The 1% in April

What did the 1% look like last month? And what am I focusing on in May?

(As always, this voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. It’s unedited, and today features a few Friday afternoon stumbles - it’s been a long week. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it regardless!)

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Happy Sunday, mates, and welcome to the monthly 1% post.

In these letters I look at some of the ways I’ve tried to apply the 1% to my life over the past month (you can see previous posts here and here) in an effort to make slow and steady change over time rather than taking big, unsustainable leaps occasionally. My theory is that, by applying the idea of 1% gently and over an entire year, I’ll see more positive impacts than hustling hard and burning out over and over.

At the end of the last post, I said that I would be tilting heavily into family during April, while also trying to keep some space for gardening and working on my novel (albeit for probably less than 1% of my month) and in part at least, I feel like that’s where I landed.

The kids were on school holidays for a little over half the month which meant I definitely tilted into spending time with them, and we went away with my family over Easter which was also very much in keeping with that intention. I grabbed moments to work on my novel in the first half of the month, but less so in the second half, and the garden benefitted from a few handfuls of tiny little tasks (weed under this tree, cart that pile of prunings to the compost, dig the manure into that bed, plant the garlic…)

It’s nice to look back and see that it all added up. I feel filled up on family time, I hit the 21,000-word mark on my novel and the garden is looking slightly less dishevelled.

Taking a big step back from school and work meant my normal rhythms fell very much and very quickly by the wayside, but I realised by the end of the month that I actually like that sometimes. It’s nice to take a break from even the positive grind and be reminded of what I actively choose to do, why I choose to do it, and how it works in my day-to-day. Plus, it always feels good to come back, which is nice.

I got the garlic in the ground just in time.

How did I apply the 1% in April?

There are a few different ways I use the 1% idea (1% of a day = 15 minutes, 1% effort towards a long-term goal, try and improve things by 1%) but this month, instead of offering a list of examples of ways I applied each of them, I decided to look at it all through the lens of my values, which have been top of mind for me since we completed the values workshop a few weeks ago.

I didn’t think I’d done much one-percenting outside of the three things I mentioned above, but when I took a quick look over my logbook in preparation for writing this post, I could see that I added lots of little 1% efforts into my days. Even on the days that felt like I didn’t. And what’s more, most of them seemed to be in service of my values. Things like: