A Goal For Each Month
Project Infobox 
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| Self researcher(s) | Florian Schumacher |
| Related tools | iCal, OfficeTime |
| Related topics | Productivity, Sleep, Sports and fitness, Activity tracking, Food tracking, Diet and weight loss, Body measurements |
Builds on project(s) |
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| Has inspired | Projects (0) |
| Show and Tell Talk Infobox | |
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| Featured image | 
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| Date | 2014/05/10 |
| Event name | 2014 QS Europe Conference |
| Slides | A-goal-for-each-month.pdf |
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A Goal For Each Month is a Show & Tell talk by Florian Schumacher that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2014/05/10 and is about Productivity, Sleep, Sports and fitness, Activity tracking, Food tracking, Diet and weight loss, and Body measurements.
Description[edit | edit source]
A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:
In the beginning of 2014 Florian set himself twelve goals, one for every month. In his Show&Tell he’ll present the achievements in nutrition, fitness, sleep, and productivity that he's made in 2014.
Video and transcript[edit | edit source]
A transcript of this talk is below:
Florian Schumacher
A Goal For Each Month
Hi everybody, my name is Florian Schumacher and in the beginning of the year I thought what I would like to improve in my life and I found it was quite a lot so I thought I wouldn’t just make one resolution but a whole plan and focus areas for the whole year. To give you a little background that’s what I’ve been doing with my time in Q1 2014, I think you might not be able to see the text, so the big green is my job at AG Technologies; it’s a marketing platform for wearables. I’m also blogging and a few other things. And the way I get to those numbers is I use my calendar, so I’m trying to live a regular life. I get up every morning at the same time morning. Do sports every morning, I try to have lunch and dinner at the same time, and every week on my calendar is pre-programmed, but obviously I have to adjust and put in all the data about my work, about my work and different customers I’m working for and I record that in my calendar. So I’m using Ical and I’m using different categories in the software called Office Time and aggregate all the information and build it up into such a graph which I can use for different timeframes. You can also see I invested quite some time in living healthy on the upper right side, so that’s what I’m going to talk about now. My goals for Q1 has been eating healthy, getting in shape, and increasing performance. So I read a lot about the high fat diet and I thought that this is something I might want to try. So this is how I’m getting my calories; it’s a snapshot. I’m not tracking regularly my nutrition, but from this snapshot you can see that I’m getting about 50% of my calories from fat, about 10 to 20% of protein and the rest is carbs. So I start my day with a bulletproof coffee. It’s a coffee with butter, coconut oil and MCT oil. That’s how I get roughly 400 calories and it keeps me energized the whole morning so quite a big portion of fat. For lunch I’m having a green smoothie which I blend myself with avocado, salad, dried fruit, fresh fruit, berries, protein powder, and it’s a big portion as you can see it’s like one liter. And the cool thing with the smoothies is you can really design the nutrition factor of the product and you can add protein. You can add avocado, nuts, oil and make it a real healthy meal. So in the evening I’m cooking regularly, vegetables; I’m a vegetarian, so usually I get roughly 700 calories and that’s why it’s quite easy for me to get a baseline of what I’m eating because it’s quite regular. And of course I’m also into snacking. So in the evening I’m eating dried fruit, seeds, nuts and have a glass of whiskey every once in a while. And if you look at it, its 300 calories for snacking and add that all up it’s a little bit less of 1800 calories for one day, and the cool thing is I’m not hungry all day. So I’m energized and it’s way beyond my calorie burn, and that’s how I was able to lose 14 pounds in Q1 2014 and no suffering from that kind of diet. So next up is my learning about snacking. So I really like snacking but I avoid unhealthy snacks and I’m eating nuts, dried fruit and things like that and I learned for me that it’s interesting to have nice containers to store them. So I’m really celebrating not eating my snacks but storing them. Of course many rules in my life, so there’s that cheat day. So on Sunday so no rules at all and I’m spending it with my girlfriend and I eat all the unhealthy food and yeah try to relax. Next up is getting in shape. So I tried to do sports last year and the year before, but I didn’t do it regularly , so I found out for me self-tracking doesn’t work for doing sports; I have to do sports every day so there’s no discussion. So I’m doing daily lifting at home. I bought myself some dumbbells and a bench and I’m also going to the gym the other day for exercising my legs or for cardio training. So doing sports every morning for 45 minutes work for me no discussion, so no excuses. So somehow I got already addicted to it and if my girlfriend doesn’t have time on Sundays I’m doing sport as well on Sundays. So I’m also measuring my muscle and my body measurements and that’s my upper arm circumference, and you can see I gained muscle and the cool thing is when you look at my weight data I had like a plateau. So for almost one month I didn’t lose weight, and I might have been frustrated that I wouldn’t have known that I gained muscle. So there were two transitions going on in my body at the same time, so by knowing that I was quite motivated to keep to that. Next, I want to talk about increasing performance, but for me that meant reducing energy loss. So if you look at the next slide you can see my alcohol levels from drinking beer or wine. I’m from Munich so typically drink beer and I quite easily get to 0.4 or 0.8, so usually in the evening that’s why I switch to whiskey on the right side, whiskey or gin. Usually in the evening enjoying a few drinks and I get much less alcohol in my blood and much less energy loss on the other days, so it works pretty well for me. I’m also taking supplements to avoid negative side effects, but no more energy loss from drinking. Then I had a problem with getting up too early in the mornings, and sometimes I’m over energetic and I sleep too little so I needed to change that. And I’m using my Phillips Hue lighting system that’s a connected lightbulb system and I can control all my lights with my IPhone app. So I’m having an artificial sunrise every morning at 6:30. So when my IPhone alarm goes on, the room is bright and I’m pretty much energized and don’t have any problems to get up and can train my rhythms to get up every morning at 6:30. As you can see here, at least this week I achieved it for four days. And the system works pretty well for me using light to influence my melatonin on certain levels, and also using it at night to trigger sleep. So at 10:30 my light goes off, and I’m sitting in my room at my computer writing and then it’s getting dark. And yeah, somehow I accept the fact that I should just got to bed and just do it.
So Q2, I’m improving my breathe, I’m improving monetization and I’m planning to share some of my insights on my blog, so igrowdigital so please look it up and that’s it from me thank you.
About the presenter[edit | edit source]
Florian Schumacher gave this talk.