I’ve learned over the years the best way for me to change is through small habits or routines. In 2019 I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and I found the best way for me to manage my blood sugar was by taking a ten to twenty minute walk after eating a meal. My walks are so much a part of my day that it feels very abnormal when I am not doing them.
So, when considering all this time I now have for myself, I began considering what it is I want to be doing each day. There were the obvious things like reading more and learning more, but I also realized that I could be doing a better job of helping to keep the house clean. Rather than doing all the cleaning all at once I broke down these tasks down into 15 minute items, one per day during week days.
Being the geek I am, I began to look for software to help in keeping track of these habits and I found two: Grocy and Brite. Grocy is a self hosted web app for managing a household, particularly grocery shopping and meal planning, and it includes chore tracking. Brite is a mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop (MacOS and web) app that has the traditional calendar and to-do lists but also has sections for Habits, Projects, and Goals. Brite is probably the most extensible “personal digital assistant” app I’ve found.
I have been using both, but neither is a perfect solution. Grocy has components we just won’t use and while Brite is better aligned it too has more than I need.
Most PDA apps are designed around a work day in an office and primarily serve for scheduling meetings and managing tasks. Appointments and tasks are still in life as a retiree but they are not the main things and so I started thinking about what is that is now important.
The first item I identified were the Topics Of Interest to me that I want to learn more about, AI is one of those topics, Anthropology is another. Another item are Ideas, which are mostly things I want to do that I want to remember. An Idea might be a topic for a blog post or what I want to do for my birthday.
Working on an idea is a Project, which is something to be accomplished in two or more tasks. I don’t stop having tasks in retirement but I might be less concerned about due dates. I am thinking of due dates as more about reminders than deadlines.
Having thought through Topics, Ideas, and Projects I realized what should tie these all together are Goals and Goals answer the question, what is it that I want to do with my time. As I fleshed out what I want to document and track my goals I came to the realization they are more meaningful to me now in retirement.
I think one of the most performative parts of working in corporate America is yearly goals or objectives. Employees are given the illusion they have influence on those goals but in reality they are dictated and in the end there is really just one goal, make money so that the top level of the company and its shareholders get rich.
My 37 year career was spent on someone else’s goals, and in that time I really had one goal, remain employed to make money to pay the bills and save for retirement. Accomplishing that one goal while part of corporate America enables me to now have real goals for the time in my life.
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Notes From The Cave 