The 1% in March

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

(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. It’s unedited, and includes lots of life noises - dogs and birds and such. If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it anyway!)

Happy Sunday, mates!

Last month I introduced the idea of the 1%, and how I plan on using it in my life to see what kind of impact a slow and steady effort might have. In today’s post I’m going to take a look at what those efforts looked like throughout March – what went well, what I learnt - as well as what I’m going to focus on in April.

There are a few different ways I use the 1%, (1% of a day = 15 minutes, 1% effort towards a long-term goal, try and improve things by 1%) and I had planned to break these recap posts into those categories, and list all the ways I tried to apply them. But as I started writing, I realised that listing everything I had tried to do felt…self-congratulatory maybe? Or hustle-culturey? Or some kind of throwback to feeling like I have to prove my worth by proving my productivity?

I don’t know, but it felt like a step away from the whole reason of the experiment.

So instead, I’m going to look at the three different ways I apply the 1%, and just reflect on a couple of examples for each of them. If you find yourself wanting more detail or interested in a meatier list, please let me know in the comments.

1% of a day = 15 minutes

This was the first month where I actually nominated a couple of different areas of life I wanted to focus on. As I mentioned in last month’s post, I planned to spend my 15-minutes-a-day on creativity and my garden. Namely, I wanted to re-start work on my novel and clear out my veggie patch ready for autumn/winter planting.

And in short, it was a lovely mixed bag.

Most days I worked on my novel. Some days it was for five minutes before the kids got up and the day started, other days I spent more time on it. So, in a purely numbers sense, I spent at least 1% of my month on it (which works out to be around 7 hours). But even more importantly, just by showing up most days, I was adding small parts to what will eventually become a much bigger whole.

Clearing out the garden was a different story. It didn’t happen and is as overgrown as ever. But, in my defence, the weather has been so warm that much of the garden is still producing. We’ve got kilos of green beans in the freezer and more on the vines, a huge bowl of tomatoes begging to be roasted, silverbeet and lettuce and herbs and flowers are still going off, and I realised pretty early on that it wasn’t actually time to tear anything out yet.

And here’s the thing. I only knew that because I spent time out there. 15 minutes a day, a few days a week, just picking and looking and marvelling. So, while the outcome wasn’t outwardly obvious, I still feel like I’ve given it 1-ish%.

And I think that’s as valuable a lesson as anything else I’ve learnt this month: Let go of the outcome, acknowledge the effort.

Sometimes the outcome will be clear (word count on my draft slowly and steadily increasing) and other times it won’t (garden still an overgrown mess but I have a better understanding of where it’s at now).

1% effort towards a long-term goal/practise

This one has been more about health this month, and doing utterly boring, helpful, positive things like:

• Going to bed a little earlier (I’m trying to get a solid 7-8 hours sleep these days, which means I try to be in bed at or before 9pm. I know. If sleep wasn’t so damn enjoyable, I’d call myself lame.)

• Stretching every morning

• Diaphragmatic breathing in bed at night

They’re not impressive or particularly interesting, but I can tell these tiny efforts all add up to an improvement in my sleep, energy, mental and physical health.

Improve things by 1%

This month I made a list of those tiny little life admin/house tasks that had been put off over and over. You know those ones that, by themselves, seem almost invisible, but when grouped together start to feel like a weight on your shoulders?

Then I dipped into the list when I wanted/could. Some days I’d take a few minutes to do one of the things on the list (lodge the health insurance claim, sign up to the kids’ football app, make the hairdressers appointment, etc) and then there was a Sunday afternoon where Ben and I devoted a few hours to knocking over a few of the housey things together.

Over the month we did things like:

• Hang the new shelves in the kids’ rooms

• Clear out the cupboard under the laundry sink

• Frame the portraits we drew a year ago

• Hang them and the art print I got for my 40^th birthday

• Sort through the stack of doctors receipts on my desk and claim them through health insurance

• Hang the corkboard in my office

None of these alone is a big deal, but by doing them, parts of our home feel genuinely different than they did at the beginning of the month. The kids’ desks are clear, the living room feels complete with a few pictures on the wall, I have somewhere to keep track of my novel outline cards… and each of these tiny improvements have ripple effects of their own. Plus, it was a good reminder that procrastinating about doing a thing often takes longer than just doing it: even though some of these tasks have been on my mind for months/years, none of them took longer than 20 minutes.   

So that’s my March in a nutshell. I don’t know. Is that too much detail? Not enough? Too frameworky? Too loosey goosey?

It’s sort of weird to try and break this stuff down into categories when most of it just happens in the course of a normal day, mixed in with work and kids and after-school activities and catching up with friends and seeing family and mowing lawns and cleaning bathrooms.

Ultimately, March taught me to be flexible with this idea of the 1%. It’s not about big, lofty goals for their own sake, but to see what might happen if I just consistently show up for the things that matter. It’s a lens through which I can try and answer the question of whether the things I say are priorities, are actually given priority treatment – over time.

So, what will I focus on in April?