Anyone that has known me for a while will know that I always need a personal project (or five) on the go at any one time. Whether it is a blog, a podcast, a website, an adventure, some health kick or some other random thing, I have to have something on the go to keep me motivated and happy. If I don’t have a project to occupy my mind, I get very fidgety, mopey and I tend to drive the family mad.

I have just passed my first month of my career break and I have been thinking about what my next project is going to be. My project over the last month was to start paddling all the waterways in Sydney and to run/hike on all the local tracks in our area. This project has been going very well. I just looked at my MapMyFitness calendar and over the last month I have paddled 16 times (260km) and run/hiked 7 times (60km). My map of Sydney is looking pretty healthy.

However, I have to admit I think I have overdone the paddling somewhat. The last few paddles have been a pretty laborious and my upper body has started getting a bit achy. I had planned to start paddling the length of Hawkesbury River, however the other day I drove along it on the way home from a paddle, and it looked really boring. It is very wide and it has a lot of long (multiple kilometres), straight stretches of windswept and tidal water. So I think I am done with that part of the world.

This week I have decided press pause on the kayaking and it is going to be “Hike Week”. It is time to give my upper body a break and start exhausting my legs instead. This morning I went for a nice 12km hike in the Lane Cove National Park to get things started. It wasn’t a very long walk, but I wanted to ease myself into it.

While I was walking and pondering, I came up with the idea of doing an experiment to see if I can do one interesting thing each day. Basically what this means is that each day I am going to strive to do something different, something new or something that is more interesting that just sitting on the computer watching YouTube. I have essentially been doing this over the last month by default, but I thought it would be an interesting personal project to challenge myself to start mixing things up and it will hopefully keep me motivate to get off my butt and to do something each day.

Now (obviously) I have to currently do things within the limitations of the current social distancing restrictions, but in a way I think this will force me to be more creative.

In order to keep myself in check, I plan to post a single photo each day on Facebook. I think that rather than saturating FB with lots of photos, it will be more interesting to post just one photo encapsulates the thing I have done that day. There has recently been many people sharing their daily favourite albums, movies and the like, so I thought this would be a different twist on this daily post idea.

The other side benefit of this project is that it will hopefully give me some new content to blog about. I haven’t been overly motivated to write my blog over the last couple weeks because I feel like all I have had to say has been “I went paddling today”.

The OCD in me feels slightly disappointed that I wasn’t able to start this project on the first day of the month, so I will have to settle on starting on the 4th of the month. So here are the daily photos of the last 4 days to make me feel a bit better about missing the 1st days of May.

1 May 2020 – Spencer Paddle

2 May 2020 – Dog Day

3 May 2020 – Cold Paddle at Long Reef

4 May 2020 – Hike in Lane Cove NP

So let’s see how this goes and see how long I can keep it interesting.