January seemed like a pretty slow month when it come to writing, reading, and walking. In fact, it may have been my slowest month on record when it comes to my FitBit data. I walked a total of about 198,000 steps in the month of January. This may sound like a lot. It comes to roughly 90 miles worth of walking. But it is dramatically lower than nearly any other month on record since I started using a FitBit–which is nearly 3 years now.
I am to walk 15,000 steps per day. But as you can see, there was only one day in the entire month that I hit my goal. For the other 30 days, I didn’t even come close. How much of a difference was this from a typical month? Well, December was pretty typical and here is what December looked like:
A big part of the drop in steps was due to how busy I was, and a little of it was the result of uncooperative weather. I am perfectly willing to walk in the rain, or the cold, when it is hot, or when it is snowing. But when you combine two tough conditions, it gets too hard for me. We had a lot of cold and wind. And some snow and wind. And some bitter cold and snow. And because of that, I didn’t get out as much as I would have liked. Last January I walked 340,000 steps, and the weather was probably more cooperative.
Writing in January
I was extremely busy in the day job in January working hard to get ready for a big software rollout. That meant longer than usual hours, and it also meant that I was tired and had less energy by the time I got home from work. All of this contributes to how much I can write. Still, all things considered, I didn’t do too badly. I wrote nearly 18,000 words in January, almost all of them on the novel draft, although there was a little nonfiction here and there.
This is down significantly from December where I wrote about 30,000 words. On the other hand, despite how busy things were, my consecutive day writing streak remained in tact all through the month. As of today, my streak stands at 559 consecutive days.
I had two items published in January, an editorial in the March 2015 issue of Analog, and a new story, “Meet and Greet” in the January 2015 issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show. That helped make up for the lower word counts.
Reading
I didn’t finish a single book in the month of January. Usually I average between 50-60 hours of audiobook listening per month. In December, while on vacation, I got more than 70 hours of audiobook listening in. But in January I managed only a meager 18 hours of audiobook listening.
How much audiobook listening I do is highly correlated to how much walking I do, because I typically do both at the same time. Since my walking was down, it makes sense that my audiobook listening was down.
And now, February is here. If the weather cooperates, I am sure to do better in all three categories this month.
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