You do not have to build the whole database today.
Start by creating a table. Set up a query. Add a button. Clean up a form. One small improvement at a time still moves you forward.
Now, full disclosure. I will admit that I am the kind of person who, once I start a project, has a really hard time putting it down. I know that if I walk away from something halfway through, it is going to take me extra time and brainpower later to figure out where I left off. So I tend to be very one-track minded. I like to dive in and knock out the whole thing if I can.
But life does not always work that way. Other things come up. You have responsibilities. You have distractions. Sometimes you have to accept that you are not going to finish the whole project in one sitting, and that is OK. Sometimes committing to just an hour a day is the smarter move.
I used to struggle with this as a developer. When I was juggling five different projects at once, it was really tempting to spend three full days getting one project done while the others sat there collecting dust. The smarter move, even though it was harder for me, was to make small progress across all of them. A little bit here, a little bit there. It adds up.
Same thing with my videos. I committed myself to just one hour a day recording TechHelp videos. That small change in my schedule, just an hour a day, has made a huge difference in my business. Those ten-minute videos started getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of views every day. And now, a few years later, I am closing in on 1,000 TechHelp videos. One hour a day. That is it. But it adds up.
I am seeing the same thing with my fitness journey. I built myself a little home gym because, well, I am not shy about it, I was up around 320 pounds. I have been working out again, an hour a day, five or six days a week, for the past couple of months. And even though the scale does not move overnight, the fat is coming off. The strength is coming back. And it feels good.
It is not about giant leaps. It is about small steps. Every day.
Commit to something. Commit to a project. Even if it is only thirty minutes a day. Over time, you will see the results. You'll thank me later.
Or, as Captain Picard would say, things are only impossible until they are not.
LLAP/RR
P.S. I'm thinking about building a database to track my workouts (exercises, sets, reps, etc.). If you think that this would be interesting and you'd like to see this project turned into a video series, post a comment down below.
No, I have to exercise. I've always hated it. I ran marathons, some for 24 hours and never got a runner's high.
I have no desire to track my torture in life as I lose these 10kgs,
all thanks to online cooking classes during the pandemic lockdowns.
In this case, small improvements in my gourmet cooking abilities added lots to my middle.
Matt Hall
@Reply 13 months ago
Kudos to you for making the move. I am still in the "good intentions" stage. :)
With the current interest in fitness, I would expect you to get a solid response in an application like that. (Don't forget to track the weight.) This would be an excellent application for graphing progress, too.
Brent Davis
@Reply 13 months ago
Great information! Congrats Richard on your health journey!
Yeah, that's true. I also bought one of those smart scales that measures your heart rate, and it can also determine your lean body mass, how much of your body is fat (visceral fat), and all that stuff. And it appears I'm going in the right direction. I'm building muscle and getting rid of fat, especially visceral fat (the fat around your organs). Slowly, but surely, I'll get back into shape. Well, I have a shape now. ROUND is a shape. :)
Fitness has always been of interest to me, but my desk-based vocation has made it difficult. In fact, when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I was huge. I was 340 pounds at one point. Then I just got sick of being fat, and so I went on a weight loss craze where I lost 165 pounds over about nine months, but I killed myself doing it. I was working out like 4 hours a day (running, cycling, lifting) and eating barely the minimum amount of calories to stay alive, tracking everything. At one point people asked me if I had cancer because my face just looked withdrawn (as opposed to the chubby "fluffy" guy I was before).
So I lost a lot of weight, but I was miserable doing it, and so as soon as I stopped that lifestyle, the weight just slowly came back. It was almost 20 years ago. I'm the kind of guy where if I don't actively work out, weight will just slowly come on. And I'll just put on the pounds. So I have to work at it to stay in shape. I have a very endomorphic body.
This time I'm doing it differently. I'm not starving myself. I'm just making sure I eat clean, plenty of protein, cutting out as much sugar as possible, lifting weights about an hour a day. I really don't like cardio except for riding my bike, but that's not something I can easily do down here because the bike riding season in Florida is very short, and we're already past it. It's hard to ride your bike outside when it's 95 degrees and humid if you're not already in great cardiovascular shape - and I'm not. Plus, also being blind in one eye now, I can't look over my left shoulder, so it's troublesome riding with traffic (not to mention Florida drivers are crazy).
There's swimming, but my pool is not big enough to really swim laps in. I can tread water, but that's about it. So weight lifting is really the one form of exercise that I actually enjoy. So I'm trying to stick to a routine that I like. I'm doing a four-day split: push, pull, legs, core - and I've been happy with it. Trying to keep it to exercises I like, and varying it up so I don't get bored - which is why a database would be nice to track progress. Right now I'm doing it on a big whiteboard.
I've been working out for a couple of months now and sticking with it pretty regularly. I look forward to it every day, and I'm starting to see results. I'm just trying to make a sustainable life change that I can do and enjoy every day without thinking of it like "oh, I got to go to the gym now."
So that's where I'm at.
Joe Holland
@Reply 13 months ago
Making positive changes in ourselves brings many rewards. Good on you for making the choice to improve. It is not easy.
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