Archives October 2022

It has now been a month since I stopped working (the most extended period in my life not working since 2004), so time for some status.

Overall, I feel happy and in balance 😀😀😀. Despite weirdness and long days at the beginning and a few stumbling blocks along the way (as expected), I feel I’m off to a great start, with healthy routines, better sleep quality, and better tools for contemplating how I can be the best version of myself.

Learning (Unity) is also off to a great start and it is fun although daunting at times (Will write some more on Unity in the future)

I also got a great understanding, encouragement, and tips from former colleagues, family, coach, and friends about hard and often “taboo” topics through good long talks so I don’t feel alone on the journey (it means more than you realize; so thank you all once again).

I don’t think I could not have gotten a better start to Rasmus 2.0 🥰

So it is now onwards to Month 2 with a focus on maintaining the established balance and further enhancing the building of the new professional passion that is Unity Game Development for now…

See you next week, and take care…

Week 43 Goals results for reference…

Goal	Result
3 x Fitness Center	2 🙁
Weight: 108,4 >> 107 kg or less	106,6 Kg 🙂 (Weight plateau finally over due to great tip from former Colleague; Thanks ALC!)
5 Walks	5 🙂
2 Sections of the Unity learning course	2 + a bit 🙂

Goals for week 44

This week is rather busy with meetings and other stuff so I lowered the fitness goals a bit this week (having the time for them is a bonus). Getting the Unity Course done is a bit optimistic, but let’s see…

1. Raise average weekly sleep time above 7 hours by paying more attention to fewer devices end of the day (currently 6,46 hours average per week)
2. 2 x Fitness Center
3. Weight: 106,6 >> 105,5 kg or less
4. 3 Walks
5. 2 final sections of the first Unity Course are done (very ambitious!)
6. 2 Morning runs should be 4km instead of the normal 2km

When I made the change to pursue a new journey 3 weeks ago, it was with minimum plans but I still had set myself some goals prior to what I wanted for Rasmus 2.0. Here are the 3 overall goals I wrote down:

1. Become Healthier
   • More exercise
   • Loose 25kg (from 120kg down to 95kg)
2. Explore Mindfulness
   • Meditation
3. Get a new Career/Passion/Goal in life
   • Make a computer game?
   • Make a board game?
   • Become an Agile Coach?

I do not think anyone can say these are bad goals, and there is even a bit of breakdown into sub-goals, but what I’m beginning to realize now is that my brain’s impatience need even more breakdown because if we just look at this raw:

Goal	Achieve?
More exercise	😊 (Yes, more)
Loose 25 kg	☹️ (Not there yet)
Meditation	😕 (Maybe)
Make a computer game	☹️ (Not done)
Make a board game	☹️ (Not done)
Become an agile coach	☹️ (Not yet)

Being this black and white on achieved/not achieved, is of cause a bit absurd (some of the “goals” I have not even started to explore yet), but my brain, which like many others, craves instant gratification and success will at a weak moment see myself as a total failure and while it is of cause wrong, it is demotivating… Let’s take my weight loss goal as an example for the rest of this post:

History of my weight/weight loss

I’ve always been big, doing too little exercise, and eating too much, having only been below 100kg in the last 10 years in 2016 when I got into a healthy rhythm (after feeling poor health and hitting, back then, the high of 110kg)…

I don’t recall why I relapsed because honestly 2016 felt awesome, but as you can see above it has only gotten worse since then hitting as high as 122kg (I can begin to blame stress, covid, or any other things, but who cares… it was bad… something needed to be done)

Start is easy; patience is a virtue I don’t have 🙁

Given the high starting numbers and the “way I work”; once I set my mind to it, I always find it easy in the beginning, but then I always end up in a state of “this is easy; I can slack a bit” 🙁

So, as you can see I’ve lost 10+ kg in the last 3 months (awesome), but in the last 2 of the months only 2 of the kgs have been achieved, despite those months being where I tried the most, and that is demotivating 😥

Weight is not the only measure!

So, should I just give up and go back to my old habits, since this does not help, and do the bursts every time my weight hit 120 kg and bump it down to 110 kg?

No!, Instead I need to realize that this is not only about weight but about overall health… So what if I weigh 110 kg and not the desired 95kg… Let’s measure in different ways:

• I feel more energized (yes, no way to “measure” but why should that matter!)
• My Fat % is dropping a bit more than my weight (so the same “amount of me” kg-wise, but better types of me (more muscle, less fat))!
• My morning runs are faster (6:30/km in August, now it is 06:10/km)
• My consumption of fast food is way down (6 times in September, 1 time in October), and overall eating much healthier foods
• Various people notice I lost weight 🙂

Goal Breakdown and Week Goals are my “cure”

As you see above it is all about going deeper into an overall goal and breaking it down more on a weekly basis.

Previous goal	Redefined goals (defined weekly)
More exercise	– x number of trips to the fitness center – x number of runs – x number of walks
Loose 25 kg	– kg weight loss goal for the week – fat% loss for the week – waist in cm measure – Picture measure (body shape) – Meal plan
Meditation	– Scheduled sessions – Commit to being present
Make a computer game	– Learn Unity and complete x sections of online courses a week – Learn the basics (crawl > walk > run) – Note down ideas but be patient with starting…
Make a board game	Wait until the Computer game outcome (you can’t do it all at once!)
Become an agile coach	Wait until the Computer game outcome (you can’t do it all at once!)
– General –	All the classics – Rome was not built in a day – It is a Marathon, not a sprint – Learn the basics – Crawl before you walk, before you run…

Overall
– No rocket science here –
– No deep insights –
– Just plain old common sense –
that I needed to remind myself of…

Thank you all for reading along and see you next week

PS: Public Service Announcement: The Worst book I’ve ever read!

While today’s post does not go deep into Unity Gaming, I wanted to inform you that this “book” I’ve mentioned in my first “What’s Next” post should be avoided by anyone like the plague!

I have very high hopes for the book and it had few, but excellent reviews, but 200 pages into it, I found out that it is utter garbage with no structure, and just random topics not learning you anything coherent as the premise promises; shame on you Auther and Publisher! 🙁

What I ended up instead was buying this Unity Course on Udemy, and I can highly recommend it, as it has been awesome so far (more on that in a later post)

Life “interrupted”

A death in the family (sad but nothing tragic; very old age and expected/good given circumstances) on Monday evening took some of the focus this week, as there suddenly was a slew of practical things to help my parents with. RIP…

A different type of life “interruption” is the meditation that I now have more structure around (2×15 min each day) after completing the book “Mindfulness for Beginners”. The book is good, but at the same time, I feel I need to read it at least one more time in a more calm mind to truly appreciate it (and see if I can somehow figure out if I’m “doing it right”)… But it feels nice and that is all that matters right now…

Feel the need; The need for code and creativity!

I am a creative being and have been all my life, so 2 whole weeks of not “creating anything” must be enough and it is time to do something creative again… So I will take up Unity Game Development and see if that is fun… I will give the first status next week.

In other news

• After two weeks of breakfast experiment (having not eaten anything in the mornings for 15+years, it is “thrown out again”… It is still not the most important meal of the day for me
• The rest of the Morning running routine is here to stay as it is a perfect start of the day for me given I have the time now
• Getting into a longer/more recurring schedule for Fitness Center, so despite feeling very sore, it is the good kind of sore 🙂
• My knees are still holding up so far with the increased exercises (please let this not be jinxing that!)
• Despite all this exercise weight is still not dropping 🙁 Guess it is a mix of muscle buildup and eating too much… Need to do more in this area soon, so expect it to be a week 3/4 topic.
• Sleep quality dropped a bit this week, but given the week’s events I’m not worried, but I need to be more strict with my before-bed screen time.
• Had a good, long talk with my parents on the transition (they are from a generation where doing something like this was unheard of so good to talk about it) and also with a former colleague that has been on the same journey as me one year ago giving some good tips; Thank you “NH”!
  • In general, if anyone has questions, comments or tips feel free to reach out; there is nothing taboo here despite it being different from the norm.

See you all next week and take care… 😉

It is now been a week since I left Boyum (feels more like a month mentally but in a good way) so wanted to give a status to further explain why I did this in the first place as I’m sort of circling in on it myself now 😀.

Work/Life Balance Status

As I mentioned in my leaving post, this was the main reason for leaving. I mentioned that it was off, but in more detail, it was properly like 95% “work” and 5% “life”. This does not mean I was 95% of the time at the office, or at a computer at home, but more that, almost all of my waking time, was spent, thinking about work stuff.

After this week, my work/life balance is even more off, but on purpose, and reversed to 99% “life” and 1% “work”. The original plan was more 80/20 but reading comments of my leaving post about remembering to fully wind down, in the beginning, made me reconsider so thanks to those that pointed that out as they were 100% correct.

So right now I am simply “denying” my creative mind any “work”, just noting down ideas that pop up instead of pursuing them, and since I cut the tie to Boyum-work, I can’t touch that stuff anymore as I don’t have access (which is so liberating 😀). I’m essentially doing a “work/creativity detox”

Instead, my mind is “learning” that it is OK not to be “doing” and it is good to just “being”…… And I feel it is working 😀😀😀

That being said, I know the end goal is “balance” and at some time I need to release my inner “creativity beast”. I will let it free down the road once the rest of my being is ready to “tame” the beast in a matter so it does not start dominating again.

99% “life” details…

So what does a 99% Life look like for me? It is a good mix of Exercise, Mindfulness, Sleep, and Social Experiments

Running

In the past, I had a run 3x2k every week in the evening where I did not have the excuse to “not have time”. For this first week I switched this up with an experiment to instead do a 2k run every morning @ 07:00. This has been really great so I will continue this morning routine 😀…

Walking

I’ve done extra walks as part of mindfulness, and always enjoyed walking but in the past, they always ended up in work thoughts (I test this by checking if I can listen to an Audiobook while walking, and in the past the work thoughts made me need to turn it off and switch to music as I could not follow the plot admits the thoughts)… This week it was finally possible to have a 15k walk with little to no work thoughts which was so nice just enjoying the trip… I even tried walks without any music, but that became a bit “boring” (need to experiment a bit more with that, perhaps mixing it up with mindful music)

Fitness

Beyond runs and walks, I’m trying a fitness center routine 2-3 times a week but have not yet committed to a schedule not knowing if it is for me yet, or more running is better suited for me… Time will tell.

Knees

Other good news is that my knees that I was very worried about as they have been an issue in the past could not handle all this extra activity, but so far, so good (I do some special 5-min training for my knees before each morning run to help with that).

Sleep

I have for many years gotten way too little sleep (4-6 hours) but somehow still managed, so I set a goal to hit the magical 8 hours of sleep. To be more scientific about it I wear my newly acquired Apple Watch to be and tried with a fixed 23:00 – 07:00 sleep schedule. I’m not quite at 8 hours, only hitting it 2 times this week with an average of 7h, 18min

It seems it is “hard” to sleep that much for me, and ironically I’ve felt less refreshed on those days, so I might be more of a 7h is optimal kind of guy, but I will try to keep the 8-hour goal at least one more week

Mental wellbeing

I’ve started the “Mindfulness for Beginners” book during the week. It is a short book with only 1-2 page chapters, but it is the kind of book where every single word is carefully chosen and has a deep meaning it feels, so I am not as far in the book as I expected, needing to re-read a lot or abandon reading altogether if my mind where somewhere else… I need to accept that this is not a “read this and you are mindful” thing, but more like a new way of learning to be more present while reading, so I’m very much looking forward to more of this book knowing that I might need to read it multiple times…. But already now I feel like it has given me a better perspective on all of this.

Social Wellbeing

One of the great fears in this journey is the eventual lack of social interaction. It still is, but this week was packed with 3 lectures (“Quantum physics”, “Blazor” and “App Development with Swift”), one role-playing session, and 2 boardgame/escape room sessions… This is by no means a normal week of social for me, and the coming weeks are much less scheduled, truly testing if I will feel the lack of social interaction (don’t worry; as an introvert, there is not a huge demand 😉), but I’m also forcing myself to do “things I normally would not do” to get perspective and train my “worst case scenario brain” that not everything new is scary…

PS

Thank you so much all for the kind reaction to all of this on LinkedIn. I knew I would get reactions on leaving, but I had not dreamed of that much love and respect for the decision, and the wise words from various people on the journey I’m now on… Not a single comment has been mean or negative, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you again for your understanding.

So, I left Boyum, with no new job lined up (on purpose). What in the world was I thinking and what’s Next?

Well, it is not set in stone yet, but I have a long list of experiments that I will spend at least the rest of 2022 exploring… The experiments are in various areas but here are the first 3 I will explore:

1. Fitness and physical wellbeing

While I do run 3 times a week and have done so for over a year, it is time to shape up and gain more energy for life, so I will spend extra time preparing proper food (no more junk food), walk more, and hit the fitness center more often… The plan is to lose 25 kg, and I’m well underway 🙂

2. Mindfulness and Minimalism

I have for a long time been fascinated by mindfulness, meditation, and minimalism, but in a busy work-life, I’ve never managed to fully “understand” mindfulness, and only on rare occasions managed to get something meaningful out of my meditation attempts. By recommendation, I’ve found the book Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat-Zinn and will see if it brings me closer to desired result…

3. Unity Gaming

So it is not only Body and Mind, I’m mixing the first phase of the experimentation up with some Unity Gaming to see if game development is something for me, after years of being a developer. So I mixed up the book reading with this book and if all goes as planned I will try to make a Tower Defense Game

Update: WARNING: Do not buy this book, I’m now started reading it and it is the worst “book” I’ve ever read! Will give more context and alternatives in Week 3 post!

… There is many more entries on the experiment list, but those are for a later post.

And so it begins…
The Journey to the next passion in life
Wish me luck!