100 Days... 100 Hours

 

Violinist Hilary Hahn did #100daysofpractice project and shared results on Instagram

This year is the 8th annual #100dayproject

There's a certain type of person who falls for this sort of thing, and I've been one of them.   In one particular bout of this, I decided  to do 10 weeks of immersion in four separate things each 90 minutes each.  This is what I wrote on May 28, 2017:

It's 10 weeks until the start of school.  Yesterday, as always at this time of the year, I tried to make some sense of the summer.  Encouraged by my success in building a habit of running, I've set ambitious time goals: 100 hours of music, exercise, gardening, and reading.  What can be accomplished when I invest more into each area? (I also want to notice 14 things per day... to get to 1000 things during the summer.)

That's 90 mins each per day; so , my weekly goal is 40 hours of the core four.  That means 6 hours per day of exercise, gardening, music, reading.  Summer is the time to expand from 25-minute chunks to 90 minute chunks.

After the first day, I realized that I had to clarify the music practice -- make smaller goals/time chunks.  After the second day, I wrote this:

On this day I did the 90 mins of garden (it was a beautiful day).  I read until 10 pm to do the 90 mins of reading (I finished Snow Country in two days!) I did 60 mins of exercise (ran, then walked 30 in Mt. Prospect).  I did 60 mins of guitar -- all at night.  I clarified music practice and did more "skill learning" things - scales, 1st inversion learning, sight reading.  

Day 3: It was a school day yesterday, and I was able to keep up with gardening and reading (b/c I'm listening to a book on tape which gave me 1/2 hour on drive to work and 1/2 hr on dog walk) but I fell short on guitar and exercise.  Both walks and gardening can be 2-fers while reading and digging.  

Benefits started right away:

While staking peonies, I began taking photos of flowering things: peonies, wild blue indigo, locust tress.  This morning I cropped them into close-ups and discovered intricate origami beauty in all of them.  A big spider was hiding in the deep peonies crevice.  It makes me think of digital v. analog [that I blogged about here recently] and the realization: I can step off the trail anywhere and have infinite adventure and distraction.  There's enough distraction and beauty in the yard now -- garden, flowers, work -- to do do, to improve, to keep me busy for a very long time.  I can say the same thing about guitar, too: the projects are infinite, but not as readily do-able as the garden.  "There's always something to do."  

So the choice that it was 90 minutes per day was based on getting to 100 hours of each thing. So I could look back and say “this is what I accomplished in 100 hours of reading or guitar. This is how fit Ive become after 100 hours. These are the gardening projects.”  But the move from 60 mins (the previous summer) accelerated things. 

Another side effect: 

Both days, too, opened themselves as I just sat in a chair on the driveway reviewing the day.

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This daily accounting is similar also to the Zen Monk's daily tracking and my list of 10 things per day.