I seem to have spent most of the day wading through treacle. I’ve been completely zoned out, exhausted and lethargic.

Normally some exercise in the afternoon would have helped rally me a little, but given that I’m not supposed to do any, I resorted to a nap instead. Which didn’t really help either.

The kids are now in bed, and technically the evening is mine to do with what I will, but I’ve mostly just sat and stared into space. Eventually told myself to get a grip and started to catch up with Twitter and RSS feeds only to find that just about everyone else seems to be having a lethargy day today as well.

Is there something in the air?!

I’ve been having slight twinges in my right knee and ankle during exercise (and stupidly ignored them and carried on). I think it was due to bad form on some step lunges a couple of weeks ago, compounded by doing the same blend of cardio and strength training exercise daily while the kids are at home for the holidays (normally I would break up the routine by going cycling a few days in the week).

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve done too bad an injury – it’s uncomfortable but I can put full weight on the leg without problems and it doesn’t bother me while ambling about or going up and down stairs. It’s just frustrating to have to take time off when I’ve got such a good exercise habit going lately.

Any seasoned exercisers got advice on how long I should stay off any weight-bearing exercise for?

Most of the sites I’ve googled seem to refer to major strains and torn ligaments where you’re walking on crutches, so the guidance doesn’t seem appropriate. I was thinking of maybe just doing some upper body exercises for the rest of this week, then only cycling next week to give me chance to recover, but can’t work out if that’s being overcautious or over-optimistic.

Is it just me, or is the expectation of family outings so much nicer than the reality?

I am sure that when I’m in my 50s, I’m going to look back at all the photographs I have of my smiling children out on spring-time walks, or on trips to the park and I’m going to have a wonderful rosy-glow memory of outings with my offspring, delighting in every moment of their company and wonder why I didn’t do it more often.

Conveniently, I will have forgotten about the constant bickering, about the argument over the ownership of a random stick from the ground, the “my legs hurt, we’ve been walking for YEARS” whine and the realisation that they’re DESPERATE for the loo just as we’re at the furthest point away from the nearest public convenience.

I will also have failed to recall the frog-march across roads with their wrist in a death-grip hold as they’d just tried to run off into direct traffic. I will have consigned to oblivion the military operation that was needed just to step out of the front door only to return three times because they haven’t got their jumper, their shoes or a favourite toy.

I will be able to completely blank out the fact that the snapshot in question was the only 30 seconds on the entire trip where they were even vaguely happy and co-operative.

After all, this is why I take photographs. Family outings are just so much more pleasant in retrospect, especially with judicious use of Photoshop’s clone brush.

Following on from Wednesday’s post about the Everyday Systems site, I wanted to mention the fantastic habit tracking system Reinhard’s developed: HabitCal.

It doesn’t matter what new behaviour you’re trying to introduce into your life (cutting out smoking, change of diet, reducing computer time), the simplest way of tracking how you are doing is to ask yourself each day: did I succeed, fail or was today exempt for some reason?

HabitCal tracks each of these states using the colour code of green for success, red for failure and yellow for exempt days. It’s easy to set up and you can update in seconds.

I’m finding its simplicity so useful. While I still feel I need to track something (it’s like being three years old and earning stickers all over again – there’s an incredible psychological urge not to slip up just so you don’t have to mark the entire day as a FAILURE), I’m also not over-tracking and ending up with a pile of irrelevant data.

For example, a list of the exact number of calories I ate every day for a month isn’t actually that useful if I end up not losing lost as much as I hoped. With HabitCal, though, I’m getting an immediate visual picture where I can see that Friday is a real problem day, or that there’s a huge bunch of reds the week I had a friend to stay.

You can use HabitCal to track anything you like, not just the systems outlined at Everyday Systems. One thing you do have to be aware of, though, is that your data is completely public. So don’t put anything on it that you wouldn’t want anyone else to know!

You can see my HabitCal tracker here. I’m currently tracking the No S Diet, Weekend Luddite, Glass Ceiling and Exercise (this last row is deliberately blank as it’s an established habit of mine so I’m only tracking failures). It’s currently a pleasant display of greens and yellows, but feel free to hassle me if any reds start appearing!

I have recently stumbled on a fantastic website called Everyday Systems. If you’re the sort of person who loves productivity hacks and self-improvement systems (like me) then Everyday Systems may well interest you, too.

Whereas most lifehack systems I’ve seen are at the micro-management level (how to keep to-do lists organised, how to keep your email inbox empty, etc) most of the systems on this site are at a macro, life-improving level. At first glance they seem overly simple, but that’s because they are simple – beautifully so – and that’s what makes them so effective.

There’s several different ideas there, some which may be more relevant to you than others. The one that jumped out at me most, though, was Weekend Luddite – mainly in an “I could never manage that” kind of way, followed by a “well if that’s the case, I really ought to be doing that”.

As I’ve mentioned before, I spend far too much time at my computer randomly surfing the net and wasting time. During the day, the computers are never off and the internet is always on. Even if I’m doing other stuff, I will pop back for a couple of minutes between chores or activities with the kids, just to see if anything interesting happened while I was away, check my email, read a few new posts on bulletin boards.

Add up all the time and it amounts to hours of wasted life.

I’ve tried to tackle it before with the occasional Screen Free days to counteract my excesses, but what I really need are better and regular life habits.

Reinhard’s Weekend Luddite system solves this problem by switching the computer off between breakfast and dinner, every Saturday and Sunday. He found that not only did end up doing more interesting things with his day, he became more productive with the more limited computer time at his disposal. A very effective form of “distraction management”. I’d like some of that.

However, I found the idea of that amount of time away a bit scary, so I’ve started out with the computer off between the hours of 10am and 12 noon every Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but last weekend in the time I would otherwise have wasted website-hopping, I got some weeding done in the garden, cleaned out the fish tank earlier in the day, went for a long walk with my youngest son and even sat down with an actual book! It felt a much more relaxed AND productive weekend as a result.

So, I’m going to keep it up. I’m not including the children in the computer ban (I’ll even be sociable and play Mario Kart Wii with them if that’s what they want to do – just no internet enabled computer for me). Eventually, I hope to be able to increase the time away until I’m doing the full breakfast to dinner computer-break.

Today so far I have:

• Found Li’l Bhaji’s milk order form that I should have handed in to school on Friday.
• Lost another important piece of paperwork that I needed to reply to today.
• Done the second worst parallel park of my life (outside the library with a police car patiently waiting behind me, oh the shame).
• Become a screaming harridan at my children for running inside for the 20th time in 10 minutes and left the door wide open AGAIN.

Still, on the plus side of the ledger, the kids haven’t killed each other yet… but there’s still a couple of weeks to go so it’s a bit early to call that a success.

Pewari’s Prattle is six years old today!

Quite what possessed me to start a blog on April Fool’s Day, I don’t know. I think I suspected that I wasn’t going to keep it going for very long… ha, fooled you!

There have been times that writing here has been a lifeline, times when it gave me an outlet to vent, times it was just a way to at least write something, times when in all honesty it was a chore.

The kindest thing I can say about the writing here is … variable. I have certainly kept my promise to keep the content random – not having a tightly focused theme for a blog seems downright unfashionable these days.

The best thing about this blog, though, is you. Thank you for popping by to read/skim through/comment/link to/use as an example of how not to blog [delete as appropriate]. I appreciate it.