August Was A Bust (/Sweet Vacation!)

I have a confession to make. August was not a very successful month for me, as far as Create / Consume is concerned.

72 hours and 38 minutes of glorious mostly guilt-free consumption

Now, keep in mind this chart also includes not one but two "vacation" periods (first weekend in August, as a celebration for completing July, as well as this current holiday weekend) where I wasn't tracking but I was consuming plenty. So its actually even worse than this. It probably didn't help that I got my first PS3 and a slew of games to go with it. Look at all this blue!

On the plus side, my list of completed video games grew nicely in August

So, just in case you thought Create / Consume was something that becomes easy or that you naturally gravitate towards once you stick with it for 30 days...no and no. I'm not being hard on myself right now, but it is important to me to be aware of how easy it is to slip back to old habits. The same thing happened to me when I gave up video games for an entire year. I allowed myself to gorge pretty heavily once the year was over, and a lot of the new interests and habits I formed wound up falling by the wayside.

Despite how poorly I knew I was doing this month, I was definitely diligent about recording my activities. I wanted to see/show the results here, no matter what. I stopped looking around halfway through the month though, knowing I wasn't going to like what I saw.

"Miscellaneous" pretty much means working out. 11 hours of outdoors exercise in August is probably a small victory in and of itself

I think it's important to reward yourself for a job well done, but also to recognize when an extended reward is turning into an old habit returning. But hey, these things happen, but I'd like to say here and now that I'm going to do my best to get back on track for September. Just like week I had something pretty awesome happen - a piece I wrote got on my favorite blog, and got a fair amount of press along with it - so I'd like to keep that momentum going if possible.

As always, thanks for reading. Look for more thoughts this coming month.

-Matt