat, high-sugar chocolate milk they sell in your kid’s school cafeteria is probably worse for them than whole-fat unsweetened milk they refuse to sell.

How do you think of fat in your diet? Good, bad, or indifferent?

 

Book Review: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

The Book

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun. By Gretchen Rubin. First published in 2009.

Summary

Over one calendar year, Rubin tries dozens of techniques and tactics to boost her own happiness — everything from starting a collection of bluebirds to cleaning up her apartment each night before bed.

She writes:

“… I grasped two things: I wasn’t as happy as I could be, and my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change. In that single moment, with that realization, I decided to dedicate a year to trying to be happier.”

What you need to know

If you’re looking for a one-size-fits-all guide to “happy,” this isn’t it. The Happiness Project doesn’t pretend to be a definitive guide. Instead, it is one woman’s series of experiments to boost her own happiness. Some of these seem quite logical; others feel totally random.

Nevertheless, it’s fun to follow along with Rubin’s experiment and as she finds out what works and what doesn’t. The book also has some profound insights into happiness and the human condition. I found a bunch of things I wanted to try like purposefully trying to make new friends.

Key Takeaway

Borrowing from the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism, Rubin comes up with four happiness theories of her own.

To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.
The days are long, but the years are short.
If I think I’m happier, I am happier.

Personal Impact

I read this book while I was planning to launch My Instruction Manual. As a result, Rubin’s ideas have influenced a few of my posts over the past week. I was also motivated by Rubin’s decision to post almost every day when she launched a new blog. I was originally planning to write a couple times a week, but Rubin inspired me to aim for the everyday habit.

Worth Reading?

Yes! I’m planning to read more of Rubin’s books including Happier at Home and Better Than Before.

Grow or Die: Why Happiness is Impossible Without Growth

One year ago this month, physician-assisted suicide became legal in Canada. The law stipulates that doctors can only carry out the procedure in situations where patients experience “suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions they consider acceptable.”

But it’s not physical pain that causes most people to request physician-assisted suicide. According to an article in the latest issue of Toronto Life magazine, it’s something much more profound.

In Oregon, where the practice has been legal for 20 years, the most common reasons cited by patients are loss of autonomy, an inability to enjoy life and loss of dignity. Doctors in Ontario say they’ve observed the same reasoning. … There is an underlying medical cause, but the suffering is usually existential. Patients find they are simply playing out the string, without any hope of finding meaning in the limited time available to them.

In other words, they are no longer able to achieve a fundamental human need — the need for growth.

I can relate.

In the months before my kidney transplant, the toxins were building up inside me, poisoning my body and mind. I was physically exhausted and mentally drained. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t exercise. I couldn’t learn. I wasn’t there for my family. My life was on hold. I had stopped growing.

Things got worse when I learned there was a chance I might not get approved for a kidney transplant because of an unrelated medical condition. This news threw me into depression. I knew I didn’t want to die. But life without growth didn’t feel like living either.

Humans have an insatiable need to grow. Our happiness depends on it. As William Butler Yeats wrote, “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

Gretchen Rubin describes growth as a key contributor to happiness in her book The Happiness Project.

Growth explains the happiness brought by training for a marathon, learning a new language, collecting stamps; by helping children learn to talk; by cooking your way through every recipe in a Julia Child Cookbook.

So what does this mean?

It means we need to grow every year, every month and every hour.

It means we must never allow ourselves to believe that we’re too old to grow, or too old to change, or too old to learn something new.

It means we need to grow like our happiness depends on it.

It means we need to grow like life itself depends on it. Because it does.

 

Has your job changed who you are?

It was 10 years ago this month that I left my steady job at The Globe and Mail to try something new. As the newspaper’s marketing reporter, I had been writing a lot about the infancy of social media and how brands were using tools like YouTube, blogs and MySpace.

I had the chance to join a mid-sized public relations company to launch a social media practice and I jumped on it.

My exit couldn’t have been better timed. In 2007, nobody could have predicted the implosion that was about to rock the worldwide newspaper industry.

But I was also happy to be leaving a career that had changed me more I anticipated when I’d started reporting a decade earlier.

 

My personality had always been rational, and I never accepted anything without proof. But I had allowed journalism to harden me. It had become more difficult for me to see the good in the world.

This is nothing against journalists or journalism, a profession I continue to respect immensely.

But it is extremely difficult not to be hardened in a profession where, to be successful, you have to:

Assume everybody you are interviewing has something to hide
Cover murders, floods, plane crashes and other tragedies without letting your emotions get in the way, and
Avoid being a fan of whatever you are covering no matter how noble or fun.

Journalists prided themselves on being detached, sober and skeptical. To be a “hard-nosed journalist” is a badge of honor. But there’s a fine-line between being hard-nosed and being unhappy.

Gretchen Rubin writes about how some people choose to be unhappy in her book The Happiness Project.

“Of course, it’s cooler not to be too happy. There’s a goofiness to happiness, an innocence, a readiness to be pleased. Zest and enthusiasm take energy, humility, and engagement; taking refuge in irony, exercising destructive criticism, or assuming an air of philosophical ennui is less taxing.”

There is magic in the world. But it’s hard to see it when you’re living in a world of skepticism.

Every job I’ve had has changed my personality in ways good and bad.

At the PR agency, there were times when I felt so happy and energized from a job that felt so fun. But there were also deep, depressing lows.

Working as the social media lead for a large corporation, I needed to go out of my way to be outgoing and positive for the team I was leading, and that made me feel more outgoing and positive.

And although running my own business – a small publishing company with no co-workers – can be lonely, it is also extremely satisfying and energizing to create something amazing all on my own.

What’s your experience? Has your profession changed who you are?

#SundayFunday: Sgt. Pepper at Fifty

When I was in grade five, my dad returned from a business trip to China with gifts: Two bootlegged cassette tapes of Beatles songs. The label was an ugly orange and there were spelling mistakes on the outside case. But I loved those tapes and couldn’t stop listening. More than a decade after they broke up, I had discovered the Beatles.

My life changed again when I bought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heats Club Band on vinyl. The album turns 50 this week.

One track, A Day in the Life, was like nothing I had ever heard before. All at once, the song moved filled me with sadness, awe and wonder.

I love almost the whole album. Aside from Within Without You, the George Harrison Sitar track, Sgt. Pepper’s is nearly perfect. The amazing thing is that two of the best songs from the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions were released early as two sides of a single and therefore left off the album. Imagine how much stronger this record would have been if these tracks had been included instead of Within Without You.

There’s something about this album that informed my musical tastes for the rest of my life; I feel it in the bands I have loved most from the Smiths and Depeche Mode in my high school years to Vampire Weekend and the New Pornographers more recently.

If you want to read more about the Beatles, check out the excellent anthology, Long and Winding Road, edited by Luis Miguel and published by my company FanReads.

What’s your favorite album of all time?

Once a week, I’m gong to take a break from writing about my quest to be happier, healthier and more productive to write about something a little different. Today’s post on Sgt. Pepper’s is the first in the #SundayFunday series.

My Kidney Transplant Story: Book Excerpt

One of my resolutions for June is to spend time everyday working on my book about my kidney disease and transplant. Getting the gift of a kidney from my little sister is what led to My Instruction Manual. Today, I’m excited to share an excerpt from the book, which will be released this summer.

I am lying in a hospital bed in the pre-op room at Toronto General Hospital. My wife Laura is seated to my left and holding my hand.

“I love you so much,” she says.

There are no tears, not now, though we’ve both cried in the days leading up to the surgery.

This is one of the biggest days of my life, right up there with my wedding day and the births of my two sons. By donating her kidney, my sister Stephanie is giving me another chance at life. But it’s hard to feel excited right before surgery.

We don’t say it out loud but we’re both scared we won’t see each other again. The risk of death from a kidney transplant is low — one in four-thousand I’ve been told — but there’s still a risk.

I’ve tossed those odds around in my head over the past few weeks. One way I try to put the numbers in perspective is to think about Rogers Centre, one of my favorite places in the world, where my beloved Toronto Blue Jays play. At 40,000, the stadium is almost full. So I imagine a stadium full of people and 10 of them don’t make it. I visualize half a row of fans who die.

This visualization doesn’t make me feel any better so I try another approach. The Toronto General Hospital does about 140 kidney transplants a year.  I do the math that this means just one death in 30 years of transplants. This way of thinking about the odds makes me feel much better.

An orderly in hospital blues approaches the bed.

“I’ve come to take you to surgery,” he says.

“It’s time?” I ask, and he nods confirmation.

As he unlocks the brakes on the bed, I turn to my wife and tell her I’ll see her soon. Her eyes well up with tears and she gives my hand a squeeze.

The orderly wheels me out of the pre-op room and into a bright corridor. I’m cold despite the heated paper blanket, filled with warm air, that covers my body.

We turn into another hallway with doors to the left and right. Above each door a sign: Operating Room 1. Operating Room 2. We continue down the hallway to Operating Room 13. I’m not superstitious, but part of me wishes this wasn’t the room where my surgery was taking place. I’m surprised they didn’t just skip Number 13, like some apartment buildings skip the thirteenth floor. There must be some patients, I imagine, who panic and protest when they learn their surgery will be in Operating Room 13.

They slide the bed right beside the operating table. As the orderly goes to lock the back wheels he accidentally knocks over my IV pole. There are a few moments of panic until one of the anesthesiologists, a woman with an English accent, tells everybody to calm down. With the IV pole upright and my bed locked in place, I am asked to slide over onto the operating table. It is so narrow that they need to install armrests so my arms don’t dangle.

I close my eyes. I have to pee, but it’s too late for that now. Besides, they’ll be inserting a Foley catheter to clear my bladder during the operation.

I notice my left arm has been taped to the armrest and the anesthesiologist is trying to insert an IV into the vein in my wrist. It’s painful and it seems to take forever. An hour earlier, another member of the anesthesiology team tried to insert the IV but couldn’t get it to work. This IV is important as it keeps track of my blood pressure through the surgery.

When the IV is finally in place, someone puts a clear plastic mask over my mouth and asks me to take deep breaths as they start the anesthetics through the IV. I feel tired right away and my eyes are heavy but I fight sleep and open my eyes wide. I don’t want them to start cutting me while I’m still awake. I notice the powerful light pointed at my torso and wonder if the ‘light’ some people report seeing in near-death experiences is just a bright surgical lamp.

“Take some deep breaths,” someone tells me. I keep my eyes wide open and breathe. A few seconds later, I can’t fight it any longer. I close my eyes and fall asleep.

Four hours later I will wake up with a new kidney and my second chance at life will begin.

Once a week, I’m going to take a break from writing about making my life happier, healthier and more productive to write about something off-topic and fun. Tomorrow, in my first #SundayFunday post, I’ll be writing about The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s  album, which turns fifty this week.

Maybe I’m Not Too Old to Make New Friends

I’m not a very good friend.

I care deeply about the people in my life and want to stay close with them. But maintaining friendships takes work, and I’ve been lazy. The friendships I do have are largely thanks to the other person making the effort.

As part of My Instruction Manual, I’ve been thinking about the people who are important to me, and I’m slowly starting to put in the required work.

But what about making new friends?

I read in Gretchen Rubin‘s The Happiness Project that one of her happiness resolutions was to make three new friends in a month.

THREE new friends? In a MONTH?

Nothing she tried in her year of happiness experiments seemed more daunting to me than the idea of making new friends. If I couldn’t be bothered to maintain existing friendships, how could I even consider making new friends? To be honest, by the time I reached my forties, I felt like I was too old to make friends.

Then one evening in May, my wife Laura, my son Bryson and I met a new neighbors who had moved in around the corner. They were from Mexico, but had most recently lived in the United States. They were friendly and their daughters were roughly the same age as our sons.

“We should be try to be friends with them,” I said to Laura as we walked home.

But how?

I came up with a plan to drop by with some kind of welcome gift. It seemed like the right thing to do, but the whole idea felt very unnatural to me.

So I asked Facebook. On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird was it to bring new neighbors a welcome gift of food?

I got about 20 replies. Here are some of the answers:

Our neighbours did this and we were sooo thankful! Not weird at all. Just make it something easy for them to make in case they haven’t unpacked all of their cooking supplies.

…and…

I say 1 totally normal and I would have loved it when we moved into the neighborhood a few years ago.

…and…

I think good. We felt welcomed when my old neighbor just popped by to welcome us when we moved in. It’s hard to move, but good to know when you have helpful and kind neighbors!

Nobody else seemed to think this was weird. So why did this feel so uncomfortable to me? I know I would think it was friendly, and not weird at all, if somebody brought me a welcome gift if I moved to a new neighborhood.

I knew I had to get over myself, so the next day I picked up a small cake from a neighborhood bakery and wrote out a welcome card. For the delivery, I brought my thirteen-year-old son Connor who is the extrovert of the family and can be very charming.

As we walked, I was struck with a memory from my childhood. When I was about nine years old, I biked to the corner store and bought a jar of candy labeled “be mine.” Then I biked over to the house of a girl I had a crush on, and with my heart beating out of my chest, knocked on the front door and asked for her. I’m not sure I even said anything when she arrived at the door, but I thrust the present at her, still enclosed in a wrinkled brown paper bag. When I arrived at school the next morning, she came over to my desk and returned the candy, telling me politely that she could not accept the gift.

Was it a fear of rejection that was making this task, 35 years later, so uncomfortable?

“Are you nervous, Dad? You seem nervous,” Connor said to me as we approached the house.

We knocked on the door and waited. But nobody was home. We walked home and put the cake and card back into the fridge.

When we returned later, the husband, who I had not yet met, was home alone. He was friendly and seemed to really appreciate this small gesture. He gave me his business card and suggested getting our families together for Mexican food once his family had settled.

The next day, his wife dropped by our house with two of her daughters. She thanked me for the cake handed me a thank you card with their contact information. The front of the card showed a hot air balloon floating over a city at night with the inscription, “You bring happiness wherever you go.”

Whether we become friends or not, I’m proud that I pushed myself to do something that made me feel uncomfortable. It’s a reminder that we’re never too old to make new friends.  More importantly, we’re never too old to grow.

A note about tomorrow’s blog. I mentioned yesterday that I’m working on a book about my experience with kidney disease and my transplant. Tomorrow, I’m going to share an excerpt of the book, which will be released later this summer.

 

Are resolutions the secret to happiness?

In her 2009 book The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin recounts spending a year of her life experimenting with techniques to boost her personal happiness, everything from decluttering her New York City apartment (which made her considerably happier) to laughter yoga (which did not).

So what made her happiest? Towards the end of the book, Rubin answers this question.

During the year, when people had asked me, “So what’s the secret to happiness?,” at different times I’d answer “Exercise” or “Sleep” or “Do good, feel good” or “Strengthen your connections to other people.” But by the end of December, I’d realized that the most helpful aspect of my happiness project hadn’t been these resolutions or the Four Splendid Truths I’d identified, or the science I’d learned, or all the high-minded books I’d read. The single most effective step for me had been to keep my Resolutions Chart.

Rubin got the idea for her idea for the resolution chart from Benjamin Franklin, who scored himself every day on whether he practiced thirteen virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility).

Resolution Charts have become a common feature in bullet journals, which I wrote about in yesterday’s post. I’m kicking off the month by starting a bullet journal, featuring a resolutions chart of my own.

I don’t know if tracking resolutions really leads to happiness, but I’m willing to give it a try. I’ve come up with five resolutions I’m going to track in June. These are things I’m aiming to do every day, though, importantly, I’m not expecting / requiring perfection from myself.

Because this is the first month I’m doing this (and the start of My Instruction Manual), I’m not working on big life-changing resolutions this month — just things that will help me get my life back on track as I continue to recover from my kidney transplant.

Here’s my list for June.

1) Exercise

I used to run half marathons. But in the months leading up to my transplant, I became so weak that I couldn’t even stand for long periods of time, let alone run. The surgeon told me I could start running again six weeks after the transplant as long as I took it easy. I’ve been out three times already in the past week, alternating between running and walking for three kilometers. So far, I haven’t done back-to-back days, but today I’m planning to go out for the second straight day. I’ll still need lots of days off from running and on those days, I’m going to walk for at least 45 minutes.

In addition to this resolution, I also have an exercise goal. (Resolutions are ongoing; goals are one and done.) July 11 marks three months since my transplant and represents the date the incision in my lower stomach is supposed to be fully healed. (It’s already healed on the skin surface, but the cut muscle inside my lower stomach takes a lot longer). So my goal on June 11 is to run for five kilometres without breaks.

2) Zero Inbox

At least once a day, I want Google Inbox to be completely empty. It’s easier to do in Inbox than in other email programs because you can snooze emails or to dos until the date and time you want to deal with them. Clearing my box every day ensures I don’t miss important tasks and can get back to people in a timely manner.

3) Write Blog

For the first month, at least, I’m aiming to post here every day.

4) Write Books

I’m a writer. I need to write everyday, and not just blog posts. I’m going to try to spend time every day writing. The main book I’m focusing on in June is a short ebook about my kidney disease and transplant. My goal is to finish the first draft by the end of June.

5) Social Media

After ignoring them for a while, I’m trying to nurture my personal social media profiles. This means posting to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn multiple times each day. I’m also going to spend time every day at Goodreads, a social network for writers and readers.

My plan is to revisit my resolutions at the end of the month and modify and / or build on them for July. There’s a lot more I could tackle in my resolutions list (such as improving my diet, being more patient with my kids, and working on friendships) and maybe I’ll address some of these in July. And while I’m not tackling friendships yet in my resolutions journal, I will be posting about friendships in tomorrow’s blog post.

I’d love to hear from you. How are you at keeping resolutions? Have you set any for June?

 

Personal Organization and the Bullet Journal

The smartphone is an amazing tool for personal organization. In addition to scheduling, note-taking and to-do lists, there are thousands of apps promising to take your personal organization to the next level.

I truly love that my smartphone keeps me organized.

But part of me misses the Daytimer I used twenty years ago. Marking a task complete by tapping your phone just isn’t as satisfying as crossing it off in pen. Completed digital tasks vanish into the smartphone ether, somehow making accomplishments less satisfying.

That’s where a bullet journal comes in.

A bullet journal is an analog mashup of calendar, to-do list and diary. As part of my journey to become happier, healthier and more productive, I am starting a bullet journal tomorrow for the first of the month.

The core of a bullet journal is a daily list of bullets that can include appointments, tasks that need to get done, milestones, notes and thoughts. Bullet journalers create indexes as they go to keep track of categories. For me these categories will include events like my transplant and projects like My Instruction Manual. Other modules that can be included in a bullet journal include lists of books read, or charts for keeping track of daily resolutions. (More on tracking daily resolutions in tomorrow’s blog post.)

Since I’m not going to get into all the ins and outs of creating a bullet journal here, I refer you to the excellent Buzzfeed post WTF is a Bullet Journal and Why Should You Start One?

 

Many bullet journalers take great pride in making their journals beautiful. Check out the Instagram hashtags #bulletjournal or #bujo for inspiration. Unfortunately for me, my handwriting is terrible and I’ve always thought of visual design as a personal blind spot.

Still, I bought some colored pens and a grid-patterned Moleskin. Serious bullet journalers prefer dotted-grid journals, but I couldn’t find one so I settled for the lined-grid version.

I spent an hour last night setting up my bujo, even drawing little pictures of books and a movie projector on the pages where planned to keep track of books I’d read and films I’d watched.

I knew it wasn’t Insta-worthy, I was proud of it and wanted to share. When I showed it to my wife Laura, she chuckled.

“What?” I asked. “Is it awful?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just a bit like I’m looking at a kids’ journal because of your handwriting. Also, you spelled calendar wrong.”

And so I had, highlighting an obvious drawback with analog — no spell check.

No matter — I’m doing this to help myself get organized, not to win any spelling bees or design awards.

After using my bullet journal for a while, I’ll report back with my experiences.

 

Meantime, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. How do you keep organized? Have you tried a bullet journal? Is this something you would consider?